Proctor's Ledge
Salem, Massachusetts, United States
The site confirmed in 2016 as the actual place of the 1692 hangings, a small city park at the base of a rock outcrop where the nineteen hanged died.
For centuries Salem located its 1692 executions on Gallows Hill, and for centuries that was wrong. The Gallows Hill Project, led by historian Emerson Baker and collaborators using the century-old Sidney Perley maps and modern terrain analysis, identified in 2016 the actual site of the hangings: a granite outcrop now called Proctor's Ledge, on Pope Street, in a quiet residential fold below the hill. Nineteen people, fourteen women and five men, were hanged there between June and September 1692.
The city acquired and preserved the site as a small memorial park, deliberately without a monument wall: the rock itself, a tree, and the memory. Annual remembrance gatherings are held on the anniversary of the executions, and the site sits in honest, unglamorous relation to the commercial witch-city around it.
Visiting
Proctor's Ledge Memorial, Pope St, Salem; open public park. The city's page carries the project documentation. Remember the nineteen by name; this is a memorial ground, not an attraction.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Proctor's_Ledge_Memorial.jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories