The Salem Witch Trials Memorial

The Salem Witch Trials Memorial opened in 1992 on the tricentennial, dedicated by Elie Wiesel, and it is built as a wound: a low granite wall inscribed with the victims' own protests of innocence, each line cut off mid-sentence, and twenty stone benches inside bearing the names and execution dates of the twenty people killed in 1692, nineteen hanged and one pressed under stones. None of the executed were witches; they were neighbors, mostly Puritan church members, condemned on spectral evidence by a court whose chief interrogator lies buried a few steps away in the Old Burying Point, a cemetery in use since 1637. The state did not clear the final names until the twenty-first century.

Salem's modern identity is stranger: a city where the trials' victims are mourned and a thriving culture of modern witchcraft and the October tourist economy operate on the same sidewalks, and practitioners from around the world make pilgrimage here. The memorial's guidelines exist because that traffic wears the place down: no candles, no plastic wrapping, no climbing the benches, quiet in the enclosure. The honest framing of this entry is exactly that tension: a city simultaneously remembering an injustice and marketing its mythology, with the memorial and cemetery as the places where the remembering is supposed to win.

Visiting

Voices Against Injustice maintains the memorial and its guidelines; the Charter Street Cemetery Welcome Center covers the burying ground's summer hours. Both free.

Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SalemMA_WitchTrialMemorial.jpg), CC BY-SA 4.0.