31 Days of Halloween | Day 18: The Salem Witch Trials — From Tragedy to Halloween Capital
Haunted American HistoryShow Notes
In 1891, a jeweler in Salem, Massachusetts, began selling a silver souvenir spoon decorated with a witch on a broomstick.
Beneath the witch were three small pins.
Those pins were modeled after evidence used two centuries earlier, when frightened girls accused their neighbors of being attacked by invisible spirits.
The accusations helped send innocent people to their deaths.
And now their story was being sold as a souvenir.
In 1692, Salem Village became the center of one of the most infamous witch hunts in American history. Nineteen people were hanged, one man was crushed beneath stones, and five others died in jail. More than 170 people were accused.
But the history of Salem didn't end when the executions stopped.
Over the following centuries, stories of curses, restless spirits, and haunted buildings grew alongside a very different kind of tradition: turning the town's darkest history into a Halloween destination.
Tonight, we're returning to Salem to examine what actually happened during the witch trials, the people who suffered, the legends that followed, and how a town once ashamed of its past became America's Halloween capital.
Welcome to Day Eighteen of 31 Days of Halloween.
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