Fletcher6 · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

FolkloreGreen

Salem

added29 August 20261692

In 1692 nineteen people were hanged here for witchcraft, one was pressed to death under stones, and several more died in gaol. It began with the fits of two girls and evidence the court accepted without proof — including "spectral" testimony, meaning a claim that the accused's spirit had appeared to a witness. Salem lives on the story openly now: museums, a memorial on the execution ground, and a reputation that fills the town every October.

Getting thereDirections Flights Where to stay Tours

Suggest a correction

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first.

On the map

25;35 Norman Street

42.51944, -70.89722

Salem Open in maps

Getting there

Booking links may be affiliate links: if you book something, the site earns a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

Sources

More in Salem

FolkloreGreen

America's Stonehenge

A cluster of stone chambers, walls and slabs on a New Hampshire hill whose purpose has been argued for a century. Some read it as a pre-Columbian observatory aligned to the solstices, others as colonial farm structures and a nineteenth-century soap works. The central slab with a channel cut round its edge is known as the sacrificial table; it could equally be a lye press. The site works as an attraction and as an argument that does not resolve.

Everything in Salem →

Nearest on the map

DebunkedWhite

Margery and the Scientific American Prize

Mina Crandon, the wife of a Boston surgeon and known as Margery, was the leading claimant for the $2,500 Scientific American had offered for a genuine mediumistic phenomenon. Harry Houdini sat on the committee; he built a wooden cabinet that closed around her to the shoulders, and after the sittings stated that she produced everything with her head and a foot, ringing the bell box with her knee. Her dead brother Walter left a thumbprint in wax, and that was held to be conclusive — until 1932, when the print was identified as that of the Crandons' living dentist, Frederick Caldwell, who had once shown her how an impression is taken. The prize was never awarded.

23 km away

FolkloreGreen

America's Stonehenge

44 km away

UFO sightingYellow

Exeter and the Lights over Kensington Road

On the night of 3 September 1965 eighteen-year-old Norman Muscarello was walking along Route 150 outside Exeter when, he said, a large dark object with a row of bright red lights pulsing in sequence came over a field. He ran to the police station; Officer Eugene Bertrand drove back out with him and saw the same thing, and so did Officer David Hunt, who arrived after. The Air Force first attributed it to a Strategic Air Command exercise, which had ended an hour before the sighting. The case stayed in the Blue Book files as unexplained. Exeter is comfortable with it: since the 2010s the town has held a summer festival on the anniversary, with the takings going to the fire department.

52 km away

More: Folklore

FolkloreGreen

Tsaritsyno and the Rejected Palace

The Tsaritsyno State Historical, Architectural, Art and Landscape Museum-Reserve is an expansive imperial palace and park estate in southern Moscow, commissioned in 1775 by Empress Catherine the Great. It stands as Europe's largest complex built in the Russian Gothic (pseudo-Gothic romanticism) style and represents one of the most dramatic architectural sagas in Russian history: the nearly completed grand residence was abruptly rejected and ordered dismantled by the Empress herself, leaving the site as a romantic, unfinished ruin for more than two centuries.

FolkloreGreen

The Sukharev Tower and Jacob Bruce

The Sukharev Tower was a masterpiece of late-17th-century Russian civil architecture, formerly standing at the junction of Moscow's Garden Ring, Sretenka Street, and Prospekt Mira. Commissioned by Peter the Great and designed in the ornate Naryshkin Baroque style, the 60-meter-tall red-and-white monument functioned as a ceremonial city gate, the administrative birthplace of the Russian Imperial Navy, and the nation’s first astronomical observatory. In folk memory, the landmark is permanently tied to one of Peter's closest intellectual confidants, Field Marshal Jacob Bruce, who was mythologized as the supreme warlock and sorcerer of the Russian Empire.

FolkloreGreen

The Library of Ivan the Terrible

The Lost Library of Ivan the Terrible (known in Russian as the "Libereya") is a legendary repository of ancient classical and Byzantine manuscripts, parchment scrolls, and codices purportedly assembled by Russia's first crowned Tsar, Ivan IV. Popular mythology claims this priceless collection of ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew literature was sealed away inside subterranean brick vaults beneath the Moscow Kremlin, the Alexandrov Kremlin, or the royal estate of Kolomenskoye, standing for four centuries as one of the world's most sought-after literary grails.