We hope you're having a lovely Halloween season today that we're releasing this episode.

It's November 1st, it's All Saints Day, so we wish you the best if you're observing any other holidays during All Hallow tide.

And welcome to the thing about Salem.

This is our Haunted Happenings episode, and I'm Josh Hutchinson.

Hi, I'm Sarah Jack Skellington.

Just going to put that in one more time for the season.

Every October, Salem, MA transforms into something extraordinary.

Families plan costumes months in advance, the streets filled with parade goers cheering together, the smell of cider and fried dough fills the air, and strangers bond waiting for ghost tours while artists, musicians and performers take over the downtown and people travel from across the world to be part of this collective experience called Haunted Happenings.

I think our listeners and watchers are all smiling really big.

They've either been there and they're like, yes, it's that awesome, or man, that's so awesome, That's how I feel.

That's so awesome.

This is what people have always done, come together for a seasonal celebration, to see and be seen, to participate in something bigger than the individual lives.

St.

Festivals, from medieval harvest fairs to Boston's first night to Salem's haunted happenings create shared identity, collective joy.

On it, Happenings normalizes Pagan celebrations, imagery, and practice.

The festival has created space like Salem.

The city itself has a space where witchcraft, Wicca, Tarot, and other Pagan practices can't exist openly, as valid spiritual paths as valid as any other spiritual path, and real practitioners operate businesses, offer services, and participate enthusiastically alongside the commercial Halloween entertainment.

The fact that Salem incorporates pay and themes doesn't make it fundamentally different from other heritage and cultural festivals like Oktoberfest, Mardi Gras, to name a few.

It simply centers previously marginalized spiritual traditions while doing what communities have always done.

Of course, some critics extract and amplify fears about Paganism, superimposing their own religious anxieties onto this community celebration.

So today we're celebrating haunted happenings by podcasting.

Salem has the Witch House, but it also has 400 years of positive history of being a maritime capital.

And you have other important history happening in Salem in those 400 years.

And it can be all of the things.

It can be the occult capital, that can be the witch city.

It can be the historical location where people were prosecuted unjustly for witchcraft.

And now we have a Halloween capital.

How did it get there?

How did it become the Halloween capital?

I'd like to think that it paralleled the rise of the witch in pop culture and Salem's connection with witchcraft and that rise in popularity of witches.

Really, they work together.

They dovetailed and LED Salem on this trajectory to become that Halloween capital.

Let's.

Take a look at the history and how haunted happenings got to be what it is today.

Yeah, Haunted Happenings actually started with these discussions in 1981 about having an event for the city.

And so that year, Susanna Stewart from the Salem Witch Museum and Gloria Limpopolis of the Chamber of Commerce, they work together and they came up with this idea for a Witches Weekend.

And so this was just one weekend of activities.

It featured A Bewitching Ball and an Insomniacs tour, among other events.

And we can thank the Salem Witch Museum for covering this history and creating this history.

And in 1982, they rolled out an official haunted happenings.

In 1982, this was a three day event and it attracted an amazing 50,000 visitors the very first year that it happened in Salem's, a town of around 40 to 45,000 people over the last few decades.

So you know, that's more people coming in as guests just to be part of this haunted happenings that you have actually living in the city.

And that was just the beginning.

40 years ago, costumes were just as important.

They may not have been commercialized.

They were elaborate in a homemade fashion.

There were costume balls and they included a parade with an elephant in 1982 and that was a nod to the elephant coming in.

Yeah, they brought an elephant in on a boat in the 18th century to Salem.

It was the first elephant to come to North America since the mastodons had died out.

So they also did a Dracula blood drive.

They did a blood drive for their community.

They're giving back to that community.

They got the kids involved.

This year.

They had this horribles parade and a kids costume contest that was actually judged by Lori Cabot who was later named the official Witch of Salem, MA.

Haunted houses, that's what I call them, but I've heard people refer to them as haunts.

So that is, you know, 40 year old history at least there.

And they had a witch's brew contest.

Haunted happenings grew over the next decade.

By 1992, it had been extended to 10 days from three.

It was still going two weeks long.

In 1995 they started their Grand parade when they kick things off on the 1st Thursday in October.

Still sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce.

There were 150,000 visitors in 1995 and the growth has just it's exploded since then.

So many different things have been added to haunted happenings.

It's now a month long event.

In 2014 they added a Howl A Wean parade for the dogs.

And there's now a zombie parade for the zombies.

The zombies.

And today I heard about another phenomenon.

The mombies.

In 2021 they did a reverse parade, so they still had lots of people coming in to celebrate.

What they did because of COVID, they had the people in the parade actually stand stationary at different locations spread out.

So you had all the floats and everything spread out, and the people visiting actually walked the route and visited the different things from a safe, socially distanced way away from the other people.

Well, I wanted to get a real good look at what Haunted Happenings was like in 2025.

I didn't get there but I found this cool YouTube Derek Millins detours in Salem.

He does many.

I had time to catch 1 and he went through Salem on the 11th of October and was talking to the people in costumes going into the businesses saying hi and it was really fun to watch that.

So I'm so glad that he puts that out there so that those who aren't attending can get a feel for what it is and participate virtually.

So that was really interesting.

He went by the Dunkin' Donuts.

If you're on social media at all, following tourist chat, everyone wants to know if the Sipper Cup is still available almost every day.

It's a daily question.

And he of course had his.

So that was pretty cool to see.

Over a million people are attending this.

A town of 45,000 accommodating 1,000,000 people in the space of a month.

This isn't like a million annual visitors all spread out and nice and neat.

This is a million people coming like at once.

There are days when they have close to 100,000 people there on weekends as you get close to Halloween day itself.

It's just amazing.

Ever since, you know, people started traveling again after COVID lockdowns, it's just people have been flocking, flocking.

So that is the definition of a crowd.

It is a crowded yet happy and friendly gathering.

If you look at pictures of Salem during hunt happenings you'll see that places like pedestrian friendly Essex St.

are a wall of people.

It's like going to Disneyland, but you should keep in mind that it's not a theme park.

It's a real city where people live and work and have to get things done.

And so just remember to be kind to everybody.

Transportation, you know, come in on foot, come in by ferry, come in on a bus, come in on your broom, don't drive your car down.

So it's crowdy, it's witchy.

You'll definitely see a lot of witch hats and witch costumes, but you'll also see people who practice the faith of witchcraft.

Yeah, and you'll probably see the Sanderson sisters performing for tips.

Definitely see the Sanderson sisters more than once I.

There's lots of performers.

Some of those performances are just awesome costumes.

They usually have really neat tip jars, but you've got local musicians that are, you know, in theme.

There's Joe the sax appeal.

He plays all year long.

When I was watching Derek's YouTube channel, there's a really great violinist playing the electric violin dress that it's a very scary clown.

So, you know, beautiful music, scary costume.

You see a lot of fun costumes this year.

You're probably seeing a lot of K pop demon runners and still seeing plenty of wicked.

That's more witches running around and that's just a beautiful thing.

I think the more witches the merrier.

Yeah, we mentioned the Sanderson sisters, but there is really this Hollywood Layer 2 haunted happenings.

There's some historic sites that you go to, Hollywood historic sites that you go to through tours, tours.

We got to talk about the tours.

Yeah, there are a lot of tours in Salem.

A lot.

There are dozens of tour companies.

There are at least a couple 100 tour guides.

There's one company that has 37 tour guides by itself and pulled in about 78,000 people last year on tours.

But there's a tour of every kind for every appetite.

You can do the history of the city, you could do the witch trials, you could do modern witchcraft, there's a nature tour.

There's just plenty of options for you.

Of course, there's a lot of ghost tours and there's haunted cruises in the harbor.

There's like.

If you want to.

So many choices.

You want to learn about something?

Then you'll learn about it.

You want to just have fun?

You'll have fun.

Yeah, the neighborhoods have beautiful yard decorations.

It's just it's Halloween.

It's Halloween there.

It's Halloween, people like to do it up big.

Some of the residents do extra special Halloween decor and you can also visit places like scenes from Hocus Pocus decked out like the Ropes Mansion, the scene of Allison's house.

There's a children's carnival and a marketplace, so you have vendors selling their local wares or their Halloween themed items that you're looking for.

There's lots of.

Souvenirs.

There's more haunted houses, or as they're often called, haunts.

There's magic shows and there's psychic readings.

And it's all closed out with fireworks, which Americans love to do to close out seasons fireworks.

It's also exciting.

And I imagine this year you just are like having an out of body experience of fun.

But there's lots to remember when you're there.

Just take a breath and expect to wait and be kind.

That goes so far.

Be kind to the people who've come into town like you have or those that live there locally.

Yeah, be kind to the people who are serving you at the restaurants, helping you at your hotel and everywhere else.

Salem shows us that community celebration is so fun and they have taken it to the ultimate place and it includes everybody.

The same streets that once witnessed persecution now hosts one of America's most joyful seasonal festivals.

People from all over, of all beliefs, no beliefs.

They come together and they celebrate and they create, and they're a part of something larger than themselves.

That's what community looks like when it makes space for everyone, and that's worth celebrating.

Happy.

Hauntings.