OK, here's the scenario.

You're in Salem.

It's 2025.

Everywhere you go, there are witches.

There's witch museums.

There's people in which costumes?

They're witchcraft stores.

The high school mascot is a witch.

There's a witch on the water tower.

There are witches on the police cars and on the police uniforms themselves.

How did a town that was infamous for a witch hunt come to be so obsessed with witches?

How did Salem, MA become the witch city?

Welcome to the thing about Salem.

I'm Josh Hutchinson.

I'm Sarah Jack.

We are descendants of those who experienced the Salem witch trials.

Today.

We're not following the yellow brick road to the Emerald City, even though it's about the same age of the Witch City, but examining how Salem's transformation into Witch City had its own carefully paved path to community reinvention and prosperity.

Of course, Salem, MA is the site of the infamous Salem Witch Trials.

The crisis began in winter 1692 as 2 girls in Reverend Samuel Paris's home began experiencing violent fits, his daughter Betty and his niece Abigail Williams.

What started in one household spread rapidly through the community, triggering accusations of diabolic witchcraft that would claim 25 lives.

By September 16, 9220.

People have been executed and five more had died in jail.

In 1692, the witches were believed to serve the devil.

So because no one serves the devil, we know that there were no witches in New England in 1692.

Nathaniel Hathorn, or you better know him as Nathaniel Hawthorne.

He changed the spelling of his last name.

He's the great grandson of Judge John Hathorne.

But he put AW into the name to make it Hawthorne.

And he writes.

In 1835 he publishes 2 short stories that are connected with the witch trials, Young Goodman Brown and Alice Jones Appeal.

And one interesting thing, in Alice Jones Appeal, Hawthorne actually comments on how there's no memorial on Gallows Hill in Salem.

And of course, in 1851, Hawthorne published The House of the Seven Gables, and that is set in Salem and features a character who was descended from a judge in the witch trials.

So it directly confronts the history and he's willing to talk about it.

After the Civil War era, Salem's transformation began.

It went from tragedy to tourist attraction at a high pace.

Charles Wentworth of them published this massively successful chronicle of the Salem which trials called Salem Witchcraft in 1867, and he did start lobbying for memorial on Gallows Hill.

All this writing that was going on in the 19th century, there were some really famous people.

They were famous in their own time.

And there were people that I know I read in school growing up in poetry classes.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he wrote a play called Giles Quarry of the Salem Farms and that was published in 1868.

And John Greenleaf Whittier contributed a poem for the 1885 dedication of Rebecca Nurse's monument in Danvers.

And so if you go to the Rebecca Nurse homestead today and see the memorial in the cemetery, you will read Whittier's poem.

So by 1880, Salem was attracting tourists.

It was pulling in 30,000 tourists annually, drawn by both the Salem Willows amusement park.

But also they're increasingly drawn by the dark history of Salem and the witchcraft trials, never once to miss a commercial opportunity.

Salem's own Parker Brothers, you may have heard of them for a thing called Monopoly.

Well, they released E witchcraft game in 1888 and then New England Magazine launched a series called Stories of Salem Witchcraft in 1891.

Cementing Salem's witch houses both tragic history and popular entertainment.

I love this next piece of commercial history because it's music and I love the arts, but the March of the Salem Witches was a Salem cadet band song that was composed by Jean Massoud in 1896.

It was commissioned by the local Knights Templar chapter, and it would have been commissioned for marching.

So it was for a performance and it was published by George H Walker and Company, and it included one of the very first advertisements for Daniel Lowe and Company's Witch Spoon.

So you had this song, March of the Salem Witches.

It's getting performed at Willows Park by the Salem Cadet Band.

It's advertising the Witch Spoon, which is the first souvenir spoon in the US.

One big point of development in the becoming of Witch City was the Witch Trial bicentennial in 1892.

People prepared for this in advance, wanted to have special events happening.

It was a special occasion, and so they wanted to mark the 200th anniversary of the Salem Witch Trials.

But marking it revealed a community wrestling with how to remember its darkest chapter, and whether profit and memorialization could coexist.

The Essex Institute pushed for an ambitious 45 foot stone lookout tower on Gallows Hill, envisioning an educational memorial about the dangers of witch trials.

But the opposition argued that they did not want to celebrate its great shame.

They did not want to be Shame City.

The 1892 Salem Visitor's Guide became the 1st edition to feature the iconic Salem witch, and advertisements exploded.

They advertised a witch cream skin lotion, souvenir photos of witch trial locations, and Daniel Lowe's now famous souvenir Witch Spoon, which was sold from his shop at the corner of Washington and Essex, the site of Salem's first meeting house.

We're on the cusp of the moment we've been waiting for for Salem to become Witch City.

And so it was around the time of the bicentennial that Pettingill's Fish Company became the first business to use which city branding They branded a line of fish as which city fish.

The yellow brick road had officially arrived, paved with equal parts remembrance and retail.

The 20th century saw Salem's long, complicated dance with its witch trial past finally tipped decisively toward embrace, though not without resistance along the way.

It was a City Council that was delaying memorialization.

They voted down $1000 memorial appropriation in 1931.

Thomas Gannon donated land on the Gals Hill for a park and memorial in 1936, but nothing came to fruition.

There were multiple memorial efforts in the early 60s and 70s and they just stalled out.

In another move to honor at least one of the Salem witch trial victims, it was 1945 that a man began petitioning the state to pardon and Pudiator, who was hanged for witchcraft in 1692, and he kept this effort going until a bill was finally passed in 1957.

Twelve years of waiting to get Ampudiator's name cleared, and it included Ampudiator and several others, words to that effect.

Marian Starkey's 1949 best selling book, The Devil in Massachusetts, reignited public fascination, directly inspiring Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which premiered in 1953.

That same year, Walter Cronkite's You Are There dramatized the trials for television audiences, and by 1962, the Salem Evening News, the Chamber of Commerce, and even the Police Department were proudly sporting which on broomstick logos with which city branding.

More Floodgates opened in the 70s with Laura Cabot when she established her witchcraft shop and Salem Witch Identity in 1971.

Also the Salem Witch Museum opened in 1972, followed by the Witch Dungeon Museum in 1979.

And Parker Brothers released the Witch Pitch Game in 1970.

And what we all love Bewitched.

They filmed 8 episodes in Salem that summer and that just really turbocharged the tourism.

And by 74, more than 1,000,000 tourists were visiting annually, not in the month of October.

That's the annual 1,000,000.

This brings us to our modern celebrations and Witch City's Halloween Capital Festival haunted happenings.

That's what the Witch City is about for tourists now.

We just did a full episode on that last week and we encourage you to check that out to learn more about how which city also became basically Halloween City, the Halloween capital of this world.

But in 1982, basically the Salem Witch Museum and the Salem Chamber of Commerce teamed up together to launch this haunted happenings.

It was at first a weekend event, but it's since expanded to a full month.

31 days of Halloween event all October.

There are events every day in Haunted Happenings now.

Even after Haunted Happening started in 1992, another very big memorial project came to fruition during the tercentenary of the Salem Witch Trials.

It has 20 granite benches with the names of the victims.

The dedication ceremony in 1992.

This was the 300th anniversary of the witch trials, and this was the first memorial to those witch trials in the city of Salem itself.

So it only took three centuries for them to get around to doing memorials, even though, you know, Hawthorne was calling for it in 1835, and there must have been other voices calling for it even before then.

So it's 1992.

They called in Arthur Miller, the playwright of The Crucible, to speak at this dedication.

They also bring in Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, to speak.

And just a year later, we see the other side coming back to the for the pop culture aspect of the witch.

In 1993.

Disney released Hocus Pocus in 2001.

A student at Salem State University realized that there were five women who were not included in the 1957 resolution who had not had their names clear as convicted victims of the Salem witch trials.

And as we've established, all the victims were innocent.

So she worked with a local representative and the General Court adopted a amendment to the 1957 resolution that had exonerated and Budiator.

These names were added on Halloween day in 2001.

The governor signed this into fruition.

In 2005, the bewitched statue of Samantha Stevens was dedicated.

In 2017, another memorial was dedicated at Proctor's Ledge, which was determined to be the hanging site of the Salem Witch Trials, and then in 2022, another person was found to have not been cleared.

She was convicted during the sandwich trials, but her name was not featured in the reversal of a tanger or the 1957 or the 2001 Bills.

It was Elizabeth Johnson, junior of Andover, and she finally got her name clear in 2022.

In closing, we'd like to talk about what it means to be the Witch City.

Now, Salem was Massachusetts's first city.

It was founded in 1626, and the name Salem is basically the English form of the Hebrew word for peace.

Salem means peace.

And so you have to take that into consideration when you look at the history of it and what it is today.

Behind Salem's commercial embrace of which city, which has a great ring to it, lies this truth.

Every generation has had to actively choose to memorialize the victims.

From the nurse descendants working a decade to raise memorial funds in the 1870s to the City Council repeatedly voting down commemoration efforts through the 20th century, remembering the human cost of 1692 has never been automatic.

The witch Legos and tourist attractions were deliberately cultivated.

But ensuring that 20 people executed as witches and the survivors who built new lives from exile remained more than footnotes requires persistence and purposeful effort.

Salem's transformation to which city isn't just about tourism.

It was about the community deciding again and again that profit and memory could dance together down the same path.