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Your Salem Tour Guide Needs You to Listen
When They Tell You the Accused Weren’t Really Witches
Tour Guide: Welcome to Salem and thank you for joining me on the “Real History of America’s Witch City” Walking Tour! I’m so glad to see so many of you interested in the true history of Salem! I’ve spent years researching this city and its important role in early American history, and can’t wait to tell you all about it. We will be exploring…
Tourists (wearing witch hats, carrying brooms): Where are the witches? Witches?! Where!?
Tour Guide: You are all obviously interested in this city’s long history, and I know the tragic trials are a big piece. The people who died here in 1692 were not actually witches. But, this tour features historically relevant sites of one of this nation’s earliest persecutions of people based on fear, ignorance, and religious fervor. So, yes, we talk about the people whom they accused of witchcraft. But they were not actually witches. OK?
Tourists:
Tour guide: It was a tragedy that resonates today. Twenty innocent people were killed, and countless others were jailed indefinitely without any due process. They held children and the elderly alike in cruel conditions all due to the hysteria that gripped this region. They allowed spectral evidence at trial…
