Salem, Massachusetts holds so much American history within its small town. The historical witch trials were a dark time in American culture with the killing of nineteen innocent victims. What better a place to visit so close Halloween.
My roommate’s sister goes to Salem State University and we decided it would be fun to go visit her for the weekend. We packed for the weekend Thursday night, and started our adventure Friday morning. We were supposed to catch a train from Temple University at 11:53, but our ubber driver had a hard time finding our apartment to pick us up. In turn of events, we missed the train at Temple, and then tried to catch the next one leaving 30th street, but ended up missing that one as well. Nevertheless, we made the next train at 1:00 making it to Trenton. In Trenton, we met Kaitlyn’s mom and her sister’s best friend, Suzy. We all piled in the car and started our Journey. The car ride from Trenton to Salem is supposed to be six hours, however, due to traffic, our car ride turned into ten hours.
When we reached Salem, it was around midnight. We woke up bright and early Saturday morning to start our day. Salem around Halloween is crazy, with everyone in the Halloween spirit. We started off the day visiting the famous Hocus Pocus house. The house was in a quiet little neighborhood that overlooked the water. We took many pictures as the scenery around the house was beautiful and it was so neat to see the actual house used in the movie. From there we headed into downtown Salem and looked at the many quaint shops. Everyone was dressed in Halloween costumes and makeup despite the cold and rainy weather. Everywhere you looked the Halloween spirit was in full swing. Owners and cashiers of shops were all dressed up making the shopping experience double the fun.
After walking around for a while, we stopped inside a little café to warm up and grab some lunch. From lunch, we walked through the cemetery and looked at the witch memorial. The cemetery and memorial were intriguing to say the least. The memorial had flowers and letters left from family members related to the victims. It was surreal to see firsthand families who were affected by the trails all these years and generations later. And as someone who studied the trails in school, it was crazy to see it all first hand, as in school I never really could picture what happened and the impact it had It was when the sun started to set that the eeriness and creepiness started to emerge as we were walking around. We even joked that we were afraid the ghosts of the victims would haunt us later on for walking on and around their graves.