Salem Witch Trials Memorial

Nearly seven years after I turned in my senior thesis written about this monument, I finally made it to see the Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial in person. This civil rights memorial was constructed in 1992, three hundred years after twenty people were found guilty of witchcraft and executed, to remind us of the country’s past mistakes and allow us to reflect on the horrors that hysteria and intolerance can produce. The Witch Trials Memorial stands in stark contrast to the kitschy witch imagery throughout Salem, making it difficult to fully appreciate what the site was created to represent.
The memorial itself looks like a small park and is rather unassuming — looks like a rectangular path surrounding a grassy patch surrounded by a stone wall and rot iron fence. On the other side of the fence is one of Salem’s oldest cemeteries. You might not know what you’ve stumbled upon until you get a chance to read the plaque describing the memorial. Each stone bench is inscribed with the name of an individual who died as a result of the witch trials hysteria, some were executed and some died in jail. The rot iron fence surrounding the memorial symbolizes the way the witch trials victims were imprisoned and the headstones in the neighboring cemetery, which are turned away from the park, represent the way the residents of Salem turned their backs on the victims. If you’re at all interested in the events of the Salem Witch Trials, be sure to visit this memorial.

This memorial is very convenient to Essex Street and Salem Harbor. It’s a very somber reminder to a dark period of history. The evils of religious fanaticism is something we can still relate to today.
Unfortunately, the memorial is always very crowded either with tours or with people gawking at the adjacent cemetery. So it’s difficult to really get the full effect of the memorial.