Supernatural Accountability and the Salem Witch Trials

• this article contains descriptions of violence against women and inhumane incarceration of children

After a year of living in Boston, I finally took the ferry to Salem on my last Friday in town. Naturally, we were going for a ghost tour. Most of the Salem ghosts are related to the infamous witch trials that took place in the late 1600s. Throughout this period fourteen women and six men were killed by hanging, or in one case, by being crushed under stones. The root of this state violence was, as with all state violence, money. These women and men were landowners sitting on property and resources that the village of Salem wanted. If an accused witch confessed, they were spared death and simply forced to forfeit all of their assets. You know, to pay the rent on their jail cells.

We started at the memorial, next to the cemetery. The victims of the trails’ bodies were disappeared, thrown into ditches outside of town. Denied their bodies, these people (mostly the women) now haunted the town. Next door, a young woman working as a servant fell ill. The man she worked for “healed” her by first locking her in the attic, then pouring hot wax down her throat. So now, she appears in the upper windows of the home.

Walking through the town, hearing story after story of independent women being imprisoned, then murdered, then becoming ghosts, I couldn’t help but think about what it takes for a woman’s story to be told. And what a free woman looks like; one with nothing to lose, not even her body.

The most heart-wrenching stop of the tour was the site of the old jail. The youngest person held in prison during the trials was a five year old girl. When her parents were accused of witch craft and taken to jail, she went too, wanting to be with them and having nowhere else to go. The cells were so small you could only stand. She was later released, but died at age sixteen. The parallels to today’s world are clear and painful, with children in cages and innocent people losing everything because of their immigration status, because they have earned something the powers-at-be want.It seems the fate of Tituba, an enslaved woman who was the first to be imprisoned during the trials, is repeating now. The ghost of a child walks the building where the jail used to be, tugging at the sleeves of people walking by.

We don’t yet know how many people we have turned into ghosts during this administration, during the entirety of American history. And while I’ve never been to the concentration camps of Germany and seen the ghosts of my family, I know they are there. Ghosts are what happens when history fails, when there are stories that need to be told, and motherfuckers that need to be reminded. Accountability doesn’t stop with death, at least I like to think it doesn’t.

It’s easy to dismiss hauntings and ghost stories until you live them, until you are faced with an uninvited memory, a story you know is true, if only in the dark and alone. I don’t think you can claim not to believe in ghosts while also claiming to understand accountability. Most of the ghosts in Salem aren’t particularly malevolent, just insistent in being remembered and seen. And even if you don’t believe that these women still walk in Salem, you know what happened to them. Their names are still being said every day.