Visiting Salem in October

Good morning. I’m Billy Baker, guest-writing Starting Point today to (re)visit Salem as spooky season begins. But first, here’s what else is going on:

• Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, is the latest Trump critic to face prosecution after President Trump demanded the Justice Department target her. The indictment, in a mortgage fraud case, happened in the same district where a Trump aide turned federal prosecutor charged James Comey, the former FBI director.
• A storm system moving up the East Coast could become a nor’easter this weekend, potentially bringing high winds and heavy flooding to Southern New England starting Sunday. These maps show its path.
• Mike Greenwell, the former Red Sox left fielder who spent his 12-year major league career with the team and was inducted into its Hall of Fame, died at 62 after a cancer diagnosis.

Today’s Starting Point

Nearly each October for the past two decades, I’ve gone to Salem looking for a story. I’d like to say something glib here like “I’m not sure how I became the Globe’s de facto Salem Halloween reporter,” but I know the answer. I love quirky stories, even though I hate that term, because it is thrown at anyone who is passionate about something that won’t make you rich or famous or attractive.

And Salem in October is full of quirky stories and quirky people, and they are all drawn to the city seeking … something. And it’s hard to say what that is, because after all this time I can’t quite put my finger on October in Salem.

If you ask a local what Salem in October is, they roll their eyes and mutter words like “traffic.” If you stop tourists on the street — and I’ve met people from all over the world who have said it was their dream to go to Salem in October – their answers are passionate, but loose. More than a few have told me it was on their Bucket List. And since the end of COVID and the rise of “revenge travel,” the city has seen its tourism explode with people following-through on a promise to see the city in all its Halloween glory.

The story

But what is it they want to see? The Salem Witch Trials are a fascinating historical example of social pandemonium. But it’s not a super-long story — I’ve watched tour guides cover the whole thing in about 10 minutes, and spend the rest of the tour pointing out the sites from the story they just told you. You can see some of their graves, sure. And take a “spooky” walking tour, where they tell you the same story but in a creepy voice. Or you can visit the laughably-outdated Salem Witch Museum, which has lines down the street, despite being named #2 on a USA Today list of the world’s biggest tourist traps.

More interesting is the modern witch movement in Salem, which began in the late 1960’s when a practicing witch named Laurie Cabot, who was living in Salem kinda secretly, had her black cat climb up in a tree next to her house and refuse to come down. When the fire department declined to get the cat down for her, she called the media. With that, word got out that there was a woman actually practicing witchcraft in the “Witch City,” and others who were practicing magic in secret soon lit out for Salem. Very quickly the city became the home of the modern witch movement. In 1970, Cabot opened the city’s first “witch shop,” and the rest is history.

The ‘witch stuff’

But I’m not sure how much of the real witch stuff you can see in Salem in October, because the genuine stuff is not for tourists or newspaper reporters. Instead, a lot of those witches and warlocks (male witches) spend the fall hustling to make money off the tourism influx — selling readings and potions and wands and whatnot — so they can spend the rest of the year, in private, doing whatever it is they do when the tourists and the media are not around.

I have no way of knowing who’s a “real” witch, but I do know there are a lot of conmen selling magic to the muggles (the Harry Potter term for “non-magic” people). Back in 2013, I wrote about how Fatima’s Psychic Studio got into trouble for charging a gullible tourist $16,000 to remove a curse.

At the same time, I’ve seen some things in Salem that feel … hard to explain. Starting with Cabot herself. Back in 2017, I was led into a small apartment to meet the then 84-year-old, and when she grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The woman has an aura; I don’t know how else to explain it.

And so I can’t knock anyone who goes to Salem in October seeking something, because I’m one of them. I don’t have to go. It’s not officially in my job description. I go because I want to, and it’s not because I want to find something so much as I have no idea what I’m going to find. Something always surprises me, something “quirky,” yes, but always unexpected, and always very … Salem.

Points of Interest

Boston: Boston food banks, already strained by Republican cuts to food stamps, are seeing increased need as the government shutdown continues.

Massachusetts: Robert Pistone resigned as Haverhill’s police chief. Pistone was already on leave following a July incident in which a man in police custody died after seven officers piled on top of him, which the state medical examiner has ruled a homicide.

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