Thursday, April 27th, 2023
Salem, MA: An increasing amount of Satanism
The conference began on Friday, with attendees expected to pick up their badges and swag bags on Thursday afternoon. As such, we took the opportunity beforehand on Thursday to go to Salem, a place I've
craved to visit for decades. We rode the commuter rail from North Station on upward, and it is worth noting that after it takes you to Salem, the train continues on and
enters Beverly.
Anyway though, we weren't going that far. We stopped in Salem and had a delightful day.
• Video Link
You may ask yourself why I chose such music to accompany a photo thread of Salem, Massachusetts.
It will be revealed later.
Coffee was required.
A spring bunny (or something like that) latte. It was akin to one of my favorites at my local coffee shop here in Greenville. It had white chocolate and lavender in it.
By the time we made it to this statue of Samantha from
Bewitched we had already noticed a significant uptick in the number of people walking around with shirts and hoodies with either occult, or outright Satanic, imagery on them.
We put it out of our minds and thought nothing of it. At the moment.
This was one of the neatest things about Salem, the way you can just be wandering along and then all of a sudden there's a house from the 16-whatevers just there, right by the sidewalk, with an address and everything.
This bit of architecture dates from the 1700's, but we'll come back to it later.
The Salem Witch Trials Memorial, next to the Charter Street Cemetery. Also perhaps fittingly, there were some folks well into their opiate high draped dramatically over some of the stone ledges in the memorial, twitching the day away.
The Peabody Essex Museum, which is something of a combination art and history museum. It also houses one of the nation's most significant collections of Asian art, and that's because Salem was one of the first ports in America to trade directly with Asia.
I particularly enjoyed these ceramic renditions of the seven deadly sins.
People: You should smile more!
Me:
On the grounds of the Peabody Essex Museum is Yin Yu Tang, a home first erected in southeastern China in the late 1700's. It was purchased by the museum, disassembled piece by piece, and reconstructed in Salem, opening to the public in 2003. Members of the Huang family lived in the home from the 1790s until the 1980s. This amazing house, along with the fact that Salem was one of the first American ports to trade with China and the rest of Asia, is why I picked the music.
Lunch was pizza. Salem leans
hard into its reputation as God's perfect Halloween town, with numerous occult businesses and "haunted" attractions. Something we also noticed was that how the high number of folks walking around wearing shirts and hoodies with occult-slash-Satanic imagery on them stayed high, along with a rather large number of people wearing various horror movie shirts.
After some thought, we figured that's just what you do when you're in the town where the Satanic Temple is headquartered, and which has the reputation Salem has even aside from that. As for us, we debated on purchasing a Baphomet plushie we saw at one shop, but ultimate decided against it. At the time, we were not yet aware of the evil even then converging on the Marriott, to say nothing of the Cheesecake Factory.
It was at this point that we had a decision to make. As I've mentioned, the Satanic Temple is headquartered in Salem and we'd heard they had a nice art gallery. We thought about going to see it, but then discovered it cost $12 a person to get in. After having dropped $40 to get us both into the Peabody Essex Museum we figured we'd stick to what was free for the rest of the day. Thus, we headed over to stand on the sidewalk outside and look at the House of the Seven Gables. It cost money to go inside the house because Salem, like my hometown of Asheville, has honed the craft of soaking tourists to high art. While I am unsure of the exact number of gables captured in these shots, I still feel that I captured an adequate number of gables.
We returned to the Charter Street Cemetery, which had been closed earlier in the day. The addicts had departed from the memorial, so we walked around it again, then toured the cemetery.
Then we visited the cemetery gift shop, because of course it has one, and then for the first time in my life I purchased a souvenir of a cemetery.
And then it was back to...
...Boston!
Something I enjoy is visiting the sites of historic disasters, particularly if they're obscure. For this trip we'd planned to visit this, the site of the Boston Molasses Flood, which occurred January 15, 1919, killing 21 and injuring 150. We had also planned to visit the site of the Cocoanut Grove Nightclub Fire, which killed 492 people on November 28, 1942, but then forgot completely about it.
After we got back from Salem the weather couldn't make up its mind about what it wanted to do, but between the spats of rain and sun, we had a nice surprise when we got back to our room.
