Salem: How a Witch Trial Town Became the Capital of Halloween, for Sleep

At noon on 19 July 2017, the city of Salem, Massachusetts, dedicated a half circle of stone wall at the foot of a rocky slope off Pope Street, behind a pharmacy and its parking lot. Nineteen stones in that wall carry the names of the people hanged there in 1692. Every October about a million visitors come to Salem for its witches. This long history for sleep asks how the town of America's most shameful trials became its capital of Halloween, and why it took 325 years to mark the place where nineteen innocent people died. Also on Spotify, to listen with your screen off: https://open.spotify.com/show/78KYY13... Along the way: the Salem Village parsonage and the Parris household; Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne before the magistrates; the Court of Oyer and Terminer and spectral evidence; Rebecca Nurse and her neighbours' petition; Andover's confessions; Increase Mather's Cases of Conscience; Samuel Sewall's apology and the reversal of 1711; the pepper ships and the city seal; Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Wentworth Upham; Daniel Low's witch spoon; the Witch House and The Crucible; Bewitched in Salem in 1970; the Salem Witch Museum and Haunted Happenings; the tercentenary memorial and Elie Wiesel; the historians' theories; and the Gallows Hill Project's search for Proctor's Ledge. Told calmly, with the evidence named, for listening late at night or drifting off to sleep. Where are you listening from tonight, and have you ever walked the streets of Salem in October? Chapters: 0:00 The Village and the Port 6:14 The Minister's House 12:29 The Meetinghouse Hearings 18:28 The Port and the Frontier 24:08 The Special Court 30:29 The Summer Trials 36:31 Andover's Confessions 42:51 The Argument from Boston 49:09 Apology and Reversal 55:26 Ships and Silence 1:01:51 The Judge's Descendant 1:08:20 Upham's Map 1:14:34 The Witch Spoon 1:20:24 A House Moved Back 1:26:41 Bewitched Comes to Town 1:32:54 The Museum in the Church 1:38:59 Benches by the Graveyard 1:45:15 Why It Began 1:51:54 The Certain Other Persons 1:57:51 Finding the Ledge 2:04:21 October in Salem 2:10:37 The Wall on Pope Street #historyforsleep #salemwitchtrials #halloween #halloweenhistory #sleephistory