7 Pope Street, Salem
Approximately 200 people gathered at Proctor’s Ledge at noon on July 19, 2017. They were there for a ceremony to dedicate a memorial to people who were hanged at the site in 1692, after having been convicted of witchcraft.
Accusations of, and convictions and executions for, witchcraft were not limited to Puritan Salem of 1692. Beginning in the 1640s, 13 women, alleged witches, lost their lives in New England over a few decades. Additionally numerous women—as well as some men—were banished from their communities for witchcraft. While there are multiple explanations for the hysteria that led to the accusations and killings, a dominant one focuses on the targeting of women who challenged society’s patriarchal norms. Also significant were intensifying competition for arable land in the face of population growth and the growing number of cattle, increasing disease, and challenging climatic conditions—from floods and cold, wet springs to summer droughts. In such a context, “witches” became scapegoats.
In Salem and its environs, the witchcraft hysteria exploded in 1692. Compounding environmental factors were the devastating impacts of King Phillip’s War, which had produced a post-war landscape throughout much of New England marked by “land hunger, pestilence, ravaged villages, refugees, war wounds, and nightmares” in historian Mark Fiege’s words.
While the top of Gallows Hill had long been suspected as the site of the hangings, it was not until early 2016 that researchers pinpointed the location—Proctors’s Ledge, at the hill’s base. Soon thereafter, Salem began building the memorial.
A total of 25 accused witches (six of them men) lost their lives in Salem in 1692: one was crushed to death, five died in prison, and 19 hanged at Proctor’s Ledge. The memorial dedication took place on the 325th anniversary of the first Witch Trials-related mass execution, which claimed the lives of five women—Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Wildes.
Getting there:
MBTA Commuter Rail to Salem. From the National Park Service Regional Visitor Center, 1.1 mile (21-minute) walk.
Sources:
Fiege, Mark. The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.
Image: Proctor’s Ledge, 2017. Photo by Joseph Nevins.