According to my research,* between 1692 and 1693, in colonial Massachusetts, more than 200 people in Salem Village were accused of practicing witchcraft, and 20 were hung on Gallows Hill. The first was Bridget Bishop who said, "I am as innocent as the child unborn." Five months later, then president of Harvard College, Increase Mather, would denounce the use of “spectral evidence”—testimony about dreams and visions—repeating what his father, Cotton Mather, a respected minister, had implored the court earlier not to allow. President Mather, in a memorable speech that itself was visionary, said, "It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned." The colony eventually admitted that the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted.
The town of Salem is only twelve miles from my childhood hometown of Reading, so one year my class went to the Salem Witch Museum. I remember only that detail. Only after I had finished this writing did I go to the museum’s website,* where I felt a tightening in my chest reading the stark words defining the period—words of hysteria created by Salem’s ignorant citizens, of fear based on superstition, and of the immoral verdicts of Salem’s innocent.
Almost 200 years after the Salem trials, European immigrants to the United States brought All Hallows’ Eve, Halloween as it is known in the States, and with it, the witch costume. “With absolutely no scientific evidence, one could conjecture that at least one in four people has dressed up as the hooked-nose, broom-laden, cauldron-stirring, wart-faced caricature at least one time in his or her Halloween career.”*
I remember my Halloween night when I dressed as a witch. In my black outfit and pointed hat, with my sister and our dad, who made us wait until after dark, we followed the back and forth circle of the flashlight he swung, opening a safe path from home to home (and only in our neighborhood). Drawn by the doorbell, each homeowner opened the door, and acting surprised, tried to guess who we were. I stood at my tallest height—a witch clearly seen in the shine of the overhead porch light. “Trick or Treat,” we hollered, our child grins speaking even louder. Our eyes searched to see what would be put in our big, brown paper bags—a shiny red apple or one of the really good candy bars.
My realization is, ”History is continuously speaking of the opportunity it offers for us to listen through our veil of the present to what has been learned in the past.”
* http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-
trials-175162489/
* Ibid.
* Salem Massachusetts. https://www.salemwitchmuseum.com/
* http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-witches-of-halloween-past-94494043/