We Spent Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts and THIS HAPPENED.
Just a few days ago, my wife and I got back from celebrating our one year wedding anniversary in Massachusetts. We stayed in a wonderful Airbnb in Winthrop right outside of Boston. In the five or so days we were there, we found our way back to Salem three times, one of which was on Halloween day. My article today is focused on the Salem portion of this trip featuring our experience on Halloween and our two subsequent visits in the following days.
It’s been a dream of ours for a while now to spend Halloween in one of the witchiest towns in the United States. As many of you probably already know, Salem is famous for its 1692 witch trials. People obsessed with or merely interested in the occult, flock here year-round, though Halloween is by far their busiest day. Makes sense to go when it’s the craziest, right?
The town is about as witch-y and awesome as we hoped. Besides a plethora of historical sites, many of the shops are witch-themed as well, (go figure!). The indoor mall is even aptly named, “Witch City Mall”. It was filled with fortune tellers, psychic mediums, and a really cool rock store where we got some good minerals for our collection.
We spent Halloween day exploring, shopping, sightseeing, and drinking. Almost everyone was dressed up. We ended up seeing some very familiar characters walking the streets…
We, of course, dressed up as well. Tiff and I decided to be Team Go Rocket from the Pokemon Go app which we play daily. Tiff made the costumes and they turned out really great. In fact, we ended up being filmed and photographed for two different news outlets and we were stopped repeatedly for pictures and compliments, (though all we REALLY wanted was PIKACHU).
Later in the evening, we ran into another couple dressed just like us. Now, generally you want to be as unique as possible on such a creative holiday, but in this case, it worked out since in the Pokemon game there’s more than one Team Rocket team in the same city trying to battle. After the picture below, we strayed far away from each other, never to meet up again. (I assume the Team Rocket leader, Giovanni, will have an evil convention soon where we’ll meet again.)
“Prepare for trouble! Make it double!”
One of the weirdest moments of the day/night was when we approached the bewitched statue and watched as a bunch of Christian protestors spoke about the evils of Halloween and gay-bashed the crowd. Opposing them was a man dressed as Satan and a guy dressed in a robe promoting his sex shops. Needless to say, it was an interesting exchange of ideologies.
Satan vs. Christians vs. Sex Shop Satanist
The entire day was a lot to take in, but luckily we had alcohol. Tiff stuck with beer and I drank whiskey throughout the evening. We ended the night in a basement party beneath Hotel Salem where things got SPOOKY. We then got an Uber back to our Airbnb. It was probably the best Halloween I’ve ever experienced.
The following photos are from all around Salem from the graveyard behind the Witch Museum to the lighthouse to the memorial for witches who were hung and pressed to death to everything in between. Enjoy!
Overall, the trip was a blast. I’ll be covering another part of this trip in my next article when we visited the Mass Audubon in Ipswich. Stay tuned!
