Have you ever had a place call to you? I mean, an in your bones call to go there. Then, years later, you make a shocking discovery and find out why. That’s what happened with me and Salem, Massachusetts.
In early 2019, my wife and I decided to go to New York City for World Pride and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Inn riots. While we were back East, I really wanted to spend a few days in Salem. It wasn’t during Haunted Happenings, the city’s annual Halloween event that draws in thousands of people each day. Instead, we would be there right before July 4th, a relatively quiet time of year. I was kicking around an idea for a book that was based on a teleplay I had written years previously about modern witches in Salem. But I also felt I had unfinished business there.
In the 1980s my family did a colonial states vacation that started in Virginia. Toward the end of the trip, we left Boston and headed north a little ways before getting off the interstate to spend our lunchtime in Salem. It was a quick visit for only a couple of hours. Back then Salem wasn’t as big a tourist draw as it is today and had limited touristy things to do.
Earlier that year I read The Crucible in high school and was interested in visiting the newish Witch Trials Museum at the center of town in Washington Square. About fifteen years earlier, the museum was established in a former gothic church with a huge glass window and hulking brick structure. Outside, in the middle of the road where three streets converged, was a statue that looked like a witch standing on a rock. Upon closer inspection, we discovered it was actually a tribute to Englishman Roger Conant, who founded the community of Salem in 1626.
My family is not just of European descent. Yes, most of my ancestors were Irish, German, and British, but on my father’s side, we are also Native American, specifically Cherokee and Chickahominy. For me American history didn’t start when Europeans showed up. It started millennium ago when my indigenous ancestors settled into the southeast of what’s now the United States.
The Cherokee referred to what is now roughly southern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, the Carolinas, and northern Georgia simply as The Land. To my ancestors their homeland was part of a great floating island suspended by strings connected to each of the four directions and the sky above. So I tend to get a bit ruffled whenever I see a historical marker noting a certain date in the 1600s as the beginning of civilization on this continent.
Once inside the Witch Museum, we were ushered into a dark circular room. Since it was so many years ago, I might be wrong regarding exactly how the show played out. Some fading memories, however, are seared in my brain. The floor glowed red with a black pentagram at its center. Narration boomed over the speakers as the history of the Salem Witch Trials enfolded around us. Vignettes of Puritan girls (one as young as nine) lit up as they claimed they had been possessed by witches. Men shouted at the adult women they accused of harming the girls with witchcraft. The panic increased to a fever pitch until the accused women were sentenced to death. Bridget Bishop, the first to be executed by hanging, was a name I did not forget. Then suddenly the show was over, and we were let out into the bright summer light after exiting the gift shop, of course.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the visit or even what I ate for lunch. I think we may have walked past a cemetery on the way back to the car. A white house with a stacked stone wall was the only other thing I remember. For the rest of my family, it was just one more place to check off a list. For me, it was something more and I didn’t fully understand why.
As I did travel research for our 2019 trip, I found Salem would be quite different than how I remembered it. Now there were walking tours, occult shops, more museums, and a memorial for the innocent victims executed during the Witch Trials. We would have lots to explore in a leisurely way over three days.
Coincidentally, around the same time, I had also been working on mapping out my genealogy, in particular both of my paternal great-grandmother’s lines. Two weeks before our New England trip, much to my astonishment, I discovered both of my great-grandmother’s families lived in Salem, MA for several generations. As in, they were some of the original settlers to arrive in Salem in 1629 on the Mayflower II. (During the 1600s there were multiple ships called the Mayflower that shuttled passengers back and forth from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.) I wrote down about a dozen surnames into my travel journal, so I could look for them in Salem’s cemeteries or on any other historical markers. One name stood out from all the others: Ingersoll.
Richard Ingersoll was the patriarch of the family and made money ferrying folks across one of the many rivers along the north shore. A son, John Sr., was my direct ancestor. Another son, Nathaniel, owned a tavern on land inherited from his father. After a Google search, I learned the building was still standing after 350 years. Or at least a colonial structure that may have been added on to the original was still there; it’s still debated. The old building, now a private home, was located in Danvers, which used to be part of Salem Village. In 1692 it served as the initial place for the Salem Witch Trials examinations, due to its convenient location by the parsonage and Puritan Meeting House. Of course, my wife and I had to go visit it while we were in Salem.
Nathaniel Ingersoll was a lieutenant in the local militia and a deacon of the Salem Village Puritan congregation. He also testified against multiple women in the Salem Witch Trials and signed the indictment of Bridget Bishop, who was the first to be hanged in the summer of 1692. I thought it might be best to keep quiet about my ancestry while I was in Salem.
We arrived at the seaside town late in the evening after spending the morning in New York City watching the Pride parade. It was dark by the time we settled into our hotel near the wharf, and we decided to walk around downtown looking for some dessert. However, we found out quickly that Salem liked going to bed early. 7 p.m. on a Sunday and next to nothing was open. Luckily we had eaten dinner in Connecticut a couple hours earlier, so we weren’t starving. On the bright side it was nice to get oriented without any crowds.
There are just a few, relatively short main streets in downtown Salem. Essex Street, Charter Street, and Derby Street run more or less east/west. Hawthorne Boulevard, Central Street/Lafayette Street, and Washington Street run north/south. One of my ancestors, Henry Francis Cook, was the original butcher in Salem and owned a farm right around what is now the Witch City Mall. He married Judith Birdsall and died on Christmas Day in 1661. I discovered all of these details after I got back home. I wished I had known sooner because it would have made for a great story while I sat inside Witch City Ink getting a tattoo.
Something that was immediately welcoming to us in Salem was all the rainbow-colored crosswalks, buntings, and flags. They were even draped on the front of churches. Throughout town there were multiple messages of inclusivity for all people. It was clear Salem wanted to steer as far away as possible from its intolerant past.
We spent the next few days taking walking tours, visiting cemeteries, exploring the occult shops, and eating at restaurants alongside locals.
Our first tour the next morning started in Crow Haven Corner’s garden. It was billed as a Witch Trials tour which included a witchcraft ritual at the shop and was an interesting way to begin our historical lessons. We sat in the garden and performed a very benign ceremony that included lighting a candle and infusing our intentions into a handful of crystals. By showing and explaining what modern witchcraft actually was as a nature-based practice, it made the witch panic seem even more ridiculous.
After the ritual we went and visited The Burying Point (now known as the Charter Street Cemetery). This was most likely the cemetery my family walked past in the 1980s. It was one of the oldest European American burying grounds in the United States. Next to it was an extremely thoughtful and subtle memorial to the Salem Witch Trials victims installed for the 300th anniversary in 1992. The rectangle park was bordered by a stacked granite wall with nineteen stone benches. Each bench was etched with the name of the victim and the date and manner of their execution, primarily hangings. Above them was a canopy of Black Locust branches, the same variety of tree the victims were strung from.
The first bench I saw was that of Bridget Bishop. It was covered in flowers, messages, and stones. I made sure to visit each victim that my great-uncle testified against. Bridget Bishop. Rebecca Nurse. Sarah Wildes. John Proctor. Susannah Martin. There were many others he accused but those were the ones who didn’t survive.
Next we went to the location of Giles Corey’s pressing near where Bridget Bishop owned an orchard of apples. As we stood on the steps of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church and our tour guide described what the parking lot in front of us looked like in 1692, I looked over into a planter. Within a small wrought iron fence were about a dozen tombstones. Half of them were Ingersolls who died in the 1700s. At least one fought in the Revolutionary War, according to a Sons of the American Revolution marker.
I felt so many different emotions once our tour ended. It was more visceral than the story I heard in the Salem Witch Museum decades earlier. I wasn’t just a passive participant in a piece of dark history, which appalled me since I was a teenager. Now I was learning how my family was directly a part of how it happened. Something was stirring inside me. I came to this place to do research for a novel, but with all of this new perspective, I no longer was merely toying with the idea of writing something. I felt I must write something. The historical backdrop needed to be based on Nathaniel and Bridget, and it needed to be about overcoming generational trauma.
The next day we took a trolly tour that started at the National Park Service Visitor Center on Essex Street and went beyond downtown past pastel-colored townhomes and the ginormous electrical plant facing the bay. Our volunteer tour guide, who was a former Salem schoolteacher, commented on how ugly it was as we made a loop along the Willows. Then we drove past Dead Horse Beach with its blue and white sand from all the mussels in the area where the town used to bury all its deceased horses.
On the return we went back through downtown Salem and learned about New England’s maritime history and Salem Commons large, grassy park where one of the first militias began mustering and would eventually become the basis of the Army National Guard. We wandered through The Point filled with its many large houses in a more affluent part of town. Many of the black front doors were sized four feet in width. Our tour guide told us they were sized that way so when people died their caskets could easily be removed from the house after the wake.
I took pictures of everything I saw so I could commit the textures of Salem to memory. The stone walls, geraniums, brick walls, Corinthian columns, cobblestones, thick yellow glass, wrought iron fences, weathered tombstones, docks with boats, restaurants and pubs all had stories behind them that needed to be told.
Every time we went through a cemetery I would find graves with my ancestors’ surnames, especially the Ingersolls. I also learned that some distant Ingersoll cousins were related to Nathaniel Hawthorne and owned the House of the Seven Gables for a time.
On our last morning in Salem, we drove up to Danvers to find the Ingersoll Ordinary. It felt surreal to see this tan, two-story, centuries old home on a quiet street corner near a school and know my family once lived there. The place was very unassuming and at the time didn’t look too bad for its age. Gigantic maple trees towered over it. A stone path led up to a tiny, colonial style portico with its small triangular roof at the front door. There were five windows upstairs and four downstairs on either side of the door. One large chimney sat in the center of the roof on the back side.
Just down the street was another Witch Trials Memorial directly across from the original site of the Puritan Meeting House. The white two-story house now on that property had fire damage on the second floor and looked as if it was in the process of being repaired. The memorial stood oddly in front of a parking lot for a couple of sports fields.
I should also have visited the site of the Rebecca Nurse homestead and the remains of Samuel Parris’ parsonage not too far away, but we needed to get to Boston. Those sites could wait for a future visit. On the way out of town via the I-95, I spotted a sign that said, Ingersoll Street, and hopped out of the car to take a photo of it. There was also an Ingersoll Parkway just around the corner. I assumed this is where the rest of my family lived. It was charming to see that farms still lined those old roads.
By the time we left Salem and Danvers I felt both places in my bones. They were so different from where I grew up in Los Angeles, but they now felt oddly so familiar to me. I had reconnected with a past my family had long forgotten. I also knew the little teleplay about witches, sitting in my den back home, needed to be someplace else other than a dusty bookshelf. It needed to be more than what I originally conceived of it. Soon after, while I was furloughed at home during the Covid pandemic, I suddenly had the time to bring it to life.
Check back each month, from now until Whispers of the Pale Witch hits bookshelves, to learn more about myself, my writing process, and how the Beckett Coven series was born. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Shall we begin?
S. A. Sizemore
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