Step into the Salem Witch Trials Era with PEM’s Spellbinding New Tour

Sponsored by the Peabody Essex Museum

What does it mean to revisit an uncomfortable history? It’s a question that museums across the country have been wrestling with over the past several years, none more so than the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts. One of the largest art museums in North America, PEM has long been lauded for the international reach of its ambitious exhibitions. But recently the museum has turned its focus onto its home turf and one period in particular: the Salem Witch Trials.

If there ever were a museum ideally suited to tell this story, it’s PEM — and not just because it’s based in Salem. The museum was home to the biggest collection of materials related to the Salem Witch Trials, including more than 500 original documents on deposit from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. In 2020, PEM debuted the exhibition “The Salem Witch Trials 1692,” which marked the first time in nearly three decades that it had displayed artifacts from those holdings. A follow-up exhibition the following year, “The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming,” fleshed out the lives of the witch trials’ victims as well as highlighted those who were brave enough to speak out against the proceedings. 

Now, PEM has once again showcased the expertise of its curators with the Salem Witch Trials Walk, a self-guided audio tour that brings visitors through museum galleries and to key sites around downtown Salem related to the witch trials, including PEM’s historic Ropes Mansion, made famous by its appearance in the 1993 Disney film Hocus Pocus. The tour, which is accessed through a visitor’s own smartphone or other Wi-Fi–enabled device, takes about an hour to complete and is free with museum admission.

The new tour artfully builds upon PEM Walks, a series of self-guided tours that the museum developed during the pandemic, when traditional visits were limited. Those walks shone a light on the museum’s 22 historic properties — the largest historic house collection of any art museum in North America — and their success shifted how PEM thought about its overall museum campus and the visitor experience.

“It was a new way to showcase the full breadth of our museum, and it was a new way for us to engage with people coming to the museum,” says Dinah Cardin, PEM’s Content Producer, who oversaw the development of both PEM Walks and the Salem Witch Trials Walk. “With the interest in the witch trials, we had seen how many people would come to Salem for a tour. Maybe they’d come away with an understanding of what happened — but on a lot of these tours, if you listened closely, you’d hear the craziest things from operators who had just come here for the month of October to run their tours, and then they’d leave. We’re here. We have the objects. We know the real story. And so we felt we had to do this.”

The actual time span of the Salem Witch Trials — involving more than 400 people and leading to the deaths of 25 innocent men, women, and children — was 11 harrowing months. But the reverberations of that period are still being felt today, says Cardin. “I hope that visitors come away from the PEM tour with the seed for a real conversation and a greater understanding that these were real people, and that the lessons from 1692 are relevant today,” she says.

Encompassing 22 different stopping points, the Salem Witch Trials Walk tells one of the most complete accounts of what happened before, during, and after the events of 1692–1963. Beginning in the museum itself, visitors are immersed in the period that led up to the trials, when economic uncertainty gripped the colonies. Local history is brought to life in text, paintings, and, most notably, the personal objects of the accused and the accusers: a walking stick, a valuables chest, a sundial. There is even an original window from a house not far from where the executions were held.

“Windows were a sight of fear that relates to why the Salem Witch Trials happened,” explains PEM Curator Paula Richter in the tour. “First of all, in a number of documents in testimony that people gave about apparitions, these are visionary or dreamlike experiences where in the night, in the dark, some would suddenly feel like they were seeing something coming in the window.”

The walking tour is enriched by themed exhibitions along the way, too. In “The Salem Witch Trials: Restoring Justice,” PEM explores the many ways that the local community worked to make amends in the aftermath of the trials. And in “Stories of Salem, From A to Z,” the displays include a sampling of 19th-century souvenirs and kitsch — from face creams to tarot cards — that demonstrates that the city’s witchy tourist economy isn’t a new phenomenon.

Venturing beyond the museum walls, the tour brings visitors to the tombstone of Judge John Hathorne, great-great-grandfather of author Nathaniel Hawthorne and one of the most vocal participants in the Salem Witch Trials. Another highlight is the c. 1675 home of Judge Jonathan Corwin, a structure nicknamed “the Witch House” on account of its being one of the last surviving structures directly connected to the trials.

All in all, the Salem Witch Trials Walk offers an unforgettable immersion in a subject that’s too often explored only in the broadest of outlines. What PEM has put together is not garish or sensational, but rather a stirring and authentic account that makes you think about both the past and the present a little differently. It is, in other words, the perfect PEM exhibition.

The Peabody Essex Museum is located at East India Square, 161 Essex St., Salem, MA. It is currently open 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Thursday through Monday; closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, as well as Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day. Reserve tickets in advance at pem.org/tickets or by calling 978-542-1511. To listen to PEM’s two riveting podcast episodes about the Salem Witch Trials, go to pem.org/pemcast.

Related Reading

Looking for some companion reading for your Salem Witch Trials Walk experience? Check out the newly released second edition of Architecture in Salem, in which noted architectural historian Bryant F. Tolles Jr. presents an illustrated guide and walking tour covering more than three centuries of building styles and types across Salem. Arranged according to eight tour districts, the book analyzes 350-plus buildings and complexes from the Georgian, Federal, Victorian, modern, and contemporary periods, with individual entries and photographs of some 230 structures. This new edition also features a preface by PEM Executive Director and CEO Lynda Roscoe Hartigan and a foreword by Steven Mallory, manager of historic structures and landscapes at PEM. You can find Architecture in Salem in the museum’s gift shop or online at shop.pem.org.