Once I reported on the lucrative witch tourism industry in Salem, Massachusetts and its nearby town of Danvers, where the witch trials happened. In Danvers, I spoke to the descendants of people hanged for witchcraft convictions. It was around Halloween. I saw no witch decorations there. In Salem, witch kitsch abounds.
- After an interview, I cleaned the headstone of one of the old women convicted of witchcraft with a disinfectant wipe from my bag and then encountered a beautiful bird in the woods. Back in Salem, I had lunch at a bad hipster place.
- There is much media looking back at the phenomenon of witch-hunting here and globally as a miscarriage of law that has systematically ensnared innocents on the basis of non-science.
- It is horrible for women and men to live under laws based on spooky stories.*
- There was a generational divide in the way my grandparents, who raised me, and I saw witches. In American media on witches, they are portrayed as beautiful, sometimes as Earth-mother hippies who represent empowerment. Academics I’ve read on the topic discuss witches as a total subversion of social contracts- the antithesis of gender and good citizen roles. For those accounts, the witch is a gadfly who flies in the face of the halls of power.
- For my grandparents, in their North African tall tales, witches were frightening. They didn’t like to talk about them lightly. Once, I suggested that little superstitious beliefs were my grandmother’s own kind of folk magic - a kind of witchcraft. She was offended by this. There’s a Tunisian horror movie that came out some years ago that helped me to understand, after her death, that witches aren’t cute in Tunisia. But they are, as in the U.S. and most places, a subversion of power dynamics. And I suppose it doesn’t take a horror film for those role-reversals to frighten some people.