Witch Sickness in Salem Massachusetts
[This is inspired by my observations as someone born in Salem, and then validated by conversations with other witches in and around Salem who observed a "Sickness" in Salem witches.]
Salem Massachusetts, Witch City, is a town known for it's witch trials that has become a bit of a tourist trap in the recent decades. Many aspiring witches move here to open businesses, write books, and to make a name for themselves as a Salem Witch. With all these different people trying to move in and make Salem part of their craft identity, I've observed them over the years as someone born here and seen mostly negative results. Which lead to people starting to use the term "Salem Sickness" to describe the effect this city has on witches minds.
These witches moving to Salem often start our level headed with their own goals of moving here because it's history and being a place you can call yourself a witch openly. As their ego and aims grow this goes to people's heads leading to their downfall, at least within their local reputation as they become victim of Salem's Witch Sickness.
Salem as a town has always had a reputation, within history especially but also locally that has nothing to do with the witchcraft. Salem has an aura of fear to it, and known to create a feeling of being an "unlucky" or "unsafe" place for some (especially during the October season). I and other locals I talk to think this is the land's way of keeping people with bad intentions out, among other factors. In recent years this has begun to shift with the increase in witch tourism (and gentrification), but within the surrounding towns you can still hear older folks tell stories about Salem from the 90s and 2000s.
Some of those messy stories are also about drama between rising Salem occultists such as Laurie Cabot, Christian Day, Lorelei Stathopoulos, and many more. A running theme seems to be rivalry, hypocrisy, and jealously, someone is always mad about what another knows or has and ruins their own reputation in the process. Frequently this devolves into frivolous legal battles, or the individuals sense of self importance gets the best of them as these dramas become all consuming in their mind. Making them defensive, off putting, and difficult to be around.
A classic example is Laurie Cabot, the official witch of Salem. She has publishes a few books, opened a few different shops, and really brought the modern witchcraft revival to Salem (tho if anyone knows of others doing public facing witchcraft before she got here please correct me, i'd prefer to be wrong). You could find her walking the streets of Salem dressed in black, her face painted, and her body decked out in jewelry. She was the face of witchcraft here for a while, and eventually it got to her head. She started a tradition of her own, the Cabot Kent tradition. Many things she's said earlier in her career have come back to bite her in the ass, especially about not cursing and her claims about the history of witchcraft.
On Laurie's website you can find the following quotes on her "understanding witchcraft" page where she makes the following claims about devils in witchcraft,
"Demons such as Satan and Lucifer are the relatively recent fabrication of the Judeo-Christian faiths to cow their ‘believers’ into obedience and have nothing to do with us. We were around way before the Christians or the Jews, which is why they usurped so many of our traditions, but that is another story entirely. Our religion has no evil deities; our philosophy requires no fear tactics to function, only education and enlightenment."
This can be found to be untrue with just a little research into history. Also who is this "We" she loves to talk about, is it all witches, pagans, or her tradition of witchcraft?
She also says the following about her tradition in regards to cursing,
"We use our Magick and our science to get out of harm’s way and to help others do the same. We do not return harm or incorrect energy to those that wish it upon us, we neutralize it so it can harm none. It is best to make the fire ‘cease to be’ than to drown it with water."
These words have come back to haunt her. She she has found herself in the local news a lot for cursing people, one example here involves a doll left on someone's lawn. I can't find the original news article but this blog mentioned an incident where cursed the Salem police (I don't support their opinions, but it's the only source of this incident I can find at the moment). I remember when this happened and hearing everyone talk about it as it did a number on the way the community saw her. At the same time other people's already difficult reputations were beginning to sour.
Christian Day was consistently finding himself in hot water when he came to Salem and opened his own stores here. Locally there was talk about him jumping from group to group, burning bridges behind him as he want. Creating lots of drama, such as this case where he and Lori Bruno ended up in court. Which was only one of such cases for him. There was also an incident where Day allegedly doxed someone, you can read the person's blog about it here. All of this local drama eventually lead to Day moving away from the city, but still managed to bring this curse of witch drama with him to New Orleans where his coven and many elders denounced him (and those that support him, such as Brian Cain) for his behavior. From what I hear things have not been great lately.
The current owner of the store Crow Haven Corner, the oldest witch shop in Salem, has also found herself in trouble with the law landing her self in the local news for a brawl during a street fair in downtown Salem. I know this incident well because I worked for Joanna Thomas (another person who came to Salem to open a witch business) in college and heard a lot about this feud, among other local dramas.
The writer and practitioner of magic Damien Echols came to Salem thinking he could find safety here as a witch, but instead found himself experience what was called a modern day witch hunt. Leading to him swiftly moving away too.
All of this isn't behind Salem either, a lot of interpersonal witch drama still happens in the city. It's just kept a little more quiet because of the way all of this was handled in the past, and the harm it did to these people's reputations. So now these store owners try to hide their transgressions and troubles betters, but the local community still sees it as a symptoms of the city's witch sickness. These owners are always having falling outs, they all gossip about each other while smiling to people's faces at events. There's rumors of theft, plagiarism, under paying and mistreatment of employees, wrongful terminations. A lot of this just doesn't reach the surface, or just hasn't yet, because their targets haven't had the money to make as much noise. Current witch store owners know the history here in the city, and the know the way it has made the minds of witches sick, so they try to be mindful of this, but very often fail.
Why is there this Witch Sickness in Salem?
I've heard a few different local theories on why Witch City carries this witch sickness. Some people think it's because there was never any real "witches" in Salem, so the land doesn't like to be known as a harbor for witches. Salem's witch history is full of misinformation and theories about what happened here, and that history isn't really the point of this post so I'm gonna quickly skim through it. Essentially Salem, as many know, was where a major witch hysteria occurred in the United States (but there were other places throughout the country also seeing a rise in accusations of witchcraft). Where 2 young girls fell suddenly ill and started acting very strange. There was so explanation for this behavior, and prayer and medicine didn't work, so the community thought it MUST be witchcraft as the victims started to report spectral visitations and painful sensations. This lead to the mass hysteria where 150-200 people were jailed, 14 women and 5 men were hung, one was tortured to dead, and 5+ died in jail. The community response to the accusations of witchcraft that were thrown around was harsh, cruel, and trauma filled.
This Massachusetts Bay Colony was primed for this as there was a strong belief in the Devil here among the English settlers, there was lingering fear of attack from the local indigenous tribes as well from the French leading to boundary and boarder disputes. Tensions were very high at this moment in Salem's history. Changes with the city cheater were also happening, causing some internal shifts to occur too. Which didn't help the rising witchcraft suspicions. Some changes were made to the legal system that allowed spectral evidence to be used in court, and this seems to be have really been the tipping point in these trials. Eventually this was undone, and people were retried and released. But the damaged had been down, to these people, and the land they lived on by bringing forth all this social strife.
As modern scholars seem to agree there were no witches in Salem, and that many factors contributed to the outburst in witch accusations such as the things i mentioned above. This page from a local museum talks more about this, i recommend exploring. Another museum also discusses the debunking of the ergot theory which i recommend too. I've seen conversion syndrome (where psychological stress manifests as psychical symptoms) suggested by a few different articles for the cause of Salem's witch hysteria, which was then fed by a need to scapegoat all their community stressors. All of this to say, Salem was never a place where witches faced injustice. So creating a whole tourist industry and witch identity out of this idea has maybe lead to the land cursing these community leaders for building a name for themselves of the backs of these innocent dead.
Another theory I have heard thrown around is the land under Salem will reject anyone who attempts to settle here and use it for their gain. As the early European settlers of Salem had no claim to this land. This area was home to the Naumkeag branch of the Massachusett tribe, and the Naumkeag were a nomadic group. So when settlers arrived they saw the empty homes the Naumkeag left and wrongfully thought the place to be abandoned and took up residence in these structures. Conditions between these groups started off predominantly peaceful, but quickly soured as the settlers spread illness and continued to take up residence in structures and spaces the Naumkeag used seasonally for fishing and gathering. Leading to increased tension, but some treaties and land deeds were signed (tho there is debate on if they were intended to be permanent or temporary. As well as if the Massachusett intended to sell the land or just allow occupancy of it. [More about these land deeds can be found here]). So all this trauma has lead to the land pushing back against anyone moving here to extract value from it.
This history of European settlers moving here to use this land for its resources and their gain on top of the community trauma that was Salem's witch hysteria seems to have effected this place in such a away that it rejects people, especially witches, moving into town to capitalize on this history. Creating a Salem Witch Sickness of the mind that ruins their reputation and sometimes more.
Some people sense it and know to move away, but others try to stay and persist with mixed results. Others who open shops, I see this particularly with those born here or the surrounding areas, know that silence seems to the best policy here in Salem to avoid these types of situations. Practicing in the quiet corners of the city, or sticking to yourself leads to some of the longest lasting establishments with the most untarnished records. As Salem's Witch Sickness seems to target the boisterous and hungry.
