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SALEM, Massachusetts -- Some came on a pagan pilgrimage.
Others said they were tracing history, trying to understand why all hell broke loose here over 300 years ago. And many said that "Witch City" was just the obvious place to spend Halloween weekend.
But few seemed to know they were about five miles away from where they thought they were.
Salem, Massachusetts, has built an entire tourist industry around being the place where, in 1692, a group of young women claimed they were being bewitched by their neighbors. In response, 19 people were hanged after being convicted of witchcraft, one man was crushed to death for refusing to cooperate with the court, and 17 others died while held in prison.
But the city of Salem has precious few connections to those events.
"It was the town now known as Danvers, once known as Salem Village, that was ground zero for the events of 1692," said Benjamin Ray, professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia and a producer of the Salem Witch Trials website, which tells the real story of the trials.
Salem Village broke away from Salem Town in 1752, and wanted to rid itself of any association with the dark times, according to an interview Richard Trask, Danvers' town historian and one of the major contributors to the Salem Witch Trials site. The name change was part of that effort.
But Salem Town opted to capitalize on the trials in an attempt to draw tourists to the area and began promoting itself as Witch City in earnest in the 1960s. Some visitors to Salem over Halloween weekend were perturbed to discover that they weren't vacationing in witch trial central.
"The whole thing mostly happened down the road?" asked Nancy Hutchins from Chicago. "Well, that bites. And here I was just getting into this nice déjà vu historical groove."
Others didn't care -- they just wanted to be where the party was. "Yeah, I read that most of the witchy stuff actually happened one town over," said Roy Pertowski of Cleveland. "But there's nothing fun going on over there this weekend. Salem is where all the cool, creepy stuff is."
The contrast between modern Salem and Danvers is huge. Salem perkily promotes its few ties with the trials with a surfeit of kitschy witchy offerings -- gloomy black houses, "Terror Tours," murky graveyards, stores selling a plethora of pewter statues of wizards and unicorns, and witches flying high in the sky ... on banners.
Danvers has none of that. What it does have is a simple memorial to the victims of the trials and several homes, farms and public buildings that once were home to those who lived -- or died -- during the hysteria of that dark year.
The 27 acres of fields, pasture and woods that surround the Rebecca Nurse Homestead, once home to 71-year-old Rebecca Nurse, executed as a witch on July 19, 1692, really allows visitors to step back in time.
"We believe Rebecca is buried here," said Bob Osgood, one of the caretakers of the homestead. "The victims were supposed to be left in shallow graves on Gallows Hill after they were hung, but records indicate Rebecca's family recovered her body and buried her in the family cemetery in an unmarked grave."
A memorial to Nurse now stands in the center of the cemetery.
Reminders of the horrible scenes that must have happened here, such as Nurse's cozy bedroom from which she was taken away to her trial on March 23, 1692, are kept very low key. The homestead is an oasis of peace.
"We wanted visitors to understand the lives of these people instead of focusing on their deaths," Osgood explained.
Ray's website, which provides links to the town of Danvers but not to Salem, has the same mission.
"By presenting actual court documents, maps and images, we hope to bring modern people as far as possible into the minds and hearts of those who were involved in the trials," said Ray.
Ray's ancestors, as well as Osgood's and Trask's, were involved in the trials. Two of Trask's relatives, and one of Osgood's, were executed as witches. Ray's family signed a petition in defense of Rebecca Nurse, putting them in the small category known as the "defenders," those who bravely spoke out against the hysteria.
Ray hadn't known about his family connection to the trials until recently. The discovery sparked the creation of the Salem Witch Trial website, which will eventually be home to more than 850 documents related to the event, including recently discovered documentation and corrected versions of earlier transcriptions.
Each document has been both newly transcribed and digitized, which allows site visitors to see what the original looked like as well as read the contents, as the originals are often difficult to decipher.
"I had a hard time convincing some archives to let us scan the documents," said Ray. "In some cases, there was concern over possible damage to the documents. In others, it seemed to be more of an ownership issue -- as if by making copies we were devaluing the original documents.
"But by and large, we've gotten incredible cooperation. Most people do know that a fire or flood could happen in their archive, and we need to back up these irreplaceable documents."
Ray's Salem site is one of the many projects of the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. By the time the site is finished next month, Ray also hopes to have digital video clips and sound recordings posted.
"It's about using technology as a way to research, archive, learn and teach better than we have ever been able to do before," said Ray. "Technology allows us to pull together the pieces of our past in amazing ways, juxtaposing images, text and maps that help us make sense of the best and worst of the human story."
*(Michelle Delio and photographer Laszlo Pataki are on a four-week geek-seeking journey along U.S. Route 1. If you know a town they should visit, a person they should meet, a weird roadside attraction they must see or a great place to fuel up on lobster rolls, barbecue, conch fritters and the like, send an e-mail to wiredroadtrip@earthlink.net.) *
