Going to Salem Massachusetts this weekend. What shouldn't we miss?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I only live an hour and a half or so from Salem, MA…But my wife and I have been so busy for the last few years we have not had the tiem to make it up there…Well we are making the time to go back to the famed spot of the Salem Witch Trials, Nathaniel Hawthorn’s Custom House, cool book stores, spooky palm readers…

What I’d like to know is: Where are the good restaurants? New/Old good book stores? What shouldn’t we miss? What can we pass by? Can we make rubbings on certain graves? Anyone going to be in Salem this weekend? I knwo this is the absolute best time to go! :slight_smile:

2

Have you been to the Peabody Essex Museum yet? (In Salem despite the name.) I’ve heard it’s fabulous.

3

No…we have not been to that museum. Is it a colonial museum, or strictly salem oriented. Not that it matters, we are certainly interested… :slight_smile:

4

Why, here’s a link! http://www.pem.org/homepage/

They’ve got a Qing Dynasty Chinese house inside the museum (dismantled and brought over, I think) that is supposed to be amazing.

5

At this time of year you might want to check out Haunted Happenings.

As for food, I like Passage to India and In a Pig’s Eye/Ear (we still don’t agree on the name of this place), and O’Neill’s Pub is usually fun.

6

Howyadoin,

The Peabody Essex museum is a must-see! Its a very diverse museum, with everything from 19th-century Chinese porcelain to items from the whaling trade to local historical material. Not too much of the witchy-poo stuff, since that’s beaten to death (no pun intended) elsewhere in the city. Beautiful new building!

I’d also recommend the Custom House and other sites in the historical park. Once upon a time, Salem was one of the richest cities in America thanks to the China trade.

If you’re interested in architecture, a walk down Chestnut St. or Federal St. would be a good idea. Many beautifully preserved examples of early American architecture. The Salem Common area is another good stroll.

Pioneer Village at Forest River Park is a recreation of the early settlement of Salem, haven’t been myself, but I’m told it’s nice.

Salem Willows Park is a pleasant little spot on the harbor. Be sure to have the chop suey sandwiches at Salem Lowe, something of a local delicacy.

In a Pig’s Eye has a really cool open-mic on Monday nights. It’s a cozy little place on Derby Street up past the Custom House.

Have fun! This is our silly season, leading up to our Mardi Gras at Halloween, when my wife and I get the hell outta town!

-Rav

7

Across the street from the House of Seven Gables is Ye Olde Pepper Companie candy store, which as you might have gathered from the name, is an old fashioned type candy store. Apparently Pepper is the family name of one of the former owners, I had a little trepidation that the candy itself somehow involved pepper. They claim to be the oldest candy maker in the United States, and the candy is morbidly delicious. We made several trips back there, as we realized we needed more peanut butter malted balls, truffles, fudge, maple sugar candy and turtles.

On our vacation to Salem, we were very impressed with the Stephen Phillips Memorial Trust House Museum, which doesn’t have anything to do with witches. I think they are a little hard up for visitors. We were the only people on our tour, and our guide was amazing and it was more like hanging out in the historic home than being on a tour.

The House of Seven Gables itself (please note that I mentioned the candy store first, which will show you where my priorities are) was a bit more typical as far as crowded historic homes tours go, but also very interesting and they have an excellent gift shop. Very nice relaxing garden along the water for strolling at your leisure after your tour.

Mr. Del and I usually like doing wacky, tacky tourist things, but the Salem Witch Museum was lame. It wasn’t interesting enough to be informative, and not tacky enough to be a fun roadside attraction type thing. It was just … lame and blah. And, at least when we were there, we had to get tickets for a certain time, and then rush through something else to make sure we were back on time … I would definitely skip this.

We were there last year right before the Peabody Museum opened after being closed for renovations, so we were very sad to miss it, as it had been highly recommended by everyone we knew who had been there.

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There are so many fun things to do there I couldn’t begin to list them. Just wander around a bit, and you’ll find them though, I’m sure. One thing, though. I’d avoid the New England Pirate Museum there, if I were you. We went in July and while the tour guide was incredibly gifted, we were only able to go through a part of the tour because the mold was so overwhelming that I was having asthma attacks.

9

The Peabody Essex Museum is fab. The Chinese house exhibit is phenomenal. The whole downtown area is beautiful. I feel funny saying nice things about Salem, because I live in the next town over (Beverly, right across the harbor), and Salem are our big football rivals.

The whole North Shore is just the greatest place in the world:)

10

I love Salem. We go there all the time.

I have to second or third the Peabody Essex Museum. They jusyt expanded and remodeled it, and it’s enormous and interesting. Well worth the visit.

A lot of the witch stuff is hyped up and hooey (but fun nevertheless). Take with a rain of salt. You might want to read up on it. I recommend Witchcraft in Salem by Chadwick Hansen (a revisionist history) and Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Posessed.

Sadly, almost all of the Salem bookstoes have closed. The Black Cat was a great used book store, and A Tangled Web was a great mystery book store (with horror as well), but they’re gone. There’s one book store on the Mall. I don’t recall the name, but it’s packed to the gills and overflowing with cut-rate books. They’re going out of businss, they say. But thy’ve been saying that for t least three years now. There are plenty of books for sale in the New Age/witchcraft/Wickie-Poo shops, but they’re almost al occult and New Age books
There are a lot of odd museums – The Pirate Museum, the new Hollywood Wax Museum, a Childen’s Museum, a Historical Wax Museum. Fun, but not essential.

See the Witchcraft Memorial, right next to the old Graveyard (they’re between the Peabody-Essex and the Pirate museum) The Witchcraft memorial went up 12 years ago on the 300th anniversary of the witch trials, and honors the 19 hanged and one pressed (Giles Corey) victims of that event. All were almost certainly innocent of any wrongdoing (Hansen makes a persuasive case that witchcraft was practced at Salem, but nobody as doing what the witches were accused of, and in the face of all the jokery about Salem Wiches, it’s worth remembering that a human tragedy lies at the heart of it.

As The_Raven notes, Salem Pioneer Village is an almost unknown feature of the town. It’s well away from the main tourist sites. It was built in the 1930s, an has lasted since then. The homes aren’t all from one era, but represent severa different stages in Salem’s Colonial history, from the quick and temporary homes built by the first settlers through a Governor’s Mansion. There used to be two Straw Houses (as mentioned in my Teemings article on the Three Little Pigs, “Not by the Hair f my Chinny Chin Chin”), but one of them burned down many years ago. Matches are a bigger threat than blowhard wolves.
There are several “Spook Houses” in town – “Dracula’s Castle” across from Wendy’s, “Horror on the Wharf” on Pickering Wharf, and a new one on the Mall.
There are quite a few restaurants, but you’ll have to drasw your own conclusions. One of them, across from the Hawthorne Hotel, is a reproduction of an Irish Pub, an has good food (and Guiness). You’dnever guess that, only fw months before, it had been a haunted-house-themed place called The CRypt Cafe, and feaured looped Addams family movies and the like.

11

If you try and pronounce it Pea Body, you’ll sound like a tourist. If you go for Pib A Dee, it’s a lot closer to how the locals do it.

This weekend, it’s either a Harry Potter Trivia quiz or mask making in the Bizzare Bazzar :dubious:

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I recommend the Salem Beer Works, a great brew pub in town. :smiley:

13

Forget spooky. That last bit sounds downright biblical!

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I’ve learned to say it “Pee’ bdy”, but I can see the “Pib a dee”, too.

I absolutely love the House of Seven Gables. I love old houses like that. For me, that’s something you can’t miss. Plus, blueberry beer at the Salem Beer Works. Yum!

15

Visiting MA often, we’ve stopped in the western part of the State to visit Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Pops, as it has been deemed. On the grounds is an old house where Hawthorne did his writings, or so it is said. And it is this house (around Lenox, MA, IIRC) which was taught to me to be the House of Seven Gables. Is this incorrect? Any native Mass’ers care to enlighten me? Thanks, Jinx

16

If you can spare the time, take a slight detour to Cape Ann (Glouster and Rockport, MA). Nicknamed “the other Cape”, it is absolutely gorgeous with quaint shops and all the charm of a New England inlet on the Atlantic. Definitely worth the side trip! You’ll fall in love with Cape Ann! - Jinx

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I suspect that the only “real” House of the Seven Gables is in the book of that name.

But, as the story is set in Salem, and the house is in Salem, and demonstrably has seven Gables (a weird architectural definition – an ordinary lout like me has to have them pointed out to him), and since Hawthorne lived and wrote here, th one in Salem has at least as good a claim as one in the Berkshres. (To tell the truth, I didn’t even know that Hawthorne ever lived and wrote out there).
On top of which, this is a BIG tourist attraction, and has a sign out fron announcing that it’s THE House of the Seven Gables. The City Fathers of Salem, MA aren’t going to give up this cash cow in favor of the Berkshires.

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It was his summer fling :wink:
Must be witchcraft!

Accompany moi to Tanglevood, schveethaart, and ve shall make de beautiful musique togeh-da! Yah? He wasn’t just fiddlin’ around at Tanglewood! Then, of course, came the Scarlet Letter! :wink: - Jinx

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And Marblehead, be sure to check out Marblehead. It was the inspiration for Lovecraft’s spooky harbor town of “Innsmouth.”

If you pass through Ipswitch you can have lunch at the Clam Box (prototypical New England clam shack) and see the rocky outcropping where the Devil landed so hard after a wrestling match with a Puritan preacher that he left his footprint. Check to see if your foot fits.

20

The Hamsters just ate my reply to Uke, bt, in brief, I just want to note that Insmouth seems to be an amalgam of various North Shore co,mmunities – the fact that Innsmouth traded with China and the South Pacific makes it seem more like Salem. ST. Joshi and his co-editor in “The Annotated Shadow over Innsmuth” (I just re-read it) believe that Innsmouth was based on Gloucester, and one writer claims that the American Legion Hall in Gloucester was the inspiration for the Temple of Dagon. Now I’m gonna have to check it out.