I’m not puttoing them down. I love museums, even (especially?) wacky ones. But Salem is overflowing in witch museums, and you wouldn’t think there’d be room for another. Tourist Witch Fatigue should be setting in. After all, with the Witch Museum on the Common, the Witch Dungeon, the Witch House, the Witch Museum on the Mall and the Witch Museum across from the Wax Museum, not to mention the outdoor Witch Memorial and the annual showing of the play about the witches (and the various DVDs on sale) and the local witch shops (like Laurie Cabot’s) and the new “Bewitched” statue, you’d think it’d be pretty well covered. But now there’s another Witch Museum on Pickering Wharf:
It’s not as if people haven’t tried other museums, to cash in on tourist interest in the grisly. You’ve got the House of Seven Gables, the Pirate Museum, a Lizzie Borden Museum (Lizzy wassn’t even from around here – her place was over an hour south, in Fall River, MA), a Horror Museum, and several defunct or only-seasonal places (Terror on the Wharf, the Edgar Allen Poe/Nathaniel Hawthorne Museum, Dracula’s Castle, The Nightmare Factory).
I guess people figure you just can’t get enough Horror in Salem.
Heck, they’ve never even tried a Lovecraft Museum. And you could make a legitimate case that some of his settings owe a debt to Salem, which is mentioned often enough in his works. But Lovecraft isn’t really well enough known to the Mainstream.
I hereby declare you to be king for a day.
I’d like to go to Salem one of these to see just how cheesy some of those museums are. I’m more interested to know how good their information on witchcraft trials, magical beliefs, etc. happens to be.
The ones run by the Park Service are accurate. The Witch Museum on the Common is pretty accurate (although I’ve noticed one or two errors). I’m not sure about the rest. Cheesiness varies quite a bit, although the Park Service tries to avoid it. Back in the 1970s they had a somewhat cheesy site, but it’s no longer exhibited.
We went a couple of years ago, and they’re reeeeally cheesy. The main Witch Museum, for which we paid somewhere between 10 and 20 bucks a pop to get into, and for which there was a steady line around the block most of the day, consisted of sitting in a big room. There were tableaux around the walls with mannequins posed to represent various famous people from the time. One by one, each one was lit up while a recorded voice pretended to be that person and told their part of the story. The whole thing took maybe 30-40 minutes, and then we were shuffled into the gift shop, which seemed to take up 70% of the building’s interior. I think there were a few exhibits on the other side of the shop, but they were about the same.
We also visited the pirate museum, which was slightly less of a rip-off, but of similar quality. The whole place felt like being surrounded by cash vampires. Horrifying, I guess, but not as they intended. I don’t know if we missed the good exhibits or what, but based purely on the lines of people, I think the witch museum was the main attraction.
I was in Billerica in May, and made it to Salem just after all the stores closed. What struck me were the number of new-age stores (I hadn’t been there since 1989). The big Army Surplus store was pretty cool, though.
I lived in Salem for 5 years. Fun place, strange place, to live, as you’d probably guess. October was always great fun except for the constant tour buses jamming up traffic. I enjoyed the mix of the sublime (House of the Seven Gables, the Peabody-Essex Museum) with the cheesy witch stuff. But one more museum is one too many.
As Vlad/Igor said, there are a ton of new-age stores, especially down on Pickering Wharf. Remember, this is a city with an official witch.
I agree that a Lovecraft museum would have been all kind of awesome.
… Seriously, Qadgop? I think we’re related. The Cook(e)s founded Salem, then split right then, with a 3 month old baby. Family history suggests they were just short of being accused of being witches themselves, which is why they split.
I find the whole thing annoying for two reasons. First, these trials were travesties of justice, and it’s kind of in bad taste to see Salem making so much money off what happened to those poor people. Second, and probably more important, most of the witch hysteria didn’t even happen in Salem. Most of the people accused of witchcraft lived in Salem Village, which is now the Town of Danvers. If anybody’s going to exploit those poor people, Danvers should be doing it.
My people were more from the Ipswich/Topsfield/Rowley vicinity, including my ancestress accused of witchcraft. Ross, Bickford, Clarke, Dwinnell, Wilde, Averill/Averell are among the surnames I recall off the top of my head; there’s lots more.
Averill is one that shows up, if I remember right, the middle name is what reminded me. I think Clarke as well. (Clark is a family middle name to this day.)
Ipswich. It figures. (I need not say why.)
It’s all horribly distant, but there weren’t that many people at the time.
