When Was John Proctor Hung

The memorial (shown here in early June) volition be dedicated on the 325th anniversary of the hangings. Christine Woodside

Eight years agone, when they bought their house overlooking a wooded ledge in Salem, Massachusetts, Erin O'Connor and her hubby, Darren Benedict, had no idea why that parcel stood empty. The scrubby lot lay tucked betwixt houses on Pope Street, inside sight of a large Walgreen'southward—nothing much to look at. Then when people began to end by and take pictures of the empty site concluding winter, they wondered why.

If they'd been in that location in 1692, they would have known. That'southward when the rocky ledge on the parcel next door turned into a site of mass execution—and when the bodies of people hanged as witches were dumped into a low spot beneath the ledge known as "the crevice." In the dark, when the hangings were over, locals heard the sounds of grieving families who snuck over to get together up their dead and secretly coffin them elsewhere.

Merely for much of history, the site sat quietly obscured by wood and buildings. A leather tannery and railroad operated nearby, and in contempo years, houses surrounded it. And for O'Connor, Bridegroom and much of Salem, that history has faded despite the town'south outsized reputation.

Now, information technology will finally exist commemorated when Salem mayor Kimberley Driscoll dedicates a memorial below Proctor's Ledge on July 19. The date coincides with the first of three mass executions there. On the same day in 1692, five women—Sarah Practiced, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Wildes—were hanged from a tree on the ledge, and their bodies fell into a "crevice," where the memorial at present marks their names.

Later victims included wealthy landowner John Proctor, killed in August. He had publicly condemned the witch trials and had punished his female person servants for challenge to exist possessed past witches' spirits in the hysteria of the twenty-four hours. Proctor'south Ledge is named for his grandson, who bought the country knowing its history.

The Salem witch trials were "the largest and near lethal witch hunt in American history," wrote historian Emerson "Tad" Baker, a professor at Salem State University in his 2015 book A Tempest of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Feel. In a June symposium well-nigh the trials, Baker spoke about the volatile political and social climate in Salem in the 1690s.

At the time, an acting colonial government was in charge and Sir William Phips, the new governor, was considered weak. In response, says Baker, people felt a spiritual reject. "Puritans thought God was telling them something," he says. Add to this the extreme atmospheric condition of the "Little Ice Age"—hot dry summers and lethally common cold winters—famine, economical failures and borderland wars with the French and Native Americans, and it became a scenario ripe for disaster.

Finger-pointing and mass hysteria ensued. During a series of trials, young women accused "witches" of making them contort, writhe and shriek. The accusations were "neighbor on neighbor," says University of Connecticut geographer Ken Foote. Information technology was an anxious time.

In the 325 years since xix of the falsely accused were hanged as witches in Salem, the coastal town has never forgotten what happened. (Most of the trial activity took place in Salem. Some of the immature accusers lived in Salem Hamlet, afterwards renamed Danvers.) Somehow, the site of the hangings had until at present faded from memory, replaced by an obsession with the "witches" themselves that borders on kitsch.

Witch tourism gave Salem the moniker "Witch City," a major economic driver that local officials have long said they value. (Even the constabulary department's logo includes a witch.) Every Halloween, as many as 250,000 visit for the result called Haunted Happenings. Revelers dress as zombies and witches. Families take "ghost tours," and wander effectually a psychic fair, costume balls, and flick festivals—all run past a public-individual partnership called Destination Salem.

The kinder, gentler grade of witch interest dates to the boob tube situation one-act "Bewitched," which filmed several episodes in town in the 1970s. A statue of the actress Elizabeth Montgomery (who played the witch Samantha Stevens) stands downtown. Other popular sites include the Witch House, the home of trials gauge Jonathan Corwin, and the Old Burying Point Cemetery, where tourists visit the grave of the other judge, John Hathorne (antecedent of writer Nathaniel Hawthorne).

Adding to its rich history, Salem has go a center for thousands of practitioners of the Wiccan faith, which has no relation to the satanic imaginations of 1692. It's difficult to know where the night history fades and the spiritual or lighthearted steps in.

Though tourists oft ask where the hangings took identify, they were directed to the incorrect place for years. Taxi drivers and, famously, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's limousine commuter, would take them to the top of the place named Gallows Colina because for years townspeople idea that was the hanging site. Only concluding year did a group of historians, including Baker, verify that the hangings took place below Gallows Hill, on Proctor'due south Ledge, underscoring the before decision of historian Sidney Perley, who identified the ledge in the early 1900s.

Location of the memorial, pre-construction — Location of the memorial, pre-structure in December 2016 Martha Lyon

The new memorial, the kickoff of its kind to exist built at the execution site, was funded past a customs grant and donations from some of the descendants of Salem'south "witches." (Many descendants vest to a group called the Associated Daughters of Early American Witches.) It incorporates a granite wall and memorial stones with the 19 killed innocents' names set in a semicircle around a unmarried oak tree, a ascendant tree in the colonial mural (the hangings to a higher place were probably from an oak). In 1992, the Salem Honour Foundation erected the Salem Witch Trials Memorial adjacent to the Old Burial Ground, a cemetery in boondocks where one of the judges and some other notables are interred. Visitors leave notes and flowers on commemorative benches, "and I think some of them must recollect it is just a park," Bakery, the historian, says.

Mayor Driscoll said in a release that the new memorial site "presents an opportunity for us to come up together every bit a community, recognize the injustice and tragedy perpetrated against those innocents in 1692, and recommit ourselves to the values of inclusivity and justice."

Baker believes that the memorial could turn Americans toward greater understanding of what a witch chase truly means in today'south world full of fear of terrorism. "Americans today gaze back at the people of 1692 as a foolish, superstitious, and intolerant lot," Baker wrote inA Storm of Witchcraft."Yet that is to dismiss the figure in the mirror."

Only non everyone feels unbridled relief at this new awareness. Neighbors of Proctor'due south Ledge didn't know they lived near the verbal site of the hangings until last winter, when the city held public hearings to talk over the memorial site. They understood that the site (owned past the city since 1936) "would never be built on because the city owns it," says O'Connor. "We were a fiddling bummed considering they cut down all our trees." And the Halloween reveling "can be a little crazy," she says. "My neighbor last year was working at habitation and people started having a loud séance in her back yard."

Centuries ago, the site of the hangings had been out of the way, if not quiet. The one time marshy area lay on the outskirts of boondocks and could be seen from a distance, says Marilynne Roach, a Watertown, Massachusetts, researcher and author of the bookSix Women of Salem.In 1692, she says, the ledge disregarded the North River, which at the fourth dimension made an L-shaped curve heading from the town of Peabody and toward the Atlantic Ocean. By the 19th century, the neighborhood surrounded tanneries (known every bit "blab hill") and other manufacture. Today, i tin drive from at that place to the Salem town eye in almost five minutes.

The choice of that particular spot for the hangings likely served a strategic purpose 325 years ago that sounds pretty ghoulish today: It was public plenty then people could watch the executions, Roach says, "but you don't want information technology in someone's backyard. It is a flake out of the way and it is public land. I become the impression that everybody in boondocks who could get away from piece of work would come out and watch these." Roach credits documented accounts of nearby residents who one time stood near the ledge as providing the historic proof that this was the identify.

Now, the site will once again concenter the public—not gawkers this fourth dimension, but visitors commemorating the witch trials' innocent victims.

Robin Boil, whose backyard abuts the hanging site, said a neighbor told her as she moved in 21 years ago, "You know, yous're living on the site where they threw the witches' bodies after they hung them." She added, "And I'm like, 'Ha ha ha.'"

Eddy said that different some of her neighbors, "I recollect it's pretty cool. I think it's amazing. To me, the memorial is…like a hallowed ground. Information technology represents kind of where the human race was at a certain indicate in history. It makes me think about that and how we never want to go that fashion once more. We need to practice tolerance."

The mayor will stand respectfully equally she dedicates the memorial below Proctor's Ledge on the 325th anniversary of five of the hangings. And in a few months, Halloween will come up again to Salem. "That's fun," Roach says, "merely mixing upward strolling zombies with the memorial in the eye of boondocks and the burying ground, information technology confuses the public and it leads to crowds that can impairment the existent thing. And [it'due south] a pain in the cervix for people who live in Salem. I kind of avoid Salem in Oct for the most function."