“Puritans thought God was telling them something,” he says. In response, says Baker, people felt a spiritual decline. In a June symposium about the trials, Baker spoke about the volatile political and social climate in Salem in the 1690s.Īt the time, an interim colonial government was in charge and Sir William Phips, the new governor, was considered weak. The Salem witch trials were “the largest and most lethal witch hunt in American history,” wrote historian Emerson “Tad” Baker, a professor at Salem State University in his 2015 book A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience. Proctor’s Ledge is named for his grandson, who bought the land knowing its history. He had publicly condemned the witch trials and had punished his female servants for claiming to be possessed by witches’ spirits in the hysteria of the day. Later victims included wealthy landowner John Proctor, killed in August. On the same day in 1692, five women-Sarah Good, 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 now marks their names. The date coincides with the first of three mass executions there. Now, it will finally be commemorated when Salem mayor Kimberley Driscoll dedicates a memorial below Proctor’s Ledge on July 19. And for O’Connor, Benedict and much of Salem, that history has faded despite the town’s outsized reputation. A leather tannery and railroad operated nearby, and in recent years, houses surrounded it.

That’s 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 night, when the hangings were over, locals heard the sounds of grieving families who snuck over to gather up their dead and secretly bury them elsewhere.īut for much of history, the site sat quietly obscured by woods and buildings. If they’d been there in 1692, they would have known. So when people began to stop by and take pictures of the empty site last winter, they wondered why.

The scrubby lot lay tucked between houses on Pope Street, within sight of a large Walgreen’s-nothing much to look at.

Eight years ago, when they bought their house overlooking a wooded ledge in Salem, Massachusetts, Erin O’Connor and her husband, Darren Benedict, had no idea why that parcel stood empty.

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