Autumn in New England 2022: Boston, Halloween and Salem (Part 2)

The joy of visiting the US in October means you get to partake in Halloween, and I for one am all for it. What’s not to like it about candies and chocolate, spooky-fun decorations and dressing up? 

This was my year to do everything Halloween: I wanted to go trick or treating of course, but also, I wanted to visit Salem, dress up and take pictures of our Halloween costumes, and carve a pumpkin. With a can-do attitude and an a great sister (and brother-in-law!) that indulged in all my whims for the holiday, we did all of these, and more. 

We had a couple of road trips planned, but for Halloween, the town of Salem is the it place to be. Salem's macabre past makes it a Halloween mecca; just the weekend before our visit in mid-October, out-of-town tourists outnumber the town's population three-to-one. 

Welcome Center: No Entry. Go away, peasants.

The history of this town is a tragic one. Salem in 1692 was gripped in the midst of a brewing supernatural hysteria. The niece and daughter of the village minister, the Reverend Samuel Parris, were behaving indecorously for good Puritan girls. They were shrieking, running around, going into convulsions and alternating between barking like a dog and purring like a cat. He sought the help of the village doctor who made a damning diagnosis: witchcraft. 

In that era, it was dangerous to be diagnosed with this affliction. One may have been an innocent martyr afflicted by a curse from a witch, or this could just as easily be a manifestation of their own guilty dealings with the Devil. The teenage girls pointed their fingers towards three unpopular elderly ladies in the village, claiming that they had seen their apparitions before their fits. It was just the testimonial the village minister needed to absolve his kin and to instead string up the unfortunate three.

When other girls started developing similar symptoms, the hunt for other witches continued. Notably, many of the accusers came from the Putnam family, and their accused had run afoul of them in some way before. Leaders of the witch hunt were ecstatic with the numbers of “witches” that they caught; the witches’ presence amongst their flock were doubtlessly proof that the Puritans was God’s chosen people, after all, why else would the Devil had seek to beguile their people so? The more witches they found, surely, the more righteousness their lifestyle was.

Several townspeople criticised the trials, but they too were cast as witches and were hanged in turn. There was no end to this horrific miscarriage of justice, until one fateful day, the governor's wife was accused of being a witch. That prompted the governor to finally step in to put to an end to the madness. But the damage was done. Over two hundred people had been imprisoned; twenty innocent people had been executed and at least five others had died under interrogation. The last words of several victims were recorded, with many protesting their innocence to their dying breath.

Dorothy Good was 4 years old when she was arrested for being a witch. Her younger sister, less than a year old, was similarly accused, imprisoned and subsequently died in jail. Two dogs were also convicted and killed. The wantonness of the convictions, the lacklustre allegations that counted as evidence and the brutality of the questionings and executions led to the infamy that is the Salem Witch’s Trials. Accusations of witchcraft may have common, but actually organising trials and executing people for witchcraft had already become “vanishingly rare” in all parts of the world in that era, until these events in Salem.

The dark stain of the town’s history captured the attention of folk culture. Over the years, Salem had leaned into its history and became associated with witches, the supernatural and all things Halloween. Cynics may call this the great American reinvention at work, but I think to Salem’s credit, its willingness to own up to its past is a solid mark in its favour. Their wrongdoings enter the public memory and conversation, and this way, much like the Holocaust, is a mistake that the country had acknowledged and vowed to never repeat. The small town displayed more grace than certain entire nations.

The House of Seven Gables is perhaps one of Salem’s most renowned attraction. The novel by the same name had been drafted by the great American nineteenth-century author Nathaniel Hawthorne while he was living in the exact mansion. The guided tour of the house was great, as the tour guide brought us around each room, explaining the history behind notable rooms and furniture, and brought us through a couple of secret passageways connecting the rooms together. 

We had a hearty carb-laden diner meal at Red's Sandwich, and pastries at Coffee Time Bake Shop, and left the town of Salem sated and happy. 

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Living with my sister's family in Boston, one particular adorable trait that my nieces and nephew have (from the perspective of someone who doesn't have to do their laundry), is how they love to dress up. Which they do, in different attires, several times a day. Everyday. From a young age, my nieces wear Disney princesses costumes around the house as everyday wear. Even my nephew has the vanity bug, and once I did a double-take because he was walking around in his frilly-cuffed pirate costume (complete with his pirate hat and two swords), when he was clearly in his Woody-From-Toy-Story costume just an hour before. It drove my sister nuts, because of all the extra laundry she had to do. My nephew had his perfect excuse every time: he changed clothes because his previous attire "was dirtied." But what can one do, when the kids are so cute? 

 

All that dressing up comes in handy for Halloween, when the kids had a lot of experience with dressing up, accessorising, and being able to strike a variety of clearly well-rehearsed poses on demand. We had a picnic in Boston Common one weekend afternoon, where the kids decided to test their Halloween costume ideas, and soon everybody had gotten in on the action. Amidst the serenity in the gardens, we found a spot for an impromptu photography. 

Same costume, but clearly much more practised than me :)

Matching cowboy and cowgirl attires

Parents with young children may ask: where the heck can one get the energy to look after four children, prep for a picnic and also do a photography session? Well, as someone who is comfortable navigating his way around a home kitchen, it's time for some real talk: forget cooking for a picnic. There's nothing that you can cook and box up for a picnic that wouldn't taste much better at home. It's much simpler to just stop by a sushi place along the way. Sushi is the ideal picnic food: a sushi platter can be shared, and you can eat a lot more variety of food compared to a burrito or burger), it's healthier, it can be eaten with your hands and is good at any temperature - warm, chilled or at room temperature. So we took it easy and just packed some drinks and snacks and fruits. And that leaves a lot more time and energy for more productive things for the picnic: walking around the park, playing frisbee and (for one particular rambunctious little boy) chasing squirrels. 

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It came as a surprise to me to learn that for all the American fanfare surrounding Halloween, it isn’t a public holiday. On the day itself, my nieces trotted off to school, leaving me to deal with this absolute unit of a pumpkin that we bought from Costco. We meant to carve it much earlier, though my procrastination tendencies meant that we only got around to it on the morning itself. Better late than never; I stuck a knife in my first jack-o-lantern and got to work. A scant couple of hours later, and ta-da!

The malls start celebrating Halloween early in the day, giving out candies to people who are not going to school (think young toddlers and their parents). In the evening, when the shops close up and school-going children return home, marks the start of the actual festival. Homework laid forgotten because of how packed the rest of the evening was. A quick change into our costumes, and we were ready to go. 

The general rule of thumb when trick-or-treating, is that if the lights are on in the house, they're expecting children to come up to the house for candies. And if a house is all decked out with flashing lights, fog machines, laser light display, dozens of moving mannequins (each section with its own music theme, like a Disneyland ride), and even a guy lying in wait in an army Ghillie suit? They'll be giving out full-sized candy bars. 

It truly was an over-the-top experience, and everything that I thought Halloween would be.