Witch City How a Massacre of the Innocent Became New England’s Biggest Attraction

In 1692, Salem hanged nineteen people and crushed a twentieth beneath stones. Three centuries later, it sells them as souvenirs.How does a town turn its worst year into its best business?Witch City follows Salem from the gallows of Gallows Hill to the broomsticks on its fire trucks, tracing the strange journey of a community that first buried its shame, then slowly rediscovered it, and finally learned to profit from it. Along the way, you will meet the minister who craved a war with the Devil, the girl whose apology came fourteen years too late, the novelist who carried his ancestor’s guilt into fiction, and the playwright who turned a Puritan village into a mirror for modern America.It is a story of memory and money, of shame turned to pride, and of what a place chooses to remember when the past is both its wound and its greatest asset.This is not another book about what happened in 1692. It is the story of what Salem did with it.