Salem

Salem
Location	Massachusetts, United States
Type	Township

Salem is a real-world town in Essex County, Massachusetts, infamous for its connection to the witchcraft hysteria of 1692. It is often cited in Cthulhu Mythos fiction; while Salem's historical "witches" were innocent victims of false accusations, those in Lovecraftian fiction tend to be genuine practitioners of cosmic evil. In her introduction to Tales of H. P. Lovecraft, Joyce Carol Oates wrote, "Lovecraft seems to have taken for granted that Salem 'witches' existed, not considering if perhaps they were simply victims of others’ malevolent misuse of power."

Salem, now a suburb of Boston, was founded in 1626. It was actually two communities at the time of the witch trials: Salem Town, the coastal settlement that's known as Salem today, and Salem Village, an inland farming village that is now called Danvers. Many of the accusers in the witch hunt were from the village, while some of the accused were from the town; some suggest that economic and political tensions between the village and the wealthier, more powerful town contributed to the hysteria.

Salem is often cited as a model for H. P. Lovecraft's Arkham. "My mental picture of Arkham is of a town something like Salem in atmosphere & style of houses, but more hilly...& with a college (which Salem hasn't)," Lovecraft wrote to F. Lee Baldwin. "The street layout is nothing like Salem's," he added.

In Lovecraft's Fiction

Attempting to explain what was distinct about American weird fiction in Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft concluded that the United States was an environment "in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare." The town features more of a background element than as the setting for narrative in Lovecraft's fiction.

In "The Dreams in the Witch-House," the villainous Keziah Mason is said to have fled from Salem Gaol in 1692, a feat "one was ever able to explain." Her jailer was driven insane, babbling of "a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell," and Cotton Mather was baffled by "the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid."

Lovecraft envisioned a considerable exodus from Salem in 1692: Randolph Carter's ancestor Edmund Carter fled from Salem to Arkham at that time, according to "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," as did "two or three armigerous families" who became the "old gentry" of Dunwich (in "The Dunwich Horror"). An ancestor of Richard Upton Pickman was not so lucky, said in "Pickman's Model" to have been hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692. (Perhaps this has something to do with Lovecraft's observation in "The History of the Necronomicon" that no copy of the Necronomicon's Greek edition "has been reported since the burning of a certain Salem man’s library in 1692"--though in the same text, he reports a rumor of "the preservation of a sixteenth-century Greek text in the Salem family of Pickman.")

In the revision tale "The Diary of Alonzo Typer," Typer relates that "Dirck van der Heyl’s wife was from Salem, a daughter of the unmentionable Abaddon Corey" (who turns out to be Typer's own ancestor). One of the best-known victims of the witch trials was Giles Corey, an elderly man who was crushed to death in an effort to force him to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which calls Salem "the glamorous old town of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs," relates that in March 1692, Joseph Curwen

fled from Salem to Providence—that universal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting—at the beginning of the great witchcraft panic; being in fear of accusation because of his solitary ways and queer chemical or alchemical experiments.

Charles Dexter Ward's ancestor had been

born in Salem-Village, now Danvers, seven miles from town, on the eighteenth of February (O.S.) 1662–3; and that he had run away to sea at the age of fifteen, not appearing again for nine years, when he returned with the speech, dress, and manners of a native Englishman and settled in Salem proper.

Curwen's necromantic associates were Simon Orne of Salem Town, and Edward Hutchinson, who lived "well out toward the woods" in Salem-Village; Hutchinson "disappeared about the time the witchcraft panic began, never to be heard from again," but Orne continued living in Salem until 1720, when his failure to age began to attract unwanted attention. Posing as his son Jedidiah, Orne returned to Salem from 1750 to 1771, when incriminating correspondence from him to Curwen was intercepted, leading to his permanent removal.

Other Mythos Writers

Other Mythos writers followed Lovecraft's lead in using Salem as a background element to give characters a link to supernatural doings in the past. In August Derleth's "The Peabody Heritage," an article in the Wilbraham Gazette notes:

There was a Peabody among those charged at Salem; indeed, it was from Salem that Jedediah Peabody removed when he came to build his home near Wilbraham.

In Derleth's "The Shadow in the Attic," the Arkham wizard Uriah Garrison "spent a good deal of money investigating the Salem trials," and had a library "filled with books on the subject." Derleth's tribute to Lovecraft, "The Lamp of Alhazred," describes one of Ward Phillips' visions:

He saw an ancient, gambrel-roofed town, with a dark river flowing through it, a town like to Salem, but more eldritch and uncanny, and he called the town Arkham, and the river Miskatonic.

Like Lovecraft and Derleth, Robert Bloch gave a character an ancestor who fell afoul of the witch trials. The narrator of "Notebook Found in a Deserted House," who loved to hear stories "about Salem and Arkham," records that "my own ancestor on my father’s side, Mehitabel Osborne...got hanged for a witch back in the Salem days."