We drove to Salem, MA, today. The House of the Seven Gables, as written about in Hawthorne’s book, is located in Salem, as is Hawthorne’s boyhood home. The houses are right by the water and right next door to each other because his boyhood home was bought and moved two blocks from a lot that is now a parking lot to the lot behind the House of the Seven Gables. It was interesting to see the history of the house because at one point a very rich sailor decided the gables were too intricate and not stylish enough so he had them removed. His daughter, after taking over the home upon his death, later told her cousin Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived a few blocks away, how the house had looked before her father changed it so drastically. To use the wood he had removed, the father built a barn out back.

Later, after the book was written describing the house with seven gables, the owner realized that in order to give tours and hopefully make money for the acclamation program she started for immigrants, she would have to rebuild the gables that had been removed. No one would want to visit the House of the Three Gables or the Four. The house was renovated with the same wood from the barn to appear how Hawthorne had described it. It remains in Salem now, as it does in the book, and is ranked as one of the top ten houses in the world.

Our second visit was the Salem Witch Museum. I suppose you can’t go to Salem and not see something about witches, but this was by far the silliest museum I’ve seen. There were life-size dioramas surrounding one room that were each spotlighted while the story narration was going on. There were screams and loud talking and attempts at being “accurate” in the scenery. The next part of the visit had a tour guide to inform us of the history of witches and Wicca and Paganism. This exhibit was to convince people to not be prejudiced against Wicca because “people of the Wicca religion are not green witches.” The museum had a very nice exhibit about medicinal botany as well as an outline with the development of Christianity compared with the fall of Paganism. Despite the good parts of the museum, the whole experience seemed to want to demonstrate the horror of the Salem Witch Trials and to discourage that type of behavior; at the same time, however, the entire town capitalizes on the same horrific history and makes incredible amounts of money off of it. I didn’t find it to be a great example of demonstrating just how awful prejudices can become, so I had problems appreciating the exhibits we saw.