Cultural depictions of the Salem witch trials


Cultural depictions of the Salem witch trials abound in art, literature and popular media in the United States, from the early 19th century to the present day. The literary and dramatic depictions are discussed in Marion Gibson's Witchcraft Myths in American Culture and see also Bernard Rosenthal's ''Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692''

In literature

Film

  • Maid of Salem : a film starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, with Bonita Granville, Gale Sondergaard, Louise Dresser, Beulah Bondi, Virginia Weidler, and Madame Sul-Te-Wan as Tituba, directed by Frank Lloyd
  • I Married a Witch : a film starring Veronica Lake and Fredric March, with Robert Benchley, Susan Hayward, Cecil Kellaway and Elizabeth Patterson, directed by René Clair; a witch burned in Salem centuries ago comes back to haunt descendants of Puritan who sent her to her death. Comedy-fantasy with special effects.
  • The Crucible : a Franco-East German film, originally titled Les Sorcières de Salem, starring Simone Signoret and Yves Montand and directed by Raymond Rouleau. Its screenplay was adapted by Jean-Paul Sartre from Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
  • Bell Book and Candle : a film starring James Stewart and Kim Novak; Novak plays a witch from old Salem who is still living in 1950s Greenwich Village.
  • Hocus Pocus, a Disney comedy film, starring Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy as three sisters who were hanged as witches in colonial Salem, and who return to life in twentieth century Salem to wreak comic havoc. Coincidentally, Parker would later discover, as documented in the NBC program Who Do You Think You Are?, that her 10th great-grandmother, Esther Elwell, was charged with witchcraft in November 1692, but was not tried.
  • The Crucible is a film adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1952 play The Crucible, from a screenplay written by Miller himself; starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder
  • Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost, loosely based on the Salem mythology, recounts a descendant of a witch, who attempts to revive her and destroy the town that condemned her.
  • Keeper of Souls, a horror film set in a fictional Southern town called Grove Hill, connects the demon to the Salem Witch Trials.
  • The Covenant, a horror film that takes places in Ipswich, Massachusetts, which ties the supernatural powers of the present-day characters to their colonial ancestors, who had been charged with witchcraft during the Salem witch trials.
  • Salem: Examine the Evidence is a documentary film about the trials shown daily the Visitor Center in Salem, Massachusetts. It was filmed entirely on-location with re-enactors and scholars for the National Park Service and the Essex National Heritage Area
  • Salem: The True 1692 is a 3D film about the trials.
  • A Haunting in Salem is a 3D horror film directed by Shane Van Dyke and starring Bill Oberst Jr., Courtney Abbiati and Jenna Stone.
  • The Lords of Salem, a horror film written and directed by Rob Zombie about a coven of 300-year-old witches who were secretly imprisoned and tortured during the Salem witch trials.
  • ParaNorman animated film takes place in a Massachusetts town that in 1712 held witch trials and convicted and executed an innocent girl as a witch.
  • The Autopsy of Jane Doe is a horror movie depicting an autopsy performed on a dead woman found in a bizarre crime scene. The coroners find increasingly strange clues and experience supernatural and unexplainable events in their attempt to find out the mysterious body's identity and cause of death. Towards the end of the film, the body was revealed to be that of a Salem witch.
  • Fear Street Trilogy, a horror movie trilogy that regularly references the trials of Salem, for example Sheriff Goode is an homage to one of the first victims of the Salem trials, Sarah Good.
  • Hocus Pocus 2, A horror sequel to Hocus Pocus, 2 teenage girls bring back the Sanderson sisters and the witches bring havoc back to Salem just like they did 29 years ago.

    Television and radio

  • And early episode of the CBS radio program You Are There dramatized key events of the Witch Trials.
  • The television series Bewitched includes six episodes in Season 7 that were filmed on location in Salem, with a plot that includes time travel to 1692.
  • Leonard Nimoy's television series In Search of... aired Season 5, Episode 109: "Salem Witches"
  • In episode four, "Agents of Satan", of the science-fiction TV show Voyagers!, the main characters, Bogg and Jeff, help save Abiah Folger, the mother of Benjamin Franklin, from being burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials.
  • A television mini-series Three Sovereigns for Sarah, starring Vanessa Redgrave, Kim Hunter and Will Lyman, first aired on PBS on May 27, 1985.
  • In The Simpsons animated television comedy series, a segment of the 1997 Halloween special episode "Treehouse of Horror VIII" is based on the Salem witch trials.
  • Episode 348 of Season 19 of the sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live contained a skit depicting the "Salem Bitch Trials" in which Abigail Wolcott, played by Shannen Doherty, is examined by Deputy Governor Danforth, played by Phil Hartman, on charges of "bitchcraft."
  • In Season 3, Episode 4 of The Scooby-Doo Show, the main cast of characters arrives in Salem to investigate a "witch" haunting the town.
  • In the television series Sabrina the Teenage Witch, in Season 1, Episode 23, "The Crucible," a class field trip goes to Salem to re-enact the trials.
  • In Histeria!, an animated television series for children, episode 36, "When America Was Young", included a People's Court-style sketch based upon the trials. View episode: http://video.aol.com/video/tv-histeria-when-america-was-young/1813972
  • The History Channel's In Search of History television series aired the episode "Salem Witch Trials".
  • In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Gingerbread", Buffy Summers, Willow Rosenberg and Amy Madison are sentenced to burn at the stake after the apparent sacrifice of two children in an occult ritual.
  • In Charmed, a television series, part of the fictional background is that Melinda Warren, an ancestor of the three fictional protagonists, was burned at the stake in the Salem witch trials. See Season 1, Episode 9, "The Witch Is Back" and Season 3, Episode 4, "All Halliwell's Eve"
  • PBS's television series Secrets of the Dead aired Season 2, Episode 1: "Witches' Curse", featuring Linnda R. Caporael
  • The History Channel aired a documentary, Witch Hunt.
  • Salem Witch Trials, a mini-series directed by Joseph Sargent and written by Maria Nation, starring Kirstie Alley, Henry Czerny, Gloria Reuben, Jay O. Sanders and Alan Bates, with appearances by Shirley MacLaine and Peter Ustinov, aired in the US on CBS in two parts, in the UK as four parts.
  • The Discovery Channel's Unsolved History series included Episode 23, "Salem Witch Trials".
  • Ghost Hunters, Season 3, Episode 17: "Salem Witch", October 24, 2007, explores the haunting of the Hawthorne Hotel by the spirit of Bridget Bishop, one of the people executed in 1692.
  • In The Vampire Diaries, Bonnie Bennett's ancestors were Salem witches, who fled Salem in 1692.
  • The BBC and the National Geographic Channel aired a documentary about Salem in 2011, hosted by novelist Katherine Howe, called Salem Witch Trial Conspiracy in Great Britain, and Salem: Unmasking the Devil; and in the US, with British and American narrators respectively.
  • In Bones season 5, episode 20: "The Witch in the Wardrobe" references to the occult and the Salem Witch Trials for the basis for the plot.
  • Aidan from Being Human on the Syfy channel has an encounter with a witch. Aidan: "Let me guess, Salem?" Ms. Gilchrist: "Andover. But Salem got all the press."
  • In the television series The Secret Circle, which aired on The CW between 2011 and 2012, the ancestors of the main characters and the witch families in Chance Harbor, are all descendants of six of the eighteen witch families who escaped from Salem in 1692.
  • The third season of the series American Horror Story: Coven primarily follows the antics of a coven of Salem descendants who reside in a boarding school, Miss Robichaux's Academy, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
  • Salem is an American historical drama television series created by Adam Simon and Brannon Braga; it aired on WGN America beginning April 20, 2014, as its first original-scripted series. Starring Janet Montgomery and Shane West, it was said to be based on the Salem witch trials in the 17th century, with a "twist": the witches were real and in charge of the trials.
  • In the 6th episode of season 9 of Criminal Minds the fictional BAU is hunting an unsub who is recreating the trials.
  • The season 2 episode "The Salem Witch Hunt" of the NBC series Timeless takes place on September 22, 1692, during the Salem Witch Trials. In the episode, Lucy, Rufus, and Garcia Flynn try to save Abiah Franklin, the future mother of Benjamin Franklin, from being hung in the trials after she is accused of Witchcraft.
  • The Salem Witch Trials were depicted in the Legends of Tomorrow episode "Witch Hunt."
  • T+E aired a 4-Part miniseries in October–November 2019 called Witches of Salem which serves as a dramatized historical documentary which shows what befell Salem in 1692 during the trials.
  • Motherland: Fort Salem is a TV series that takes place in an alternate reality some 300 years after the trials in which the witches made a deal with the US Government to allow them to live in return for helping them with their powers.
  • The eighth episode of the Disney+ miniseries WandaVision, titled "Previously On", is briefly set during the Salem witch trials of 1693, where the witch Agatha Harkness is accused by her fellow witches of practicing black magic and betraying her coven. She is nearly executed while held against a wooden post before retaliating and killing every member of her coven.

    Comic books

  • Issue No. 29 of Black Cat Mystery Comics, from June 1946, includes the cover story, "Black Cat Battles the Salem Witch."
  • "The Salem Terror" was a story published in Wanted Comics No. 13 in 1948. It was drawn by Maurice del Bourgo. The entire story has been scanned at .
  • Issue No. 18 in September 1962 of Unknown Worlds, from American Comics Group, contained an 11-page story called "Witch Hunter of Salem", depicted on the cover, in which the minister who was hunting witches in Salem turned out to be one. Zev Zimmer, C. C. Beck, Pete Costanza ; Cover by Ogden Whitney.
  • Marvel Team-Up in 1976, included a 4-part serialized storyline in which Spider-Man, Vision and the Scarlet Witch travel through time to Salem, 1692, to battle Dr. Doom —- who has enlisted the help of Cotton Mather – get entangled in the witchcraft accusations. Pages 11–16 in particular in issue No. 42, "Visions of Hate!," depict the historical episode.
  • In Marvel's Fantastic Four vol. 1 #185, published in August 1977, the titular super-hero team discovers a hidden town in Colorado called New Salem in which the inhabitants are witches and warlocks, descendants of those who survived the Salem Trials. The inhabitants include Agatha Harkness, Nicholas Scratch and the Salem's Seven.
  • Salem: Queen of Thorns is a 5-issue comic, the first issue published in 2006 and the rest in 2008 by Boom! The entire series was later compiled into a single volume: Salem: Queen of Thorns in February 2009.

    Music

  • The 1962 opera The Crucible with music by Robert Ward and a libretto adapted lightly from Miller's play.
  • The second album by the indie rock band Liars, They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, is a concept album about the trials.
  • Rob Zombie's album Educated Horses contains many references to the trials, mainly in the song "American Witch". His song, entitled "Lords of Salem", also was based on this.
  • Jello Biafra had a side-project entitled The Witch Trials, and his work with the Dead Kennedys made a few references to them.
  • Canadian progressive rock band Rush's song "Witch Hunt" is about how manipulators can use fear to "possess" the "ignorant" masses to their liking, much like the Salem townspeople during the Witch Hunts.
  • American punk-rock band AFI has a song "Malleus Maleficarum" on their album Art of Drowning; the title is based on a book of the same name.
  • American ska-punk band Big D and the Kids Table released an EP in 2005 titled Salem Girls, which contains the titular song that documents one of the trials.
  • Neal Peterson mentions Alice Parker in his song "I wind my clocks / OneSixNineTwo". Peterson is a descendant of Parker.
  • American death metal band Ishia have a song called "Witch Hunting in Salem".
  • American metalcore band Unearth wrote a song about Giles Corey named "Giles" for their album III: In the Eyes of Fire.
  • American black metal band Ceremonial Castings's 2008 album Salem 1692 is based on the events and two members of the band are direct descendants of Judge John Hathorne.
  • Abigail Williams, an American symphonic black metal band from Phoenix, AZ, take their name from one of the accusers in the trials.
  • "Hunting For Witches" by Bloc Party references the hysteria about witches in Salem and uses it as a metaphor for hysteria about immigration in contemporary Britain.
  • "Burn the Witch" by Queens of the Stone Age is about the Salem Witch Trials.
  • "The Dead Can't Testify" a song by Canadian rock group Billy Talent based on the Salem witch trials.
  • "Under a Killing Moon" a song by the rock band Thrice talks about Salem Witch Trials and the innocent people burned in them.
  • Swedish heavy metal band Wolf wrote a song called "Curse You, Salem", a song about the trials.
  • Metalcore band Motionless in White released a song titled "Abigail" on their album Creatures about Abigail Williams and the Salem Witch Trials.
  • The Clutch album Blast Tyrant contains the track " La Curandera" which is, as stated, notes from a witch trial, and how she exacted her revenge
  • The One-Eyed Doll concept album Witches is based on the trials.
  • Melodic metalcore band The Raven Age released a song titled "Salem's Fate" on their debut album Darkness Will Rise.
  • Texas rock Band Nothing More released the song "Salem", featured on their third studio album The Few Not Fleeting.
  • Connecticut musician Dan Barrett from Have a Nice Life released music under the pseudonym "Giles Corey", including an album of the same name.
  • Taylor Swift released a song "Mad Woman" about female rage, on her lockdown album Folklore referencing hunting witches. Swift also had a lyric on "I Did Something Bad" from her 2017 album Reputation also referencing hunting witches.
  • The Boston Crusaders Drum and Bugle Corps 2017 production, "Wicked Games", was based on the trials.
  • The Cincinnati-based doom metal band Lore released the song "Proctor's Ledge" on their self-titled debut, featuring lyrics reflecting the hanging and burning of accused witches.

    Video games

  • The 1997 game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has an enemy called Salem Witch that sometimes drops Shortcake, possibly a reference to Witch cake.
  • The 2013 game Murdered: Soul Suspect features the Salem Witch Trials as the motivation for a modern serial killer
  • The 2014 online multiplayer strategy game Town of Salem is a more comical version of the Salem Witch Trials, set primarily to the theme of the "Mafia" party game. Its 2023 sequel Town of Salem 2 retains similar gameplay to the original, while staying truer to the time period and setting of the Salem Witch Trials.
  • The 2015 video game Fallout 4, which depicts an alternate future of a post-apocalyptic Boston, contains a reimagined version of the town of Salem, including a "Salem Museum of Witchcraft".
  • Salem is one of "Epic of Remnant" chapter in Fate/Grand Order smartphone mobile game, briefly based on Salem, Massachusetts of the year 1692.
  • The 2020 game The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope takes place in the fictional town of Little Hope, which also had witch-burnings like Salem.
  • In the 2022 game Marvel's Midnight Suns, the titular team's home base, the abbey, is located in a hidden pocket dimension in Salem. The abbey's proprietor Caretaker and her sister Litlith are shown to have been present and hunted during the Salem witch trials by a man named Hiram Shaw.

    Internet

  • In the web series RWBY, the character Salem, who is both the narrator and one of the main villains, is named after the town.
  • "The Haunting of the Salem Witch Trials", released on May 26, 2017, is episode 8 of season 2 of BuzzFeed web series, BuzzFeed Unsolved: Supernatural, in which the trials and the theories that surround them are discussed, and the possible ghosts of Salem as a result of the trails are investigated.

    Collectibles

  • Daniel Low, a jeweler in Salem, Massachusetts, began selling souvenir sterling "Witch" spoons in 1890, using two different patterns, the first with three pins, the word "Salem", and a witch on a broom.

    19th-century illustrations depicting the episode

The story of Salem featured prominently in many publications in the 19th century about the 17th century colonial foundations of the United States. The illustrations continue to be reproduced widely in 20th and 21st century publications, in many cases without accurate attribution or reference to the century in which the illustrations were created. This gallery includes their citations and the names, where known, of the artists who created them.

19th- and 20th-century photographs of 17th-century buildings related to the episode

Although a few of the houses that belonged to the participants in the Salem witch trials are still standing, many of these buildings have been lost. This gallery includes photographs take in the 19th century and early 20th century that preserve the visual record of these homes.