There is something almost comical about planning a trip to Salem, Massachusetts, only for the journey there to immediately descend into chaos.

Almost.

I was traveling with both of my cats, which probably tells you everything you need to know about the level of difficulty I voluntarily added to this trip. Normally, traveling with them is manageable, but Dila needs daily medication, and I didn’t want to leave her behind. Then I felt guilty about leaving the other cat behind.

So naturally, I brought both.

Because apparently I like to make things harder for myself.

Then, on the day we flew, air traffic control problems hit the Northeast. A primary communications circuit at an FAA facility in Philadelphia failed, while a backup fiber-optic line had also been cut, disrupting flights into Philadelphia, Newark, and eventually other major airports in the region.

Our flight was rerouted to Charlotte.

And there we were.

Stranded in North Carolina.

With two cats.

Instead of arriving in Boston when I expected, we didn’t get there until around 2 a.m. the following day.

So, yes.

Salem and I reunited with a bang.

Sometimes the Itinerary Has to Die

I knew immediately that something had to give.

The problem was that I didn’t want to give up anything.

I had plans.

I wanted to see everything.

I wanted to go to Lizzie Borden’s house. I wanted to explore. I wanted Salem to give me all the spooky, historical, witchy, gothic things I had traveled across the country for.

Meanwhile, my body was basically like:

Girl. Go to sleep.

Eventually, I listened.

Going to the Lizzie Borden house had to come off the itinerary because getting there and experiencing it properly would eat up more than half a day. The chaos of our arrival had already stolen that time.

It sucked.

But alas.

We went on.

And I think that ended up becoming one of the lessons of this trip. Sometimes the experience you’re supposed to have isn’t necessarily the experience you meticulously planned.

Sometimes you have to leave room for the trip itself to tell you what it is going to be.

First Stop: Chai, Obviously

Our first real day began at Gulu-Gulu Cafe in Salem.

And wow.

I loved it.

Gulu-Gulu describes itself as a bohemian café with coffee, food, craft beer, art, and live music, which, honestly, makes perfect sense for Salem.

But what I am still thinking about is that chai with golden turmeric.

Spicy.

Warm.

Delicious.

The kind of drink that makes you take another sip immediately because you’re trying to figure out exactly what you’re tasting.

I would go back for that alone.

Then, because I had finally accepted that I was exhausted, I went back and took a nap before our night tour.

Best decision I could have made.

Because that tour gave me a lot to think about.

Salem Didn’t Have Witches

There is the Salem we know now: witches in storefront windows, witch-themed museums, tarot readings, spell shops, pointed hats, Halloween everywhere, and modern practitioners openly identifying with different spiritual traditions.

And then there is Salem in 1692.

Our tour guide made a statement that stayed with me:

There weren’t witches.

At least, there is no historical evidence that the people accused during the Salem witch trials were actually practicing witchcraft. The Salem Witch Museum notes that confessions were frequently made under enormous pressure and that there is no contemporary evidence demonstrating the accused were witches.

What Salem had was fear.

Religion.

Social pressure.

Illness.

Community conflict.

And people searching for explanations.

Beginning in early 1692, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams began exhibiting disturbing symptoms that neither prayer nor medicine seemed to resolve. Eventually, witchcraft became the explanation. Other people began reporting similar afflictions, names were given, accusations spread, and somewhere between 150 and 200 people would ultimately be jailed.

And because human beings have always been human beings, I found myself thinking about the young people at the center of it.

Teenagers Have Always Been Teenagers

One thing I kept coming back to during the tour was this idea that sometimes we look at historical people as though they were fundamentally different from us.

But teenagers didn’t suddenly become teenagers in the twentieth century.

Children have always pushed boundaries.

Adolescents have always wanted attention, connection, excitement, freedom, and ways to understand themselves.

The difference is that today we actually recognize adolescence as a developmental stage.

Imagine being a girl in a deeply restrictive Puritan community where so much of your behavior was governed by religious expectations.

Then imagine discovering something forbidden.

There is evidence that some of the girls engaged in fortune-telling. One account described a young girl admitting that the troubles began after she and others experimented with divination, possibly by dropping an egg white into a glass of water and interpreting the resulting shapes.

That is important because it is a little different from the popular story many of us have heard.

There is no reliable evidence that Tituba was leading the girls through some secret witchcraft ritual. That version of the story grew through later retellings and popular culture. Tituba was an enslaved woman in Reverend Samuel Parris’s household who became one of the first people accused, and the historical record suggests she was particularly vulnerable precisely because she had so little social power or protection.

Once accusations began, though, something much larger took over.

Fear creates momentum.

So does attention.

So does power.

And suddenly a community that believed it was defending itself against evil was harming its own people.

The Horror Wasn’t Witchcraft

That might be the part that interests me the most as a horror writer.

The supernatural isn’t necessarily the scariest part of Salem.

People are.

Systems are.

Fear is.

Certainty can be.

The willingness to believe that your suffering must have a human enemy can be.

Nineteen people were hanged during the trials. Giles Corey was pressed to death after refusing to enter a plea. Others died while imprisoned.

They weren’t executed because Salem was overrun with witches.

They died because people believed something strongly enough to build a system around it.

And that, to me, is much more frightening.

It is also why the irony our guide pointed out made me laugh.

Salem didn’t really have witches then.

But it sure does now.

And modern Salem has, in many ways, reclaimed the word.

Maybe That’s Why I Love Salem So Much

This was my second trip to Salem, and I already know I want to go back.

Actually, I want to make it a yearly thing.

Not because I think I can ever “finish” Salem.

That’s exactly the point.

I don’t want to.

I want to go back and choose different things every year. Different museums. Different tours. Different historical sites. Different cafés. Maybe finally make it to the Lizzie Borden house.

I also visited some of the locations connected to Hocus Pocus and went over to nearby Marblehead, where I wandered through a cemetery.

And y’all already know I love a cemetery.

Give me old tombstones and suddenly I have questions.

Who were you?

Who loved you?

Who mourned you?

Who kept saying your name after you were gone?

Who was left standing when you died?

I find myself reading the stones and imagining entire lives around the few words that remain.

Maybe that’s the writer in me.

Maybe it’s the part of me that writes so much about ghosts, ancestors, grief, memory, and the things people leave behind.

Probably both.

Salem Made Me Want to Write

And that’s ultimately what I will remember most about this trip.

Not the airport chaos.

Not being stranded in Charlotte.

Not dragging two cats across the country like some kind of traveling bruja familiar caravan.

Although I’m definitely going to remember that.

What I will remember is feeling inspired.

Something about Salem made my creative brain light up.

I wrote the dedication for The Forgotten Bruja while I was there.

And that means something to me.

Because this book is so deeply concerned with inheritance, memory, women, power, land, the dead, and what happens when people try to erase stories that refuse to stay buried.

How could I not feel something while walking around Salem?

The trip even planted another idea in my head:

a writing retreat in Salem for marginalized writers.

A place where writers could step away from everyday responsibilities for a few days and create somewhere saturated with history, contradiction, storytelling, and ghosts, literal or otherwise.

That idea is still forming.

But Salem does that to me.

It makes me think about what happened there.

It makes me think about the stories we’ve created around what happened there.

And then it makes me want to create stories of my own.

Maybe the Chaos Was Part of It

My Salem trip absolutely did not begin the way I planned.

My carefully imagined itinerary was wrecked before I ever reached Massachusetts.

I lost time.

I lost Lizzie Borden.

I lost sleep.

But I gained something I wasn’t necessarily expecting.

I came home creatively full.

Sometimes inspiration doesn’t wait for the perfect retreat, the perfectly organized itinerary, or eight glorious hours of sleep.

Sometimes it meets you after a flight diversion, two exhausted cats, a spicy turmeric chai, a cemetery, a ghost tour, and a town built around the complicated memory of people who died more than three hundred years ago.

And maybe that’s why I already know I’ll be back.

Salem, apparently, isn’t finished with me yet.