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American (Hi)storytelling: Report #1 from a Real Experience. Written by a Theorist of History after a Tourist Visit to Salem, Massachusetts.

Charter Street Cemetery on October 5th 2025, Salem. @Photo: Lisa Regazzoni.

October 5th, 2025. In Salem, Massachusetts, the temporal horizons seem to merge. In this small town near Boston, the past—specifically the year 1692—is present in a way I had not yet experienced. Well known under its canonized name: “The Salem Witchcraft Crises of 1692,” or “The Witch Trials of 1692”, this past is not simply relegated to a printed history book or quietly preserved as a natura morta in a museum. On the contrary, 1692 is “queerly” alive. To this day, the multivocal—even cacophonous—ensemble of inhabitants, tourists, vendors, street artists, and tour guides seems deeply connected to the victims of suspicions and trials that took place in the past. Finding words for this post that will convey the unique amalgamation of the past and the present I discovered on October 5th is truly not an easy task.

The first image that came to mind in my effort to describe this temporal entanglement was the time fold, where a page bends back upon itself and touches its other end, a point, or rather a space-time point: the year 1692. But this metaphor does not do justice to what I experienced in Salem. There is no time travel here; the past cannot be encountered or touched as it once was, and Salem Town does not align with Salem Village, then home to most of the protagonists in the trials—accusers and accused alike (Figure 1).1 And yet, the past here in Salem is far more embodied in the present. Although the present is driven by “forces” other than those imagined or believed to be real by the Puritan minds of New England at the end of the seventeenth century—namely, different cultural and religious beliefs, new political agendas, exacerbated capitalistic logics, and the overwhelming consumerist way of life—past and present appear to be seamlessly amalgamated.

Fig. 1: A map showing Salem Village in 1692, with its landmarks, farms and land grants, by Charles W. Upham, in Salem Witchcraft: With an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on Witchcraft and Kindred Spirits (1867), plate on p. XV. Salem Town is visible in the lower right-hand corner.

What is meant by the crisis of 1692? The events relevant to this story began in February 1692, when occurrences deemed inexplicable were increasingly attributed to witchcraft. Complaints of witchcraft by several individuals developed into legal proceedings that involved at least 144 people (most of them imprisoned) and resulted in 20 executions—15 women and five men.2 This series of episodes and their interpretation continues to obsess historians and storytellers and to mesmerize countless people both in and beyond the United States. Academic publications, guided tours, historical sites, museums, theatre shows, and interviews with descendants, as well as reenactments, video games, TV series, podcasts, and much more, constantly reinterpret the events.

It is not my intention here to analyse or compare these understandings (which are probably as numerous as grains of sand on a beach). Nor am I concerned with assuming a fundamental difference between the historical production of professional historians (Geschichtswissenschaft) and the output of actors outside academia (public history). I consider the division into these two major areas heuristically and theoretically flawed in the extreme.

The classic analytical distinctions do not suffice to describe the co-presence and imbrication of past and present. Among the four forms of remembrance listed by Edward L. Ayers, i.e., celebration, commemoration, memory, and history,3 none do justice to how the past is encountered in Salem.

This singular form of encounter could tentatively be called embodied legacy—a mode of living with the past without separation, which manifests itself, in my view, in varying degrees. The first form of embodiment I observed was the physical performance of “witchcraft,” through which individuals establish a direct line of descent from the witches themselves. This is the case with people who work in Salem witchcraft shops, call themselves “Salem witches” and offer psychic readings in secluded rooms or small cabins. The second variation concerns magicians who perform in live magic shows said to be haunted by spirits. The show “Hysteria,” for example, claims to be “inspired by supernatural lore and ghostly investigations” and “centers around Alice—a spirit whose presence is felt throughout the performance.”4 It is not important here to determine whether the psychics and magicians truly believe they themselves are (Salem) witches or are related to them in some way, or whether the audience believes them, and to what extent, if at all. Nor is it essential to decide how much of this is driven by commerce, with Salem merely serving as a marketing strategy, although that is certainly a significant aspect of the entire enterprise. Regardless of such judgements, the “capital” that Salem possesses—or simply sells in order to sell—is the experience, delusive or real, of being in the presence of the past. There is at least a third variant of the witch legacy embodiment. This specifically concerns Salem’s thriving LGBTQ+ community, which is also active in the cultural mediation of historical sites and museums. The Salem Witch Museum programme illustrates it well—although the very concept of a “museum” in this case would merit a separate discussion. The museum itself consists of two main exhibits. The first is choreographed as a theatre show, where the history of the trials is presented through dioramas showing three-dimensional models of the trial scenes, accompanied by an offstage narration of the events (Figures 2-3).

The second exhibit, the educational display, although it does contain a few objects and a timeline of the main events, is essentially a guided talk in which the witch hunt is interpreted as the persecution of “deviants”—to use seventeenth-century theological terminology—of those who were “different,” or more simply, of uncomfortable figures now elevated to the role of scapegoats. The museum guide concluded by stating that the pattern of behaviour that caused the witch hunts survived the trials and remains alive today. The same message appears on the official museum website:

The Salem Witch Museum’s mission is to be the voice of the innocent victims of the witch-hunt of 1692, while also bringing awareness to the root causes of witch-hunts and how they continue to impact our society today. In our second exhibit, ‘Witches: Evolving Perceptions,’ we present a formula that can be used to describe the pattern of behavior responsible for sparking witch-hunts, with examples from 1692 through the twentieth century. This formula is ‘fear + a trigger = a scapegoat.’5

On the concluding wall of the second exhibit, the variables of the formula become more concrete, with each variable assigned a true historical name from “God/Devil + Dr. Griggs6 = 150 accused” to “Infection + AIDS = Gay Community,” spanning the witch hunts that followed Pearl Harbour and McCarthyism (Figure 4).

Fig. 4: The concluding wall of the second exhibit featuring the “Formula.” Salem Witch Museum, Salem. @Photo: Lisa Regazzoni.

Since 2017, the museum has invited visitors “to fill out this formula with examples they believe fit this pattern, and to submit these suggestions to our museum,” which have since been published on its website.7 As of September 2025, under the variable “Trigger,” the name Donald Trump appears most frequently and in various forms (“MAGA/Trump,” “Trump elected,” “Hate and Donald Trump,” “Trump lies,” “Trump Admin/MAGA,” etc.). Correspondingly, “immigrants” are the most frequently mentioned scapegoats. That said, LGBTQ+ community members continue to be prominently indicated as victims of a modern “witch hunt.” 

In 2017, Salem, similar to several other towns in Massachusetts, became a “sanctuary city”, a specific municipal status affirming that all residents, regardless of their immigration status, are entitled to city services and protections.8 In April 2025, a month later than Boston City Council, Salem City Council likewise adopted a resolution declaring the city a “sanctuary city” for transgender and nonbinary individuals. The proclamation emphasizes that this designation is crucial in light of the federal government’s ongoing actions, which, according to the council, have fostered “discrimination towards transgender persons by state and local governments, schools, hospitals, businesses, other public and private institutions.”9

From its status as lieu of persecution, Salem thus became more than a lieu de mémoire, having transformed itself into a refuge for persecuted communities and individuals. Some of these communities, as mirrored by the guides I encountered at Charter Street Cemetery and the Salem Witch Museum, embody the legacy of past/present witch hunts. In this temporal imbrication, the past becomes politics, ethics, compassion. It is a past physically embodied and existentially embraced—queerly alive, a “force” that, whether seen as occult by some or simply unseen by others, ultimately moves.

Glosses

One historico-theoretical question emerged and haunted me while I was writing about my experience in Salem—one that demands attention: how should an experience of this kind be assessed in light of the scholarly discourse on Hauntology inaugurated by Jacques Derrida10 and developed by scholars gathered under the concept of the spectral turn11 and theorists of history such as Ethan Kleinberg12 and Margrit Pernau,13 who have also contributed to this blog?

Hauntology is, in fact, a proposal to deconstruct the way we think about the relationship between past and present, inspired by the mode of (non-)existence of the ghost.

Are we simply witnessing a case of conceptual homonymy, in which the same notions—“haunting past,” “ghosts,” and “revenants”—are interpreted (and lived!) in entirely different ways? If the “hauntologists” were to visit Salem, would they dismiss this peculiar entanglement with the past merely as a commercial strategy and thus “rationalize” it? Would they be disturbed by the historical positivism and factual history that is also—but not only—told and sold there? Or would they encounter Salem with a certain sympathy for its various degrees and modes of entanglement with the past? Be that as it may, the hypothesis that Salem is nothing more than a case of discursive homonymy or a profit-driven enterprise fails to do it justice. Salem is a place where you can genuinely sense the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous and the embodied past; where the past is imbricated with the present in a way that the traditional conceptual categories of remembrance mentioned earlier—celebration, commemoration, memory, and history—cannot fully capture.


Lisa Regazzoni is a professor of Theory of History and Director of the Center for Theories in Historical Research at the University of Bielefeld. Her research focuses on the theory and epistemology of history, the materiality of history and modes of representation of the past. Her most recent publications: Geschichtsdinge. Gallische Vergangenheit und französische Geschichtsforschung im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (2020, engl.: The Episteme of the Gallic Past. French Historical Research in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, 2025), Im Zwischenraum der Dinge. Eine Annäherung an die Figurensammlung Reinhart Kosellecks (2023); “The Uncertain Stuff of History: Outline of a Theory of Intentionality – Thing by Thing.” History and Theory (23/2024). She is a co-founder and co-editor of the blog Theory of History at Work.


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  1. For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that Salem Village, the place mentioned in the sources, was a rural area bordering Salem town that only became the independent town of Danvers, Massachusetts in 1752. []
  2. I refer to Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare. The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Vintage Books, 2003, for essential historical information. []
  3. Edward L. Ayers, “The Reckless Assault on Remembrance,” The Atlantic (September 2025), 18–19, here 18. In this article, Ayers refers to the four “distinct but intertwined” ways in which Americans will experience the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026 in particular, but also their national history in general. []
  4. Quoted from the show’s website: URL: https://www.thesalemmagicshow.com (12.10.2025). []
  5. See the Salem Witch Museum website at this URL: https://salemwitchmuseum.com/witch-hunt/ (12.10.2025). []
  6. According to most historians, Dr. William Griggs diagnosed the first two cases of fits as “under an Evil Hand.” See Norton, In the Devil’s Snare, 19. []
  7. See suggestions at the Salem Witch Museum website: URL: https://salemwitchmuseum.com/witch-hunt/ (12.10.2025). []
  8. So-called “sanctuary cities” are, in origin, municipalities that refused to cooperate with the federal government in enforcing immigration laws. More recently, the concept has been extended—most notably in 2025—to include protections for other vulnerable communities, such as transgender and nonbinary individuals. On the origins of the sanctuary movement in the United States, see Naomi A. Paik, “Abolitionist futures and the US sanctuary movement,” Race & Class 59, no. 2 (2017), 3-25. []
  9. See Boston Spirit, “Salem, MA City Council unanimously declares trans sanctuary city status,” April 14, 2025, URL: https://bostonspiritmagazine.com/2025/04/salem-ma-city-council-unanimously-declares-trans-sanctuary-city-status/ (12.10.2025). []
  10. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx. L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993. []
  11. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (ed.), The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. I am grateful to Marcus Wystub for bringing this volume to my attention. []
  12. Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting History. For a Deconstructive Approach to the Past. Standford, California: Standford University Press, 2017; and Ethan Kleinberg, “GhostConceptKoselleck,” Geschichtstheorie am Werk (27.06.2023), DOI: https://doi.org/10.58079/pcz6. []
  13. Margrit Pernau, “Stones and Jinns. Time between Layers of Sedimentation and Hauntology,” Geschichtstheorie am Werk (24.01.2023), DOI: https://doi.org/10.58079/pcy9. []

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Lisa Regazzoni (October 21, 2025). American (Hi)storytelling: Report #1 from a Real Experience. Written by a Theorist of History after a Tourist Visit to Salem, Massachusetts. Geschichtstheorie am Werk. Retrieved January 22, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/1502q


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