The ‘Spooky Season’, another mighty American cultural export, omits half the story of the New England town that defines its aesthetic.

Fake gravestones litter the neat gardens of suburban streets. Plastic skeletons hang from the branches of trees decked in the colours of the New England Fall. Outlines of stooped and hook-nosed women flying on brooms twist in the gentle breeze. This is American Halloween, in its aesthetic and cultural homeland.

The ubiquity of what is now ‘Spooky Season’ is felt across the United States and is invariably coming to Europe soon. Already in England children are invited to ‘pumpkin picking parties’ and to ‘Trick or Treat’. Back in the States itself Halloween is no longer a day to mark the nearness of the supernatural but a whole month, with its associated merchandise and branding. Nowhere is this more clear than Danvers, Massachusetts; formerly Salem Village. It was here, in early October, that I passed the suburban shrine to spookiness. Yet, Danvers is not just an American anywhere: it is the epicentre of modern Halloween.

The whole aesthetic of this new, global season is very particular  – from the pumpkins to the colour palettes to the actual ghost stories told; it is all specifically evocative of New England. Or even more specifically of the part of Massachusetts north of Boston. Evocative of Salem.

Much of what we now consider ‘spooky’, much of the received wisdom about witches in the West and, perhaps most importantly, how it has been so thoroughly packaged and sold, the aesthetics of creepiness are entirely derivative of Salem and its witch trials. Of course, there is nothing, per se, about a house made of white clapboard, with gothic windows and a peeling porch which is spooky and yet, the grammar of scariness across the West is clearly derived from  it. Danvers is filled with such houses today. Even without the decorations, spookiness is its vernacular.

Even more significant were the influences of Salem on the established understanding of what constituted ‘witches’ in the West. Many of the tropes associated with witchcraft in popular culture came from the cultural influence of Salem. The trials themselves were largely based on the evidence of children, the daughter and niece of the minister in the parish, Samuel Parriss. They had, it was claimed, been told tales by Tituba, Parriss’s slave – almost certainly of Native American heritage – who claimed to be a witch. Soon they began identifying neighbours and friends as witches, too, often convulsing in their presence with claims they were torturing them. Parriss – a man with grudges to settle within the community  – took them seriously and the trials began.

Salem was not alone in having witch trials in New England: the combination of a fearful, frontier society, the lack of an English-style centralised rule of law, and the specifics of Puritan beliefs about the presence of good and evil in the world made the region fertile ground. Salem’s, of 1692, however, is the one that has become the totemic witch trial. Part of this is due to its length, scope and number of victims, as well as Arthur Miller’s classic dramatic reconstruction, The Crucible. Whatever the reasoning, there is no denying that it continues to exert a folkloric power today. From the association with bodily control over children to Tituba’s own stooped appearance and the claim that she attended witches sabbaths by ‘flying on a sticke’; so many of the aspects which we would culturally associate with witchcraft come from the specific details of Salem.

We might reasonably identify the lore which emerged from Salem  – with its undertones of heady mix of multiple cultural influences as uniquely American. Arguably, the export of this imagined form of witchcraft was perhaps the first example of American cultural imperialism, predating the formation of the United States proper by almost a century.

Of course, Salem’s influence goes further than just either the ‘creepy’ in either aesthetic or folkloric terms. The timeliness of Miller’s The Crucible has made its events symbolic of hysteria throughout the Anglo-cultural sphere, just as its aesthetics have become informers of what that same cultural world considers to be scary.

The events at Salem have become a byword for societal breakdown, intolerance and cultural insecurity. The particular strand of Christianity which dominated the thought world of the protagonists undoubtedly must shoulder some of the blame for that. The heady Puritanism which led many of those who died at Salem to leave the Church of England was not known for its ability to compromise theologically. However it was in terms of Christianity that all the defences of those accused were couched. It was Christianity which inspired those who stood up for their neighbours against the wider opprobrium of the community and at great risk to themselves. For all the cosplay of modern ‘witchcraft’ enthusiasts about the victims being their forebears; those who died so horribly did so with Bible verses on their lips, not Satanic ones.

It was Christianity, too, albeit of a different kind, which inspired those who sought to put an end to the persecution and it was also Christianity that enabled the public forgiveness of those who had made up the stories some years later. That is not the tale told at Salem. It is almost as if the girls, with their repetition of Tituba’s myths, and Parris, with his fearful desire to believe the worst, have won the battle for the narrative of the place.

That is perhaps because the West is increasingly a place which wants only one half of Salem’s story. ‘Spooky Season’ is celebrated in the midst of a society that sees nothing compelling in Christianity’s message of sin and redemption, of good and evil, and of God and Man being interrelated. In such a context, we might delight in its spookiness at our peril. Indeed, a world which is still keen to evoke the darkness of Salem and one where the persecutory tendencies and internal cultural conflicts for which it became a byword are bubbling up again – but without any sense of redemptive light – might prove a very dangerous one indeed.