visiting salem, ma

what if we made the worst thing we did our whole personality

Here’s a question: is Salem, Massachusetts, the town with the biggest amount of space dedicated to a historical claim basically everybody agrees is not true?¹ That is, if you go by the stores in Salem, you are in Witchville USA. Almost every store is witch themed (or something that might as well be witch themed, like “vampire themed”). So if you were dropped into Salem you might assume it is a town famed for its witches—instead of being famous for actually having no witches at all, which is closer to reality.

That is, there were no witches in Salem. That is why the witch trials were bad, presumably. Because they killed people who were innocent of being witches, because “witches” (in the sense intended)² do not exist. If you thought the witches were real it would be a different kind of situation.

Well I suppose you could believe that there were witches in Salem …