Salem — Witch Trials & Maritime City
Old Burying Point
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
The Old Burying Point, also known as Charter Street Cemetery, contains graves of prominent early Salem residents, including figures connected to the witchcraft crisis.
Cemeteries encourage a false sense of completeness. The people with durable stone monuments were not necessarily the community members whose lives were most historically important, and the poorest residents are often least visible in the material record.
The cemetery also sits beside the modern trials memorial, placing two types of memory together: seventeenth- and eighteenth-century burial practice, and a twentieth-century effort to confront judicial persecution.
None of the executed witch-trial victims received dignified public burials here immediately after execution. Their bodies were treated as criminals’ remains. Family traditions later developed about secret recovery and burial, but documentation is incomplete and should be labeled as tradition where repeated.
Salem’s commercial ghost tours often turn cemeteries into supernatural stages. There is nothing wrong with folklore when it is advertised as folklore. Problems begin when a dramatic story is presented as archival fact simply because it sells well after dark.
The stones here provide enough genuine strangeness: changing death imagery, Puritan beliefs, fragile inscriptions and the slow transformation of a working burying ground into a historic attraction.