SALEM — Lifelong resident Polly Jean still can remember when she first realized her son was a creative kid.
Barely in his teens, Eric Rodenhiser built his first haunted house in the basement of the family home in The Point neighborhood. This was shortly before Salem launched its annual Haunted Happenings festival in 1982.
Polly was impressed with Eric’s idea to get his blindfolded visitors to plunge their hands into a bowl of cold spaghetti. They were led to believe it was the innards of a murder victim.
Few Salem residents have plunged their hands as deep into the city’s all-things-Halloween reputation as Eric Rodenhiser. He’s the proprietor of some of the Witch City’s top tourist attractions, including Gallows Hill, a special effects-laden theatrical event, and The Lost Museum, an interactive underground spook show.
By now, the debate over Salem’s wholesale investment in its creepy economy is about as dead as that fake murder victim planted in Rodenhiser’s teenage basement. This year marks the 40th anniversary of Haunted Happenings, which continues to grow both in scope and duration. Fright-seeking tourists now crowd the city not just during the month of October — they’ve started coming as early as August.
There was a time not long ago when some residents wondered whether this historic city should stake its reputation so heavily on the ghoulish and the gruesome. A few holdouts remain.
“It’s nice to live here, like, 10 months out of the year,” says Cynthia Johnson, a medical content editor who went to Salem State and has raised a family here since 1999. But the headaches of so many visitors — the parking, the traffic jams, the packs of pedestrians, the costumed characters scaring her dog — make these few months a nightmare for her.
Johnson says she recently bought a new smartwatch that tracks her stress level. On a recent Saturday, while she was walking the dog, “It was so high, my watch was telling me I needed more rest,” she says with a laugh.
The walkable city she chose to live in is becoming more like Mardi Gras or Disneyland each year, she says: “People think it’s an amusement park, but this is a place where people have to function.”
Post-pandemic, Halloween tourism has been off the charts. Nearly 300,000 visitors jammed into Salem during the first nine days of October alone, according to City Councilor Ty Hapworth — prompting him to urge tourists not to come without a plan and reservations.
Donna Seger is a history professor at Salem State who fell in love with the city when she visited the Witch Museum as a young girl.
“It looked very enchanting to me then,” she says.
She settled in Salem in 1992, which happened to be the 300th anniversary of the witch trials that first linked the area with the supernatural. Today Seger — who blogs about the city at Streets of Salem – is dismayed about the booming commercialization.
“It distorts history, but I also think it distorts our economy,” she says. “It’s hard to buy anything practical downtown anymore.”
Salem tourism associated with the witch trials goes back at least as far as the late 1800s. In 1880, for instance, 30,000 visitors came to the city, as cited in Emerson Baker’s definitive book, “A Storm of Witchcraft.” A few years later, the locally headquartered Parker Brothers introduced a popular board game called Ye Witchcraft Game.
Still, residents banded together to oppose a proposal to build a monument to the victims of the witch trials. Intended to be completed by the bicentennial in 1892, the project was killed.
“The whole affair ought to be cast into oblivion as too horrible to contemplate,” opponents argued.
Polly Jean, who is in her 80s, says she learned almost nothing about the city’s history when she was growing up. Trick or treating was just a night to go out and smear a few windows with bars of soap.
“Nobody had candy,” she says. “Nobody had any money.”
Joe Cultrera can recall a time when he and his family could walk to Essex Street to shop in Almy’s or Webber’s department stores.
“You never needed a car if you lived here,” he says. “Now it’s pretty much nothing but tourist traps and tattoo parlors.”
Cultrera, a documentary filmmaker, raised some issues about the city’s changing economy in his 1996 film “Witch City,” which was inspired by the hoopla surrounding the 300th anniversary of the trials.
“It was basically a way for people to have a conversation,” he says. “That’s completely lacking at this point.” The brisk business during Haunted Happenings has preempted any discussion, he says, paraphrasing the proponents: “This is how we survive, so we should be thankful we have this business.”
To Cynthia Johnson, it’s ironic how many witch costumes and witch-themed attractions overwhelm the town, given the fact that there never were any actual witches here. That, after all, is the lesson of the witch trials.
Visitors “are much less interested in the persecution of these people,” she says, “than the scare factor.”
(Rodenhiser would agree. When he first began creating his attractions, he offered a one-man historical show called Legends of Salem. “That’s what Salem needs,” he thought. “I was dead wrong.”)
Johnson loves the city’s history.
“There’s so much to learn,” she says. “We have really good historical tours. But I don’t know that that’s why everyone comes here.”
If Salem is going to welcome visitors, she’d prefer they go away feeling fulfilled. What with the crowds, the lines, and the parking hassles, that’s not always the case. That’s one thing she’s afraid of.
James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.
