Okay, so it is partly about witches. This museum tells the story of the famous trials via some dioramas and then has some other small exhibits on the topic.
There are lots of tours and other attractions based around the supernatural. The place seems to be a magnet for fans of that, but the trials are really a tragic case of mass hysteria. Next to the cemetery is a memorial to those who were hanged for witchcraft as well as the man who was crushed to death in an attempt to force a confession. Even today we see people throwing baseless accusations around that can have lasting effects on the victims.
We were staying in Boston and took the ferry to Salem. We got the train back. It seems that New England is mad on boats as there are thousands moored around the coast. There was everything from small sailboats to luxury yachts.
There are some very nice homes along the shore.
A house we wanted to visit was the House of 7 Gables that was immortalised in a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The woman who bought the house to preserve it actually added some features to match the story, including a hidden stairway. The site has several other early houses, some of which have been moved there.
Salem is a fair sized town that did very well from early trade in the colonies. Now it does well from tourists. There is an old sailing ship that we did not go on. We have done a few of those back in the UK.
The floating bar is a more recent feature.
There was a big crowd and some stalls by the harbour, so we went to check it out. It turned out to be a cardboard boat race. Various teams had built craft that had to go out and back to a buoy. The guy in the water was taking photos and we saw one on The Guardian site the next day. Some of the boats did pretty (surprisingly) well, but a few sank.
Not far from Boston is the small town of Concord. There is a house there where Louisa May Alcott lived and wrote Little Women. That has also been preserved to look as it did in her time.
Concord has a cemetery called Sleepy Hollow. It seems this is not the place of the headless horseman story as that is in New York state. It is still significant as it contains the graves of Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fans of these writers have left pens and pencils at their graves. The cemetery is pretty big and has a lot of other old graves.
This part of the USA is where much of its history was forged. Some of the landscape did remind me of 'old' England, but the houses have their own style. We went through the town of Bedford that is named after my hometown. There is also New Bedford on the coast, but we did not have time to go there.