It was a dark part of American history, filled with fear and falsehoods. Nonetheless, our fascination with the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts is still going strong. Writer Kathy Witt recently visited and returned with guidance about what to see, do and eat, and where to stay to take it all in.

Save this article about an immersive experience of the Salem Witch Trials by saving this article to Pinterest. Photos by Kathy Witt. Graphic by RealFoodTraveler.com.

See what Salem, Massachusetts was like during 1692 Witch Trials

Enter the rustic kitchen at Daniels House and step through a portal into late 1600s Salem, known then as Salem Town. Ritual protection marks are etched into the wood of the heavy door—the double V for Blessed Virgin Mary and the Blessed B—to protect the house and those who lived within its walls from evil spirits.

Keeping evil spirits at bay . . . two ritual protection marks have been carved into the kitchen door at the Daniels House.

The fire in the massive open-hearth fireplace would have burned round the clock, licking at heavy cookpots and kettles. The house, built 350 years ago by a sea captain, sheltered its occupants from sun and rain, but it was sweltering in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. When night fell, the room was plunged into darkness, the only light source the flames of the candles burning down in their candlestands.

“If you want to know what it was like to live in Salem during the Witch Trials of 1692, this room is it,” said Vijay Joyce, whose background is in architectural history and historic preservation.

Vijay Joyce welcomes visitors for a tour of the Daniels House—Salem’s oldest bed and breakfast inn.

Joyce developed and conducts the tours and events that take place at Daniels House, including the new interactive “Inside the Daniels House” tour where visitors are treated to a full sensory experience: seeing the conditions in which the home’s former occupants worked, lived, played and prayed; hearing the stories of neighbor turning on neighbor; touching the China, sitting on the furniture, stepping into an abyss of darkness on the root cellar’s stacked granite stairs; smelling peppercorns—a highly prized seasoning proudly displayed on front parlor table; tasting strong and smoky Souchong black tea, a favorite brew among New England seamen.

Earth fireplaces, exposed beams, paneled walls—the Daniels House, a First Period property, predates the infamous Salem Witch Trials.

Play: Salem’s story is best enjoyed on tours like “Inside the Daniels House.” From candlelight, kid-friendly and trolley tours to movie sites, foodie and ghost tours, there is no shortage of ways to walk into Salem’s past—and no two experiences are alike.

On Witch City Walking Tours, see what is considered Salem’s most haunted building. It sits on the site of the jail, where Sheriff George Corwin once interrogated, tortured and carried out the death sentence for those accused of witchcraft.

Learn the story behind Salem’s most haunted house on a walking tour.

Stop by Witch House, former home of Witch Trial Judge Jonathan Corwin (the sheriff’s uncle), one of the few structures in Salem with direct ties to the trials. Hear the story of the tween and teenage girls who set in motion one of America’s darkest chapters, where 19 innocent people were hanged at the gallows and one (Giles Corey) was pressed to death.

“Twelve-year-old Ann Putnam accused 60 people herself,” said tour guide Jeremiah Hakundy.

On Spellbound Tours, founder, guide and professional paranormal investigator Dr. Vitka takes visitors through the streets at night to share the supernatural side of Salem—tales of vampirism and paranormal activity, of hauntings and horrors related to one of the cruelest of Witch Trial judges, John Hathorne, and a young girl who may have been buried alive. Pray you don’t see the specter of Giles Corey at the very site he was pressed to death.

“Legend says that when his ghost walks, tragedy follows close behind,” warned Vitka.

Stay: Salem’s newest hotel is the Hampton Inn Salem Boston, featuring a bright, modern feel and an ideal location within walking distance of all of Salem’s restaurants, shops and attractions. Among amenities are an indoor pool, fitness center and attached heated garage with valet parking. The third-floor breakfast area is clean and well-maintained and has individual booth seating, each with its own flatscreen television.

Besides presenting a number of outstanding tours—including “Terror Next Door,” which takes place through August 2023 and focuses specifically on the Salem Witch Trials—the Daniels House is also a bed and breakfast inn. In fact, it is America’s oldest bed and breakfast inn, offering four individually decorated guestrooms—each expressing a different facet of the house’s history. A Continental breakfast is served in the atmospheric settings of the antique-laden front parlor and the ancient kitchen, the oldest parts of the home.

Eat: Drop by Turner’s Seafood, for a crabcake appetizer and a Smoked Old Fashioned. The restaurant, famous for seafood entrées like Wild Atlantic Haddock Piccata, Hake Marsala Dinner, made with local Gloucester hake, a mild white fish, and a seafood medley featuring local haddock and sea scallops, is located in historic Lyceum Hall. This coveted piece of land is presumed to have once belonged to Bridget Bishop—until she was accused of being a witch.

Witch City’s Walking Tours’ Hakundy summed up the plight for those accused: “Half the village accused the other half—that is, the half who had land. A couple days after you were accused, all your property would be sold at auction, while you were sitting in jail awaiting trial.”

Hungry for more? Here’s the Turner’s Seafood baked Crab Cake recipe.

Other fun foodie stops: Lulu’s Bakery and Pantry, for chocolate croissants and lattes; Red Line Café, for ham and cheese crepes; and American Flatbread, spread out in a former Goodyear tire repair shop and offering candle pin bowling alley and monster flatbreads with flavor combos like maple fennel sausage, sundried tomatoes, mushrooms and caramelized onions topped with mozzarella and parmesan, garlic oil and herbs.

Pick up coffee and croissant at Lulu’s Bakery and Pantry.

Treat: Grab a table at artisanal chocolate shop, Kakawa Chocolate House, for a flight of chocolate elixirs and a tasting that is velvety-smooth exquisiteness. Drawing on chocolate’s long history, Kakawa’s chocolatiers recreate original Mesoamerican, European and Colonial chocolate elixir recipes: Tzul, a rich mix of dark chocolate and caramelized milk chocolate; French lavender, highly scented, exotic and semisweet; Zapoteca, complex, un-spiced, bittersweet—less and less sweet as the elixirs move toward 100 percent real chocolate.

Drinking the chocolate elixirs at Kakawa Chocolate House is a sweet highlight of any visit to Salem.

The elixirs are paired with house-made whipped cream, light, fluffy and delicious. All the historic elixirs as well as the artisan chocolates, ice cream, milkshakes and other sweet treats are handmade onsite, and exclusively in small batches.

Hungry for more? Here’s a recipe for Chocolate Elixir from Kakawa Chocolate House.

Read: Part of the fun of being in Salem is immersing yourself in its history through its many tours as well as museums, including the Salem Witch Museum, where illuminated dioramas draw visitors into Salem’s dark period, and the Witch Dungeon Museum, with its dramatic live performance of a witch trial adapted and created from historical transcripts from 1692.

The Salem Witch Museum is Salem’s most visited museum.

Equally enthralling are attractions like Court Orlok’s Nightmare Gallery, a wax museum of filmdom’s monsters—Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera, Halloween villain Michael Myers, Bette Midler’s Winifred Sanderson of Hocus Pocus, parts of which were filmed in Salem—and indie bookstores like Wicked Good Books.

Located on the Pedestrian Mall (Essex Street), this shop is fun to poke around in for books relating to the most notorious chapter in Salem’s history, like Marilynne K. Roach’s book, Six Women of Salem: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials. One of the women profiled is Bridget Bishop—one of the 19 people hanged for witchcraft and who supposedly owned the land on which Turner’s Seafood is located today.

“Especially with history, knowing something about what you hope to see and experience before you go makes the reality more understandable once you get there,” said Roach, currently working on Six Men of Salem. “In reading about these women, I hope readers will see the characters as real people rather than stereotypes or symbols, individual human personalities. I also hope the setting makes more sense to the readers, that the difficult circumstances of their times make better sense of their different reactions both wrong and right.”

No matter how the narrative unfolds, Salem bewitches with its blend of mystery and magic, myth and the macabre.

Plan: Stop by the new Visitor Information Center at 245 Derby Street in downtown Salem and visit Salem’s website, here, for more information.

-Story and photos by Kathy Witt

Hungry for more? Read Kathy’s article about the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.