Alaina Scapicchio, Ph.D. Candidate, University of South Florida
In 1992, a significant anniversary loomed large over the city of Salem, Massachusetts. Three hundred years prior, the infamous months-long witch trials had turned the lives of residents in Salem Village, Salem Town, and the surrounding areas upside down. The commemoration of those events in the late 20th century, for some Salemites, seemed no different.
While on fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I came across a tantalizing folder tucked in a massive collection of records from the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). This folder was simply titled “Salem Witches, 1992.” As a Ph.D. candidate working on a dissertation that examines commemoration and memory of witch trials in the US, I could imagine what the file might contain but thought it best to dampen my excitement until it was in my hands.
If you’ve worked in a reading room before, you’ll know that there is a certain level of decorum expected from researchers. So, I’m sure you can imagine the difficulty of stifling a shout of joy and the urge to jump up-and-down at my table upon opening the folder. Those emotions were brought on by the letterhead and the signature on the first page inside.


Laurie Cabot is a significant figure in Salem history for several reasons, primarily because she was a harbinger of a shift in the city’s population and economic landscape. Cabot moved to Salem in the late 1960s as a practicing Witch and in 1970 opened up The Witch Shoppe, the first occult store in the city. As a spiritual leader, Cabot attracted many Witches, Wiccans, and New Age religious practitioners to the area over the next few decades. Amidst the backdrop of a collapsing industrial economy, many of these new residents followed in Cabot’s footsteps and opened up metaphysical shops in Salem’s historic downtown–a tourist boon. Governor Michael Dukakis even named Cabot the city’s “Official Witch.”
While I was familiar with Cabot’s influence on the city, this was my first time encountering the organization Witches’ League for Public Awareness. Luckily, a brochure in the back of the folder provided their vision statement.

It quickly became clear from the contents of this folder that the Witches’ League was needed more than ever in 1992. Apparently, as the tercentenary anniversary of the witch trials descended upon the city, so too did numerous groups of Christian Fundamentalists to protest any recognition or celebration of Witchcraft. This ACLU file contains a letter from a concerned Salem resident who was surrounded by one of these groups while on a walk with her children and asked about her religious beliefs. In another letter from Cabot to the Civil Rights Division of the Attorney General’s office, she claimed that one specific Methodist organization had “targeted local businesses for coercive treatment aimed at their immediate closure, or to cause the removal of certain items from their business fare.” Letters from the aforementioned office and from the Mayor of Salem confirm Cabot’s claims to be true, as they informed her that they would be prepared to take “immediate action” against the perpetrators should they return.
However, it was not simply these rogue religious agents that the Witches’ League had a problem with. In fact, they often took greater issue with a more legitimate body. The Salem Witch Trials Tercentenary Committee was created by the city’s municipal government to develop educational and commemorative events for 1992 in remembrance of the 300th anniversary of the trials. They estimated that this milestone anniversary could attract nearly one million visitors to the ‘Witch City’ and the committee sought to provide tourists with opportunities to spend their money there all year long. All of these events were to culminate in the dedication of a memorial to the twenty victims killed during the panic.
Prior to discovering this folder, I had seen references in newspaper articles about local Witches in Salem who were unhappy with some of the language included in the Salem Witch Trials Memorial and who felt the city was purposefully leaving them out of events during the tercentennial year. These sentiments are made crystal clear by Cabot in a few of the letters she copied the ACLU in on. She even blamed the city outright for some of the incidents mentioned above, arguing “Because of the misuse of the term “Witch” and “Witchcraft” by this City, it’s [sic] agencies, and these out-of-state organizations, a substantial number of Salem’s citizenry, businesses, and tourists are being placed at risk.” Cabot had chastised the city just two months prior for their linking of Puritanical understandings of witchcraft with the Devil. She was not the only one either. In a printed copy of the “North Shore Sunday Feedback” included in the folder, another Salem Witch accused the committee of adopting “the Puritans’ superstitious and half-demented definition of Witchdom as its own…”
In 1992, Salem’s modern-day Witches were not going to let the delirium that had overtaken hundreds in 1692 repeat itself. They organized and wrote to their local government officials and the ACLU to ensure that their religious rights were protected. Since Witchcraft had been recognized by the federal government as a valid religion, officials had to respond to their statements of distress. The Salem Tercentenary Committee, however, did not. The Witches’ League may have been able to protect their practitioners, but they could not salvage their image in the eyes of many Salemites— a struggle that continues today.
Materials Referenced:
Emerson Baker, “Witch City?” in A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 256-286.
Alaina Scapicchio, ““Memories Rescued from the Mire of Oblivion”: The 1885 Rebecca Nurse Monument and Salem Witch Trials Commemoration,” USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations, 2022. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10354
Lynn Smith, “Official Witch is Haunting Dukakis– By Accident,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 8, 1988. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-08-08-me-97-story.html.
Mary B. W. Tabor, “‘The Witch City’ Dusts Off Its Past,” New York Times, Sept. 9, 1991.
Christopher White, “Salem as Religious Proving Ground,” in Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory, eds. Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 43-61.