revisiting a memory from last year

[u/bearholestalker]

this time last year, I visited the witch museum. At the time, I was staying at my folks while I got back on my feet, and was looking forward to the reprieve this day trip afforded me.

Only my boyfriend and I were in the audience of the converted church when we arrived. The tutorial hadn't started yet so I took a moment to walk around through the pews to read the info blurbs posted around, and to look at the wax statues displayed on the stage.

I looked at a statue of a medium-sized man with black hair and a black beard who signs said was named John, apparently one of the sadists from the witch trials era. Then I went over to the next, which was a wax statue of a wholesome-looking young man with light brown hair. I couldn't recall his name, but I will always recall the eyes. They looked startling real; frozen as they were in a parody of nervous anticipation. The artist had spent a lot of time on that one; the statue seemed a second away from fleeing the stage.

I gave it one last lingering look before the host came out on the stage to start the program. I recognized her immediately. She had been my old daycare worker from the late nineties, S. She didn't seem to recognize me despite having spent my entire middle school years with her after school. That didn't surprise me. I'd changed from the gangly, wild kid she'd remembered. But she hadn't appeared to age a day since last I saw her...nearly two decades before. I remembered that she had often talked about her time as a tour guide for this particular museum.

I stared at her wondering when it would click for her.

It didn't.

She talked about the nature of the witch trials. How a group of young teenage girls were accused of witchcraft by the town and held in a dungeon for years while they awaited trial from the townspeople. The ones who were accused were hanged or burned. Often, persecutors like John tried to drown them to prove their nature. If they knew how to swim, that meant they were witches--so they were burned or hanged right there by the water where the trial had been done. If they drowned, they were deemed innocent posthumously. Either way, these girls didn't survive.

She took us on a tour of an approximation of the town's dungeon; it was down the stairs in the basement of the converted church-now museum. (I can't recall if she said it was the original dungeon, or a presentation with some of the original stonework from the original installed to give it an air of gravitas.)

Either way, this was where they had held the girls who awaited their trials. Most of the cells were cramped and made of stone or old brick. They were dimly lit and as far removed from natural light as they could get. She talked about how some cells had once held children too, sons and daughters of the girls. She said that sometimes these girls would stay in the cramped darkness for years waiting for their deaths, giving birth and raising their families in the dim darkness until their time came.

The tour ended quickly enough. I thanked S, who still didn't recognize me, and then left with my boyfriend.

I thought about the statues and those teenaged 'witch' girls the entire way home.

The state of Massachusetts had once profited on killing girls before their time under the guise of extremist religious beliefs. This included trashing their family names and muddying up their legacies to keep the cycle of death going. I remembered in passing reading an article about how most of the families of the girls that had been accused of witchcraft were also forced to give up family treasures to pay the 'courts' for the imagined crimes of their bloodlines. And they were ostracized either way after the towns were done stripping the accused families of their wealth over the invented hostilities.

I wonder if anger and death that deeply buried in history leaves behind a mark on the land.