Maria and I just returned from a too-brief visit to Salem, Mass., which calls itself the Witch City, our visit had nothing to do with the witch trials – we came to see an exhibit on George O’Keefe’ and her personal style at the Peabody-Essex Museum – but we quickly found ourselves at the very moving and somewhat haunting Salem Witch Memorial crammed into a small piece of land between the town cemetery and one of scores of tacky witch junk shops in the city.

The town is a fascinating hodge-podge of Maritime History, gorgeous Federal buildings, top-notch seafood restaurans, a world-class museum, the ghost of the industrial/manufacture era, post-war urban renewal, poor working class neighborhoods, markedly diverse,  a virtually dead but historic harbor, all kinds of faux witch/horror junk, one surviving  building from the 1600’s,  and a belated homage to the Salem Witch Trials, which have recently brought hordes of tourists.

Salem is a very American City, if feels very young and very tolerant and appropriately diverse. To understand this somewhat chaotic but appealing place, you need to know that the Salem Witch trials, which were the result of a hysteria that took the lives of twenty innocent people, took place in and around 1692.

It was not Salem’s finest hour, to say the least, and for more than 300 years, the town, for most of this century a dying industrial relic of a city, did little to remind anyone of the trials. The victims were mostly forgotten, few buildings survived the period and the trials were largely forgotten beyond Salem.

But more than 50 years ago, a popular TV series called “Bewitched,”about a sweet witch with whose husband insisted she never use or show her powers, came to Salem to film an episode, and America being what it is, there was suddenly big money in them their cobblestone streets.

Salem quickly became the “Witch  City” and began to commercialize and capitalize on what seems the very least to have been a horrible and sorrowful tragedy. Many of the witches were hanged, some were pressed to death with huge rocks. All of them protested their innocents, and the trials are now widely acknowledged by historians to have been a farce, and a hysteria.

Many in the women’s movement seized upon the trials as a particularly powerful symbol of the persecution of women, and many younger women have embraced it as an outrage and a  cautionary tale of indifference to injustice and hysteria.

For a time, there was only one “Witch Shoppe” in Salem, owned by the city’s most famous witch, Laurie Cabot. She was one of the first to grasp the marketing power of witches.

For me, the witch business trivializes and overwhelms what really happened at the trials, and few people I spoke with or listen to seemed to know much about the trials, other than they were somehow not fair or dealt with witches. I suppose that’s something.

If you read the pleas and statements of those killed, it is truly chilling, not something to commemorate with Dracula teeth for $19.95.

After Bewitched came, Salem’s merchants immediately began making big dollar from the new awareness of the trials, there are now all kinds of tacky souvenir/horror/psychic shops selling all kinds of junk that has absolutely nothing to do with the witches.

The town, which ignored the trials for centuries, was very quick to commercial the killings, a capitalist kind of vampirism, I think. But the witch trials did become a feminist symbol to many young women, it remains a symbol today. I saw many young women leaving necklaces and pins and wreaths on the memorial benches.

in1992, the town got around to dedicating this tasteful and surprisingly powerful memorial to those men and woman hanged during the trials. Elie Wiesel came to Salem to dedicate the memorial,  and for a brief moment, the fruitless pleas for mercy from the murdered men and women of Salem were heard.

The memorial, built nearly four hundred years after the trials themselves, seems an afterthought. The city intrudes on every side on the tiny space, on every view, trucks and cars and busses rumbles and roar all around it. A ‘Witch Hysteria Night Tour” is advertised on a sign not 20 feet from the memorial stones.

Since there is only one house left in Salem from those days, it seems the memorial is cheated of its rightful place, built too late to have the space and dignity it deserves.

In America, there is nothing we don’t try to profit from, and if nobody heard these people when they claimed their innocence, they sure are hearing them now, most in the form of tourists buying witchy trinkets.

The message of the trials – I see immigrants today as our new witches, we always seem to need some – hardly comes through at all amidst all of the blood and ghost and candles and potions and jewelry and horror and psychic garbage on sale.

To be fair, there is a witch trial re-enactment museum and a trial history museum – both were closed for the season this weekend. But for those on trial, the real awareness of their story seemed to come too late, the city has moved on, making room for the tourists but not pausing too long on the history.

If one ever needs a history lesson in the persecution of women who dare to be themselves, or in the dangers of unchecked, religious or political power, there it is. I suppose that makes it a very timely tale.

For all that, I liked Salem a lot. There is a real charm and energy around the city, whose people seem to have taken their own message – be tolerant, be diverse. . It seems a consciously open kind of place which celebrates and accommodates all kinds of people.

There are some wonderful old restored hotels, terrific restaurants, and all kinds of pre-and-post industrial architecture worth gawking at. The downtown, riding in part on the ghosts of the persecuted dead, seems to be vibrant and prosperous.  That is no small thing for a New England town abandoned by the maritime industry, and then again by the flight of all of its factories.

The “witches” get credit for that.

There is something heartbreaking about the Salem Witch Trials, the more you read about them, the more it cuts.

Maria burst into tears when she started reading the pleas of the condemned – “I will deny this until I die” –  and saw the tokens left by people on their memorial stones.  I was grateful that she did, because for just a few moments, we both felt the power and moral lessons of the trials. We both felt it, and you can walk around Salem for days and not really feel it.

The memorial does what it supposed to do, it  make you think about the men and women we still call “witches” and still exploit for money, not history.

The memorial is  the only place in Salem that I saw that does – and when you think about it, you get a chill running up and down your spine.