Samantha goes on to do something no mere mortal could, venturing back to the 17th century. Accused of witchcraft in old Salem, she winds up manacled, on trial for her life. She admits to the charge. But she announces to the courtroom that she will also prove that no 17th-century suspect was a witch. (She seems to forget her ill-fated ancestor.) “How can you imprison someone who can vanish before your very eyes?” she demands. Firmly she sets our Puritan forebears straight: “The people that you persecuted were guiltless. They were mortals, just like yourselves. You are the guilty,” she informs the old Salemites, before she vanishes, at long last clearing the air. Not for the first time, it fell to a fiction to restore the history.

In Samantha’s wake, Salem recast its inglorious past, or at least some version of it. Other enchantresses followed: A community of Wiccans established themselves in Salem, soon pulsing with New Age energy. A witch museum opened in a former church. A medium turned up on the police force. The restored home of a 1692 judge recast itself as the Witch House. It neither belonged to an accused witch nor stood where it had in the 17th century, but no matter; Frankenstein wasn’t the monster, either.

Across the board, the nomenclature fails us. By a “haunted house” a Puritan meant one infested by diabolical agents, not by zombies and ghouls. A witch as a 17th-century New Englander conceived her (or him) was generally a foot-stamper or troublemaker, though in 1692 a witch could also be someone who doubted the existence of witchcraft. In league with Satan, she worked her magic with diabolical cats, dogs or toads. She had as little to do with perky Samantha as with a Wiccan or Professor McGonagall. Since time immemorial we have conflated two very different brands of sorcery: There was the ugly old woman in league with the devil. And then there was the beautiful young woman, noted Ambrose Bierce, “in wickedness a league beyond.”

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By the time Salem reconnected with its past, Halloween had found its commercial footing; the city transmuted its secret shame into its saving grace. In 1982 it introduced “Haunted Happenings,” later extending the holiday into a four-week festival. “Salem owns Halloween like the North Pole owns Christmas,” The Boston Globe declared, the difference being that no one takes his tourist dollars to the Arctic in December. In fact Halloween is to some extent year-round in Salem, where you might well bump into a goblin in a sandwich shop in July.