Monday, October 24, 2011

Halloween Sight-Seeing - Salem, MA

This historic fright site gets extremely crowded around Halloween, because of its reputation as the site of the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. It is currently home to the Salem Witch Museum, The New England Pirate Museum, Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables and countless other museums and tourist sites that capitalize on Salem's haunted history. The Haunted Happenings website offers detailed information on Salem's attractions, so in lieu of reinventing the wheel, I will suggest that if you must go during October, you avoid Halloween and the weekends surrounding it, take public transportation and skip the wax museum, which is cheesy at best.

If you (or your out-of-town guests) insist on visiting Salem during October, your best bet is the Peabody Essex Museum, which is a beautiful art museum featuring the incredible 200-year-old home of a Chinese merchant, relocated to the museum. Like everything else, it is probably mobbed during the Halloween season, but it should be a relative oasis of calm in a sea of costumed teens.

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