Witch History Museum

I'm a Salem resident and I am on a mission to tour all the local attractions.

I visited the Witch History Museum in November right after all the October frenzy.

What this is:

The Witch History Museum is located directly on Essex Street (the main pedestrian street in downtown Salem) and it is basically a guided tour through some life-size depictions of scenes from the Salem Witch Trials. Tours run every half hour (as in 10am, 10.30, 11 etc) and, as far as I know, tickets are only sold at the door before tours start. You can buy at the door also a combo ticket that includes other 2 museums (Witch Dungeon and The NE Pirate Museum).

First you'll sit in a small, colonial style auditorium, where you can read some facts about the trials on the wall while waiting for the tour to start. The auditorium can host maybe.. 60 people? Probably more. When I toured it in November we were only 3 people in the tour.

Your guide will give you a short introduction about the trials, and then walk you through the second part of the exhibition, downstairs, where you'll find - you can guess... - dioramas and mannequins. Yes, this is yet ANOTHER dioramas-and-mannequines Salem's attraction!

This attraction is a direct competitor of the Witch Museum, as they have almost the same name and they are similar in intents and purposes.

So, which one is better?

I'll start by saying that it took me a minute to decide if rating this attraction 3 or 4 stars. The display downstairs is, in all honesty, dusty and outdated and it makes, in my personal opinion, no more than a 3 stars display.

However, this attraction features a guided tour, so the quality of the experience is also based on the ability of your tour guide. Our guide was great, not as much as a "Salem-Witch-Trials connoisseur" 😊, but as a person able to tell a story to a group in an entertaining and fun way. So, I did enjoy the experience and I thought 3 stars were unfair, especially as it is better, in my opinion, than other attractions that I rated 3 stars (for example, the Wax Museum).

Was the information given a generalization of the actual facts? Yes, it understandably was, given the small amount of time available.

Were there mistakes in the information given? To the risk of sounding like an obnoxious know-it-all who tells others how to do their jobs... Yes, there were some mistakes in what was said during the presentation.

So, is it better of worse than the Witch Museum?

The Witch Museum (the other attraction) has a better structured presentation, a longer show, more information around witch trials in general, a bigger and fuller gift shop, and together with their website and their programs, a general feeling of being "more than just an attraction" - while the Witch History Museum is indeed just an attraction - so the Witch Museum is objectively better (in my opinion. This is my personal opinion, objective to me 😊 I am not affiliated with the Witch Museum or any of the Salem's attractions)

However, the Witch History Museum (the attraction of this review) could be offering you things that might be more valuable to you depending on what you are looking for. The Witch History Museum has the "human touch" of an actual person guiding you through the display (instead of recordings as at the Witch Museum), pictures are allowed, you don't have to buy tickets in advance to secure your spot, you'll probably have shorter waiting times here to get in, and it is a quicker, "easier" experience to do that doesn't require any planning ahead.

PROs

Informative, enjoyable. It can be interactive (if you have questions for your guide!). You can take pictures.

CONs

The display itself is old, and dark, and dusty. Because of the presence of a tour guide, the experience can go either way. And I can imagine that in a large crowd, it would not be easy to hear your guide talking.

Whichever you can/want to visit, I don't recommend to visit both as the second one you visit will probably feel just like a repetition of what you learned from the first one.