Proctor Tomb and House, October 2021

On one of my many excursions to Salem, Massachusetts – my favorite place – I took a very long walk to see some history. After getting off the train on an early weekend morning (before the October festivities downtown truly began) I wanted to scope out a few sights that sounded interesting. One of those sights was the Proctor Tomb.

It is here that legend says John Proctor is buried. Proctor was tried, convicted and hanged during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, and became the main character in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The prospect of something concrete (where there are a few places like this in Salem) directly connected to the witch trials seemed worthy of checking out. So, I walked 6 miles total to check out the tomb, and the John Proctor House nearby. It was a sunny, cool morning, and it rained the night before. Everything was glistening and most houses were decorated for Halloween. It was one of the best walks/mornings of my life.

Sadly, the tomb was a bit... underwhelming. Near a ramp for a local highway, it truly is a stone in the ground. And, the legend is probably not even true. John Proctor is probably not buried there and was most likely buried in a ditch somewhere after being hanged. The tomb sits at the corner of the 500 acre farm that the Proctor's lived and worked. But this would have been land they rented, not owned. Would they have buried John on land they did not own?

A few more steps from the tomb is the John Proctor House. Again, legend tells house that John lived here at the time of the 1692 trials. However, scientific testing of the wood in the house dates it to the 1720s and was probably built by John's son. Whether these sites have anything to do with John Proctor or not, they do make us today sit and think of the people who lived here so many years ago.