Weird World Adventures Season 2 Spotlight: Episode 4 A Bewitching Weekend in Salem, Part 2

So you watched Part 1 of our Salem adventure for Weird World Adventures. Welcome back. Or, if you haven’t watched Part 1 yet, please go do that first — some things deserve to be experienced in order, and Salem is one of them.

When we left off, Michael and I had worked our way through the Bewitched Statue, Count Orlock’s, and the first leg of Mike Vitka’s Spellbound Tours. Part 2 picks up where that left off: deeper into Salem’s history, into its complicated and genuinely devastating past, and into one of the most specific museum experiences I’ve ever had the pleasure of wandering through.

Mike Vitka’s Spellbound Tours continued to be the compass that oriented everything else. What I appreciate about Mike — and what comes through clearly in the episode — is that he doesn’t let Salem become a caricature of itself. The witch trials were real. The people who were accused, imprisoned, and executed were real. Nineteen people were hanged on Proctor’s Ledge in 1692. One man was pressed to death with stones. Several others died in prison. These were not Halloween decorations. They were human beings caught in a perfect storm of Puritan theology, social pressure, land disputes, political instability, and what historians now believe may have included ergot poisoning causing genuine hallucinatory symptoms in some of the accusers.

What Salem has managed to do — and this is genuinely impressive from a cultural anthropology standpoint — is hold both things at once: the gravity of its history and the vitality of its present. The city does not look away from what happened in 1692. It builds museums about it. It names streets after the accused. It tells the story over and over again, because forgetting is worse than remembering uncomfortably.

And then there is the Salem Witch Board Museum, which deserves its own paragraph and possibly its own episode. The Ouija board — or the spirit board, or the talking board, depending on who you ask — has one of the most fascinating cultural histories of any object in American occult tradition. What began as a parlor game in the 1890s became, over the course of the 20th century, one of the most loaded artifacts in American pop culture: simultaneously a toy (Hasbro has sold it next to Monopoly for decades), a supposed portal to demonic forces (if you believe the Exorcist and several concerned parents I’ve encountered), and a genuine artifact of American spiritualism that tells us an enormous amount about how ordinary people in the late 19th century were trying to process grief, uncertainty, and the desire to communicate across the boundary of death.

The museum houses boards spanning over a century of production, design, and cultural context. As someone who studies the occult academically, I found myself genuinely moved by how much these objects reveal about the humans who made and used them. Every talking board is a record of someone wanting to reach across an impossible distance.

We also spent time sitting with the broader history of the witch trials in a way that Part 1 didn’t fully allow for — the legal history, the social dynamics, the question of why Salem specifically, why 1692, and what the episode in American history tells us about the machinery of accusation and the fragility of due process. These are not academic abstractions. They are, in various forms, questions that every society keeps asking of itself in different eras.

Salem is not just a Halloween destination. It’s a city that has been doing the work of historical reckoning longer than most American cities have been willing to try.

Both parts of our Salem episode are streaming on Amazon Prime — free for Prime members internationally. Free streaming is also available via the Fawesome app on Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and other major platforms. And if the Ouija board told you to watch it, who are you to argue?