"It seems to me a strange thing, mystifying ..."

No, I'm not going to break out into song from the musical Jesus Christ, Superstar - and you should thank your lucky stars on that one, my friends, as I sing horribly! - but those words keep going through my head in regards to a couple of pictures I took while visiting Salem, Massachusetts last week with Amanda, Darci, and my friend Amy. Actually, a lot of the pictures I took have me scratching my head in wonderment but you're probably going to have to wait another day or two to see those as I took way too many pictures to write just one post about our trip. Figures, eh?!?

I thought what I would try to do is break our day down into more easily digestible parts not just for you, my readers, but also for myself as wading through 360+ pictures takes a lot of time that I would rather be spending with my nose in the book I'm currently reading! However, Eclipse has been put aside until I can at least make sense of the pictures I have and get a few of them posted before the weekend rolls around and I forget what we did in Salem - short-term memory loss and all that good stuff, don'tchaknow?!

Anyone who has ever heard of Salem, Massachusetts probably immediately thinks of one word - witches. That's not surprising considering Salem's infamous past and the witch hysteria that gripped it in the 1690's. People flock to Salem in droves to visit the witch museums and the cemeteries and hear the horrifying tales of how 20 innocent people were put to death during a time when people were about as superstitious as they come and all it took was for someone to look at you funny before you found yourself moldering in a cell awaiting your fate at the gallows. It was a dark time in our Nation's history but people find it fascinating - myself included.
Salem, though, is more than just witches - it's also a coastal town with a very rich maritime history and a waterfront still lined with houses from its heyday as a major port. If you don't go to Salem for the witches, go to see the old homes of ship's captains and merchants as they are almost as fascinating as the stories of the witch trials.

Another major attraction of Salem is the setting for Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic New England tale - The House of the Seven Gables. The house itself, also known as the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, was built in 1668 and is the oldest surviving 17th century wooden mansion in New England. It was at this house that Hawthorne decided to set his tale of a house cursed through the centuries by a man hung for witchcraft by the owner of the house. The story explores the guilt, retribution and atonement of the Pyncheon family throughout the ages. Nathaniel Hawthorne felt cursed by the sins of his own ancestors when he wrote this book in 1851 based on his grandfather, John Hathrone, who was a judge during the witch trials.

Way back when I was a junior in high school, one of our required reading assignments was The House of the Seven Gables and as part of that, we took a field trip to see the house itself. I was fascinated then and I am fascinated today even though I would really want to reread the story before revisiting the house. Still, when we were in Salem last week I did want to at least take a walk by the place and after leaving Amy, Amanda, and Darci at the Salem Witch Museum, that's exactly what I did - with a few stops along the way. Pictures of 'along the way' will be posted tomorrow along with more pictures of the house.

One of the pictures that I took while walking around the outside of the grounds has definitely given me pause, though, as I can't for the life of me figure out why/how rainbows appeared in it but there they are - one red, yellow, and blue while the other is basically green. The sun was not in any position to be causing rainbows, they appear in the shadow of the back of the house, and I am positive that they weren't there when I snapped the picture. I'm sure I would have remembered their brilliant colors.

I'm sure there's a very logical explanation for why those rainbows are there and they may not be anything more than the sun reflecting off of something (perhaps the bald head of a visiting tourist?) but then again - maybe they're more than that; maybe they are the spirits of some long-dead New Englanders who still like to walk the beautiful gardens of their former home. Or maybe I'm just daft! That's always a very good possibility.

While we're at it, I thought I would also post a picture of the lobby of The Hawthorne Hotel where I caught an interesting orb up hear the ceiling in the middle of the day. Again, it might just be a trick of the light but then again - I took the picture in Salem without using a flash and, as the guide for our Haunted Footsteps tour later that night told us, "ghosts don't obey the rules in Salem". What do you think?