Salem: A Haunted Town in Massachusetts
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What would you think of if you heard the name Salem? Witches? Haunted? or Tourists trap? Let me show you what kind of experience I had there!
Before I went to New Hampshire to be a TA for the Thai Scholars summer camp, I got a few days off and had nothing to do. My friend, Purim, and I decided to go to Boston to visit our friends in Boston college. For some reason, we got so bored and searched for interesting places to go in Massachusetts, and Purim shouted with excitement, “Salem, let’s go to Salem!” Without hesitation, we booked a ticket to Salem and rent a house through Airbnb. It cost us around a hundred dollars for both the house and the roundtrip ticket per person.
By the time we arrived in Salem, it was around 4 PM, and the summer sun was getting low. We decided to throw all the bags in the house and started the journey before sunset! The entire town is full of witch statues and dolls. Some were like those pointy-nose witches you have seen in the movies, and others were like fairies.
This town is more like a tourist spot for American people around MA as we barely saw other Asians. That night we didn’t just go to bed because we were in Salem! We should befriend the darkness, right? Thus, we went for a night tour at 8 PM. There was still some light out, so it was not completely scarily dark. The guide’s storytelling was so amazing that everything seemed REAL!
“The guy told me sometimes he saw a headless ghost through that window…”
She kept pointing to the old, ruined, and dusted buildings. She told us which building was used for caging suspected people. To be honest, it was not scary at all, but the story was so much fun and exciting. If you ever get bored in Salem at night, please consider this option!
On the next day, we went to a random breakfast place. It was funny that one of the waiters seemed surprised to see these four Asians in town. After we were fully energized, we went to see the area outside downtown. Some places are not quite related to the witches and pretty costly, so we decided just to walk past by. However, we spotted a lighthouse near the beautiful sea area on the way back to downtown. That seems to be a good ending to the trip, but we forgot that we forgot to do something important! Yep, we forgot to visit some of the witch museums! We did not know which one is the best witch museum, so we just walked into the most scary-looking one. Inside, there was not much to do. There was no exhibition; instead, we were seated in the middle of the darkroom, still. Then, the show began. A spotlight went to each corner of the room, showing some scary scenes made of wax. It was short but quite worth it. Since the train to Boston was not there till in the afternoon, we decided to go to the Peabody Museum of Art, which has nothing to do with the witches. All in all, this town was great for a short visit. A day or two should be enough. Although many stories of this town are not so believable, I really like how they wickedly used their dull history for boosting their economy.
After we found out that there are some flights from Willard (a regional airport in Champaign) that are inexpensive, we started flying out from here instaead of Chicago. We got a really good price of plane tickets to Seattle, so we decided to go to more national parks! The two parks that we visited were Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks. We thought about going to North Cascade as well, but the time was limited so we planned to visit there next time. Visiting these two popular national parks in the fall was such a good choice–less crowd, nice weather, and fall foliage!
Midwest surprisingly offers us many national parks to visit all year round. One of the national parks near Illinois is the Mammoth Cave National Park in Cave City, Kentucky. We rented a car from Champaign and drove around 5 hours, excluding small stops in Indiana. We had never been to Kentucky before, and we believe that not many international students had been there. Plus, this was the first time we visited a cave in the US, and we start with the world’s longest known cave system!
We’d been thinking of visiting South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and Badlands national park for almost a year. Then an opportunity came when one of our friends gave us a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Delta. We did not hestitate even a bit in buying two tickets for a round trip from Chicago to Rapid City, SD. Although it was an impulsive trip, we had a lot of fun observing the wildlife in the great plains of South Dakota and North Dakota.
Although Poy graduated from the Scripps-Oxford joint Ph.D. program in Biochemistry for half a year and already started working at UIUC as a post-doctoral researcher, his graduation ceremony was held way later in May 2024. His family also came from Thailand to attend his graduation ceremony in San Diego. We then spent over a week afterward traveling around the west coast, including California, Arizona, and Nevada. It was my first time (and his family’s first time) doing a road trip in the west coast. We enjoyed a huge variety of natural wonders that the west coast has to offer.