Chapter Twelve: In which Spencer and I do all the Halloween things

Hello everyone,
This is way overdue, and I'm sorry for that. I'm trying to come up to breathe between the readings and essays and work and such every so often, so blogging has been, unfortunately, put aside for a few weeks. Actually, case in point, I'm actually supposed to be working on an essay right now, but my brain is going to explode so I'm blogging.

Anyway, October was a fantastic month, and you've already heard about some of it (visiting the Back Bay, the beautiful autumn leaves, etc.), so I thought I would quickly tell you about how the rest of our Halloween season shook out. So our October/Halloween season really focused around three major events: Harry Huff's private Halloween organ recital, seeing NTLive's Frankenstein starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in theaters, and visiting Salem, Massachusetts. You've already heard about Harry and the E.M. Skinner organ, so I'll tell you about our other two Halloween-y adventures!

So National Theatre Live is an incredible source of quality theater. They film plays put on by National Theatre and then send them to theaters so that a wider audience can pay to see the performance that way. Frankenstein has now shown through an initial screening and a series of encores at least three times as opposed to the usual one showing. I first heard about the play screening three years ago, but I could not afford to go. :( So when I heard that it was being screened as a part of this encore series, I was thrilled! I'd been waiting years for this. It was also fitting that it was October/Halloween . . . excellent. So I bought our rather expensive tickets and figure out all the public transit and wait. The day arrives. I'm waiting at the station for Spencer to come into Cambridge from Belmont, and it is getting later and later. I'm starting to become more and more stressed. We'd planned in some buffer time and soon that time is gone. He still isn't there. Now we will certainly be late. He still isn't there. I walk from the connection to the next station hoping he'd be there and he isn't. I'm walking back to the connection when I hear Spencer's voice shout Natalie from a crowd. We'd barely missed each other since I wasn't at the connection and he'd gone looking for me. Spencer and I rapidly walked to the bus stop and waited. Spencer explained that there had been a massive accident that had stopped traffic so the buses couldn't get through. Hence why he was late. Even with such an excellent explanation, I couldn't be comforted. I'd waited for this for years; tickets had been pricey. This was our chance! And now I was going to miss a significant portion of the show. Well, we got to the theater 20 minutes into the play crawled into seats awkwardly and watched the rest of it. We basically missed the creation of the creature. No big deal, just the most iconic part ever! (Needless to say, I'm unforgivably bitter at the public transit even if it wasn't their fault.)

The upside of this story is that what we did see of the play was incredible. Both Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch had mastered both the role of Dr. Frankenstein and the creature and would take turns playing each role. They did this because it was too physically taxing to play the creature repeatedly. Nuts! (You'll notice the picture with half their faces looking like the creature and half like Dr. Frankenstein. That's why.) The version that we saw had Benedict Cumberbatch as the creature and Jonny Lee Miller as Dr. Frankenstein. Cumberbatch was insane in the way he was constantly contorting his body and grunting and learning speech. Him discovering movement, snow, birds singing, language, love, hate, reading, loneliness, etc. was so so moving. My heart just hurt as the play unfolded, just as it has the few times I've read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This is an accurate and beautiful rendition of her work. Something I've always hoped to see. Anyway, if you all ever get the chance to attend an NTLive screening of pretty much any play, go! Oh, and don't be late.

On the 28th, Caleb drove down from Maine for our monthly outing. This month we were going to Salem. I have always loved Arthur Miller's The Crucible and felt that October was a good time to go see the place where it all happened. It turns out that Salem is also a National Park because of its maritime history, which we didn't know, so we'll have to go back eventually and learn about that aspect of the city. This trip, though, was dedicated to the Salem Witch Trials. We arrived in the afternoon and spent much of it wandering through the town. It was raining, which Caleb remarked meant our trip was now the quintessential New England experience. We visited Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, walked by the Harbor, and took some extra time at the oldest graveyard in Salem and the Salem Witch Trials Memorial, although we knew we'd stop by again on our tour that evening. We stopped in at a bunch of shops and all I can say is all the incense! I did get a nice necklace with a metal circle forming a tree and a beautiful white stone with green veins on its surface. It was a green tree agate stone, which is supposed to be an extremely stabilizing stone that helps provide a powerful connection with the energy of nature. I figured that was something I could use, besides the fact that it was lovely and I've always collected rocks, so I got it. Spencer and I had chosen as our main activity a Witch-trial-focused historical tour scheduled for that evening, so Caleb chose to have us go to the Witch Dungeon Museum.

The dungeon was a recreation based on the recorded dimensions. At the peak of the trials the jail held 150 accused. Debtors prison was a horrid reality, and those who had made a plea, either guilty or not guilty, were under the law put into prison to await trial and then had their possessions and land liquidated to pay for their time in prison. Based on what a prisoner could afford they could pay to have a larger cell, have fewer people in the cell with them, to receive more food, to receive blankets, etc. In the recreation the cells are covered with bars, but in the original dungeon the cells were covered with door leaving the prisoners in absolute darkness. To the above right is a view into one of the smaller cells (the mannequin is there to demonstrate proportion). She couldn't have even laid down. So basically horrifying and inhumane. The youngest accused was a four-year-old girl who ended up going insane from her incarceration. :( By the end of these hellish nine months, five people had died from the conditions in the dungeon. But those who survived and were eventually released, emerged homeless, having had all their possession sold to pay for their time in the dungeon.

Later in the evening, we took the historical tour. Here are some of the interesting things we learned:

• The Salem Witch Trials occurred during a vulnerable time for the Puritan colonists because the Queen of England had decided that they didn't need a governor as much as Canada, so she moved his jurisdiction. This left Massachusetts without a central body of law.
• Girls were kept inside and ignored until the marrying age, which was quite young. And so it is believed that the girls were simply thrilled with any form of attention. Until it got out of hand, that is. After a small amount of acting out on the part of the girls, the adults of Salem realized that they could manipulate the girls, who by this point were too scared to say they had been pretending from the start (I mean people were dying), in order to get back at those against whom they'd held long-standing grudges. Being a Puritan, you know, you're supposed to be pure, so this was an ideal way for the adults to exact revenge, take out jealousies, and acquire the accused's land, etc. 
• You may be wondering how any of these silly testaments held up in a court of law. Well, at this time, specifically in Salem, spectral evidence was accepted as legitimate proof of condemnation. Those who had "signed the Devil's book" acquired a specter, their essence/soul/spirit that they could send out to terrorize others while their body remained sleeping in bed for example. So one simply had to testify that a person's specter had terrorized them, and the evidence was considered irrefutable. 
• Accused witches were sent to prison and stripped to find any moles, birthmarks, or other body marks as evidence of their specter. The Devil would leave a mark where the specter was tied to you though it could roam according to your will.
• Confessing you were a witch most often led to acquittal and "rehabilitation" and "reintroduction" to society, which is why so many people were being accused. If you confessed, you were expected to divulge the names you'd seen written in the Devil's book. This pattern was started by the slave Tituba, who was the first accused (bet you can't guess why >:( . . . ) and was of course frightened and simply did what was told to her: she confessed, expressed her deep contrition, and provided names when they were asked for.
• This pattern of finger pointing made it likely that a person would become guilty by association. But when Rebecca Nurse (an elderly and deeply revered woman in the community) was accused, 39 Salem residents put their lives on the line to sign a petition for her release and in defense of her character. This was a turning point in the trials because previous to Rebecca Nurse, the slave Tituba, and the poverty-stricken outcast Sarah Good were the type of people being accused. It's unfortunate, but few felt inclined to stand up for these people.

• Two men were eventually accused and killed for defending their wives and opposing the legitimacy of the court and trials themselves: John Proctor and Giles Corey. John Proctor was hanged and is the protagonist of The Crucible (No, he did not have an affair with Abigail. She was a young girl in reality and that was creative license by Arthur Miller.) Giles Corey was pressed to death. Unfortunately, his wife Martha ended up dying by hanging even so.

• Giles Corey was a wealthy man (his property covered all of Salem and a few of the surrounding cities) and had noticed that those with land were being accused and their land being seized and resold for profit. He knew that it was only a matter of time before he was accused. So he secretly signed over his land to two of his sons-in-law, the two that lived outside the jurisdiction of the Salem courts (by this time people outside of Salem but within the court's jurisdiction were also being accused and brought into the prison). When he was accused, he refused to give a plea, which meant he couldn't be tried. Remember that once a person offered a plea, regardless of what it was, their property was forfeit and seized by the law, and they remained in prison till their trial. So he refused to plea. In order to try to force him to plea (obviously so they could sell his land), the officials submitted him to torture by pressing. This is the only time this method of torture has ever been used in America's history. They laid him in a ditch and place a board on him. Every hour they would add a large boulder to the board on his body. Note that this was not intended to kill Giles Corey; they were trying to force him to plea. But Corey remained silent. The only time he spoke was to say the words, "More weight." I'll skip past some of the more grisly details (Wikipedia it if you want to know), but Giles Corey survived two days under this immense pain and died, pressed to death. Once Corey was dead, the officials went to collect his land only to find that he no longer owned it. The pressing was all for naught, the plea wouldn't have made a difference. Giles Corey had outsmarted the system, refusing to cooperate with corruption even so. 
• Elizabeth Proctor was accused, but her hanging was postponed because she was pregnant. She remained in jail while John was hanged. She was in jail for months and gave birth to her son, whom she named John, in prison. She was eventually released (because of the governor's return), but as a convicted person she was considered dead by the law, she no longer existed. It took seven years for her to gain back her legal rights and a small fraction of the wealth that she and John lost due to the trials. 
• The governor only came back to restore order once his wife was accused. He released 153 prisoners. 
• In November 2001, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill exonerating by name the victims of the Salem Witch Trials, 300 years after their occurrence. 

A quote by Elie Wiesel, who dedicated the memorial. The words in the white bar at the bottom are the words of those accused and executed.

The Salem Witch Trial Memorial has 20 stones, one for each victim (19 being hanged and 1 pressed to death). Their names, means of death, and date of execution are carved onto their respective stone. Elie Wiesel dedicated the Memorial. Fourteen women and six men were killed. There is lots of cool symbolism in the memorial, I would suggest you check it out.

The Memorial is next to the oldest graveyard where Rebecca Nurse is buried among others. One of the judges is buried there (relative of Nathaniel Hawthorne's I believe), and one judge was buried secretly because the family was afraid that the members of the community would dig him up and tear him to pieces.

Interesting fact: Salem's economy is almost entirely based on tourism, so it wasn't doing too hot before the town realized its tourist potential and got on the historical site bandwagon. The revival of Salem's economy though was the TV show Bewitched, which renewed the general population's interest in witches and witchcraft. Hence the statue dedicated to her.

Spencer loves it when I take all the pictures of him and tell him to smile. This is a moment of rebellion. :) He is standing on an abstract map of Salem.

I already mentioned the maritime history of the town briefly. But Spencer has a good pirate voice, and if he had a beard he would have been Red Beard. He also didn't have an eyepatch, so he's improvising. :) 

Okay! End of picture reel. So that was Salem. It was very sobering but also a wonderful day with Spencer and Caleb. As Elie Wiesel said, "Only if we remember will we be worthy of redemption."

The rest of October included a ward Halloween party, which included Spencer and I throwing together very very rushed costumes. (Spencer was a lumberjack of sorts and I was a Hogwarts student.) We had a really quite Halloween. I did homework, and Spencer bought a bag of candy with Almond Joys in it because he loves me, and we ate that . . . for days. So. Much. Candy. I also watched "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" online since after trick-or-treating every Halloween growing up, we'd come home and watch that film. Turns out that it is the 50th Anniversary of "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"!

Read all about it here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chuck-mirarchi/its-the-50th-anniversary-of-the-great-pumpkin-charlie-brown_b_12456016.html


Anyway, it was very nostalgic and a perfect way to end the most Halloween-filled October I've ever experienced.