Wild World of Witchcraft – Live in Salem with Grady Hendrix
January 16, 2025 @ 6:30 pm - 10:00 pm
Are witches old ladies who live in candy houses and eat children? Are they naked maidens dancing in a circle and celebrating the moon? Are they riding broomsticks to a black mass where they’ll worship Satan, or being dragged to a gallows where they’ll be hung after false accusations?
Join bestselling author Grady Hendrix to celebrate his latest book, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, by taking a wild flight into the blackest night as we investigate the world of witchcraft in books and movies and witness an army of broomstick-brandishing, curse-hurling, baby-eating, world-renouncing, unkillable, unstoppable, unbeatable witches!
Grady Hendrix is a New York Times bestselling novelist and screenwriter living in New York City. He is the author of How to Sell a Haunted House, The Final Girl Support Group, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, We Sold Our Souls, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, and Horrorstör.
His books have sold over two million copies and have been translated into more than 20 languages. He also writes nonfiction; his history of the horror paperback boom of the 1970s and 1980s, Paperbacks from Hell, received the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction.
Tickets: admission for you ($40) or you and a guest ($50) to Grady’s new one-man show, plus a signed copy of Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, a Meet and Greet after the show with Grady, and the opportunity to get your signed book personalized.
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Members of the First Church caught up in the hysteria included Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey, who were full members of this Church until they were excommunicated and sent to their deaths. For the record, their memberships were formally reinstated during the Tercentennial observance of the Witch Trials in 1992. At that time, an appropriately somber memorial was erected in downtown Salem to remember the 20 people who lost their lives during one New England’s darkest episodes.
As for others who were involved during the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, perhaps the most well known is the Rev. Nicholas Noyes, the junior minister of the First Church. Noyes fanned the flames of religious hysteria as a vocal persecutor of the accused during the trials. Unlike Samuel Sewall and John Higginson, he never expressed remorse for his involvement in the hysteria. It is said that he died of a curse since one of the accused witches at her execution reportedly told him that “God will give you blood to drink.” In 1717 Noyes apparently died of an unusual throat disorder during which he asphyxiated on his own blood. This local story later inspired the 19th century Salem author Nathaniel Hawthorne; in The House of the Seven Gables, Judge Pynchon is cursed in a similar way.
The original church building no longer exists.
Source: The First Church in Salem, The Long History