Old Burying Point Cemetery

Salem's oldest cemetery, established in 1637 and second oldest in America. Judge John Hathorne — Nathaniel Hawthorne's ancestor and one of the most reviled witch trial judges — is buried here. The executed witches were not allowed to be.

The ghost of Giles Corey — pressed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea — haunts the Old Burying Point, and he does not show up at random. Witnesses have spotted him before fires, before storms, before calamity. He appears among the headstones as a warning. A man who chose death over participation in a corrupt court, still standing watch over the town that killed him.

The Old Burying Point Cemetery is the second oldest in the country, established in 1637 on Charter Street in Salem. Its 485 headstones mark around six hundred known burials. Nearly four hundred years of ghostly accounts have accumulated within these iron gates, where the judges who condemned innocent people to death lie buried just behind the memorial honoring their victims.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 resulted in nineteen hangings, one man crushed to death under stones, and four who died in prison. The memorial to these victims stands at the cemetery's edge. The real horror lies in who rests just beyond it.

Judge John Hathorne is arguably the most infamous person buried here. He played a central role in prosecuting the accused and showed zero remorse for any of it. His descendant Nathaniel Hawthorne was so ashamed that he added a "w" to his surname. Visitors claim to have captured Hathorne's ghost in photographs taken near his grave — a dark figure standing near the headstone at night.

Reverend Nicholas Noyes also rests here. He provided the religious justification for the harsh sentences. He died from a "strangling" illness, which some interpreted as divine retribution. Judge Bartholomew Gedney, another witch trial judge and physician, lies nearby.

More than fifty enslaved people are buried in the cemetery without headstones. That was standard practice in an era when markers were routinely denied to the enslaved.

The cemetery is currently closed for restoration, but its reputation holds. In a town defined by injustice, hysteria, and innocent death, the Old Burying Point is ground where victims and perpetrators alike were laid to rest — and where none of them, by all accounts, have found peace.