The raucous street party in Salem over the weekend, and the whole year-round industry that has sprung up in town around witches and witchcraft, is a sort of macabre parody of a gruesome episode in the town's history. Everyone who comes to Haunted Happenings, the official name of the celebration, knows what happened in Salem to put it on the Halloween map. But that's just one more reason to buy the T-shirt. In the end, the witch trials are just a great excuse for a party.

Wiccans, and the spare proselytizing pamphleteer, take Halloween in Salem seriously, as something loaded with lasting historical and cultural significance. Maybe to them it's a distilled version of some deeper religious rift in American culture.

But what they think is beside the point. Most of the people in Salem Sunday night weren't there to pass out fliers or light candles by the Witch Trials Memorial on New Liberty Street. They were there to have fun.

This year's Halloween celebration ended with a near-riot. After some idiots in the already thinning crowd started throwing bottles at cops a little before midnight, the whole police contingent--including mounted police, a couple of police dogs, a few officers on motorcycles and dozens on foot--methodically cleared the streets in the center of town.

During the disturbance, some of the cops had to be diverted from guarding the graveyard, where the men with the pamphlets had long ago given up their perch by the entrance. So with no one to stop them, teenagers in costumes filtered into the cemetery, wandering bemused among the ancient headstones. Disrespectful, yes--but maybe an appropriate way to end a night devoted to mocking the past.

Alan E. Wirzbicki '01 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.