To Walk in Clear Skies
November 21, 2022I sat in the rental car with my soon-to-be husband as we drove into Salem. We drove past lines of cars waiting to enter overpriced parking lots—their rates tripled and quadrupled for the month of Halloween—and as we drove, I started feeling pins and needles on my tongue and at the back of my mouth and down my throat—like it was all going numb—and I wondered if this is what it felt like to be hanged.
We gave up trying to park and just kept driving. We drove north for three miles until we arrived at 39 Hale Street in Beverly, Massachusetts. We parked the car on the street outside a yellow clapboard house. The uncomfortable tingling sensation in my mouth and throat were gone. They’d disappeared as soon as we’d left Salem’s town center, and now, standing outside this yellow house, I felt comfortable and safe—like this home was my home. Like here, in the radiating warmth of the autumn sun, beneath the towering, green tulip tree, I was completely welcome.
The house belonged to my eighth-great-grandfather, John Hale, who was the reverend in this town for thirty-three years. He moved to the house just after 1692, after two young girls in the neighboring village of Salem began exhibiting strange behavior. When he saw the girls, he immediately suspected witchcraft was to blame and encouraged the creation of the trials. Fifteen months and twenty-five dead bodies later, the Salem witch trials ended.
Throughout the trials, Hale was intimately involved. He was present during examinations of the accused, testified against two women, and counseled the judges and other trial participants, but in November of 1692, when his wife, Sarah Noyes Hale, was accused, he started doubting everything.
It was in this yellow house, in the years following the trials, that he wrote A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft—the book in which he formally denounced the trials and expressed remorse for the innocent lives that, undoubtedly, were taken. He didn’t believe they were innocent because witchcraft wasn’t real. No, he firmly believed in the invisible forces—good and evil. He simply challenged our ability to judge them clearly.
“We walked in the clouds and could not see our way,” Hale wrote. The clouds, he explained, were fear. A fear he knew well, for he’d feared witchcraft most of his life.
In 1648, just twelve days after his twelfth birthday, he watched a woman hanged for witchcraft. She was the first of fifteen people killed over fifteen years during New England’s first witch hunt, which lasted the entirety of John Hale’s adolescence.
She was accused—amongst other things—of being psychic, of accurately predicting the future and knowing people’s secrets. Of course, most people today will tell you that she wasn’t really psychic or a witch. None of them were. Because these things are not real.
At least, that’s what I was taught. Unlike my eighth-great-grandfather, I was raised with no religion and no spirituality. I never believed in invisible forces—save for gravity—and because I didn’t believe in magic, I never feared it, and I never looked for it. So, you can imagine my surprise when I started meditating, when I got really still and listened to myself, and I discovered that magic was the most natural expression of my being.
By magic, I mean that when I cleared my mind of all my thoughts—the ones I created and the ones that were created for me—other experiences entered that open space. Visions came through. Knowings. Feelings. Predictions. A connection to something I’d never felt before that was so big and powerful it felt like it was both me and outside of me, and it seemed to have no name, and it only ever felt like peace and love and truth.
Over the last seven years of my life, I—like my eighth-great-grandfather— have become a person of faith, of believing in invisible forces. I receive messages in my dreams that come true. On hundreds of occasions, strangers have sat down in front of me, and I’ve closed my eyes and accurately received information about their lives through visions and sounds and feelings. I regularly wish for things, and they come true. And often, I’ll be going about my day—folding my laundry, doing the dishes, the most mundane of tasks—when suddenly, it’s like I can hear the ocean in my ears, and if I close my eyes and listen carefully, the waves become words— messages, songs, instructions—all full of what I felt in those early days of meditation: peace, love, truth.
John Hale and the other powerful men in Salem thought that experiences like these were an aspect of witchcraft. This, in their minds, was Satan’s work. Because that’s what they’d been taught. And that’s what they feared.
I don’t consider myself a witch in the Christian sense of the word, but I am a woman, having an experience, trusting and following her own inner knowing, and in today’s society—just like in 1692—this is an act of rebellion. I can’t tell you how many people have told me that my experiences couldn’t possibly be real, that in short, I—in my entirety, as the person I truly am—do not exist.
Disbelief, I think, was maybe the natural evolution of our fear. Because you can’t fear something you don’t believe in. And I think that for many of us, the clouds we walk in now, the ones that stop us from seeing clearly, are no longer fear but disbelief. I know because I walked in them too, and I’m actually grateful for this because it meant that when magic showed up, I wasn’t afraid, and I could just experience it—without judgment.
As my fiancé and I drove away from John Hale’s yellow house, he was visibly upset. Upset that I’d been so happy there, walking around the yard, taking photos, smiling by the tree. “This is a man who killed many people!” He exclaimed.
I knew it was true. I hadn’t forgotten, and I wondered if maybe I was able to be so happy because I was rewriting Hale’s story in my mind. Maybe I was focusing too much on the part where he eventually spoke against the trials rather than the part where he instigated them and twenty-five people died, and now, the energy still feels so heavy in Salem that my throat hurts driving through, and as I thought about all of this, I could feel inside me the blood of the persecutor and the spirit of the persecuted, but then I took a deep breath, and I cleared my mind, and there in the white rental car, I could still feel what I felt beneath the tulip tree: the warmth of the sun on my skin and the truth that John Hale is not judging me. He just loves me.
And despite all of the fear and disbelief we walk in that makes us judge each other and kill each other and do all sorts of unspeakable, unloving things, I choose to trust my instincts and the inner knowing that we are all connected, that love moves through us, that despite what happens when we are here, we return to the earth, and we return to that love, and after enough time, that is all that’s left.
A version of this essay was first published in the 77th issue of the Lincoln Center Theater Review. The above is Virginia’s original edit, written in February 2020.
