Charter Street Cemetery, Salem: Old Burying Point Beside the Witch Trials Memorial

Salem’s oldest European burying ground — 1637, fragile slate, witch-trial judges in the ground, and no executed victims here

Charter Street Cemetery, long called the Old Burying Point, is the oldest European burial ground in Salem and among the oldest surviving cemeteries in the United States. The first town-record mention is 1637 (John Horne and a windmill “in the burial place”). It sits on Charter Street beside the Salem Witch Trials Memorial (1992) and the Welcome Center in the historic Pickman House. It is a real closed burial landscape, not a movie set and not the hanging ground.

Salem’s downtown will try to sell you a single “witch city” feeling that pours the memorial, the cemetery, the museums, and every night-photography reel into one product. Ghosthound’s job is the opposite: this fence, these stones, this rule sheet. History first. Haunt lore is mostly Salem-general, and the cemetery’s own staff spend a lot of time correcting what the cemetery is not.

Plan your visit

Address: Charter Street, Salem, MA 01970. Welcome Center: 51 Charter Street (Pickman House).

Web: charterstreetcemetery.com · email listed on that site for research questions.

Hours: Seasonal and posted. Recent summer schedule: Welcome Center / grounds 10 a.m.–5 p.m. daily, last entry 4:45. Some older guides still say noon–4 p.m. — ignore blogs; use the Welcome Center page the week you travel. Closed Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve/Day, New Year’s Eve/Day, and federal holidays. Unsafe weather can close the grounds.

Cost: Cemetery and memorial: free when open. Nearby museums charge separately. Downtown parking is a project in October; plan for it.

Access rules (from the official visitor guidelines — this is the important paragraph): stay on the established path; photographs yes; no climbing or sitting on walls, box tombs, or markers; no eating, drinking, smoking, or vaping; no candles; no flowers, coins, or stones left in the cemetery; no dogs; no grave rubbings (replicas are in the Welcome Center). Remove non-biodegradable trash if you see it. The memorial wants biodegradable tokens only.

Do not confuse with: Old Burial Hill in Marblehead (the Hocus Pocus cemetery stand-in); Howard Street Cemetery (1801) or Broad Street Cemetery (1655), both real downtown Salem grounds with their own stories; Gallows Hill / Proctor’s Ledge, the execution landscape — not this lot.

History: a public burying place from 1637

Indigenous burial sites in Salem predate colonization. Charter Street is the English town’s early municipal ground. In 1637 John Horne got permission for a windmill in the “burial place”; in 1639 the town ordered him to stop enclosing it. The cemetery remained in use into the late nineteenth century (Elizabeth Peele, 1882, is cited as the last contemporary interment stone; a 2008 marker for William Cash is a later commemoration). It was listed on the National Register in 1975 as part of the Charter Street Historic District.

It was a public cemetery: no single church gatekept burial. Wealth still biased what survives. Slate that was well cut and well paid-for lasted; poorer graves often did not. Footstones (name or initials only) still sit opposite some headstones. Box or chest tombs are family crypts, not above-ground coffins. The oldest surviving death date on a stone is midwife Doraty Cromwell, 1673 (the inscription was recut in the early twentieth century because the original was failing). Next among the early dates: Caleb More (1674) and Sarah Higginson (1675).

Who is in the ground — and who is not

Walk for the stones and the civic roster, not for 1692 victims. They are not here. People executed by the colony were not given municipal lots; most 1692 dead were not even Salem-town residents. Shallow burial near the hanging site is mentioned in period comment; families likely moved remains later. The two commonly cited identified graves of executed victims are at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers (Nurse; and George Jacobs, reinterred there). If a tour implies the hanged lie under Charter Street slate, the guide is wrong.

People who are here, per the Welcome Center and standard Salem interpretation:

Col. John Hathorne — magistrate of the 1692 Court of Oyer and Terminer; ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne (who added the w). His stone is the one witch-trial tourists are walked to. He judged; he was not accused.
Bartholomew Gedney — also sat on that court; tabletop tomb toward the center.
Gov. Simon Bradstreet — last governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; died 1697, age 94.
Richard More — Mayflower passenger.
Nathaniel Mather — son of Increase, brother of Cotton; stone associated with carver William Mumford.
Chief Justice Benjamin Lynde — later presided at the Boston Massacre trial — and Primus Lynde, a man Lynde enslaved. The Welcome Center lists both. That pairing is the history, not a side note.
Elias Hasket Derby — early American merchant wealth.
Samuel McIntire — carver-architect; the McIntire District is named for him.

Revs. John Higginson and Nicholas Noyes also appear in older popular lists. Use the Welcome Center’s database of surviving stones if you are looking for a specific name — many burials have no stone left.

The Witch Trials Memorial next door

The 1992 memorial (Liberty Street, designers James Cutler and Maggie Smith) is a courtyard of twenty granite benches, one for each executed victim, with protest excerpts cut into the stone threshold. It is the right place to think about 1692. The cemetery wall is the backdrop, not the burial site of the twenty. Sit on a bench. Do not turn the memorial into a picnic or a costume backdrop. The cemetery’s own FAQ is blunt: Charter Street was an active burying ground in 1692 and had no special function in the trials beyond who later ended up under its slate.

Ghost stories and paranormal claims

Labeled lore. Charter Street is on almost every Salem ghost walk because it is old, central, photogenic, and adjacent to witch-trial memory. Specific claims are usually generic residual-energy language, night-photograph orbs (tourists + dust + slate + streetlighting), and “I felt watched.” There is no single named ghost with a documentary trail comparable to Midnight Mary or the White Lady of Route 59.

That absence is useful. The site is already over-narrated. Adding a shadow-figure file on top of Hathorne’s stone mostly measures October crowd density. If you record, do it during open hours from the path, log the pedestrian traffic, and do not trespass after the last entry. The conservation rules exist because people have already loved this slate nearly to death.

Corrections the Welcome Center has to keep making

Not the Hocus Pocus cemetery.
Not the burial place of the 1692 executed.
Not a playground for offerings, candles, or rubbings.
Not open for unstructured midnight hunts.

Field notes

Primary target for history: Hathorne and Gedney (judges, not victims); a Mayflower stone; the memorial as interpretation, not as a graveyard extension; slate carving up close from the path.
Primary target for lore: low. If you want Salem haunt theater, that is a different paid walk. This lot is a conservation landscape.
October: expect a queue, heat, and people in costume. Go at opening if you want to read inscriptions.
Other downtown grounds: Broad Street (1655) and Howard Street (1801) if Charter Street is closed or slammed — each has its own hours and rules.

Always re-check charterstreetcemetery.com/visiting the week you go. Closures for grounds work happen.