Residents and businesses in Salem are speaking out about the hundreds of thousands of visitors that descend upon their small community during the Halloween season and say it’s taking a toll, according to a Boston.com report.
The number of reported visitors last weekend is staggering, and residents are speaking up about how the unprecedented number of tourists is affecting their ability to live their ordinary lives.
On the third weekend of October, Boston.com reported that Salem received 101,000 visitors on Saturday alone, more than double the city’s population of 43,350 and well above what can fill Gillette Stadium with its 65,000 capacity.
People fill the streets on Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts on October 31, 2021. - The city is the location of the witch trials that took place in the 1690s and is considered a Mecca for modern day witches and Halloween fans. (Photo by Joseph Prezioso / AFP) (Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)AFP via Getty Images
“There were points on Saturday where the sidewalks came to a standstill, there were so many people,” a resident told Boston.com. “The crowds are frightening,” another said.
Businesses capitalizing on the draw of Salem’s history around witch trials are pulling in millions of dollars from hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. Jeremy Siegel, a reporter for GBH News, quoted Kate Fox of Destination Salem as saying that even though Salem’s tourism industry generates large sums of money, residents are being negatively impacted.
Fox also spoke with Boston.com, and she said, “I hear from businesses every year that they have a hard time because locals can’t get to them to use their services. I heard the esthetician loses clients because they can’t get to her in October. There used to be a jewelry store downtown and his customers wouldn’t come shopping in October.”
Tourists are arriving in such large numbers that the town is running out of parking spaces. Mayor Kimberley Driscoll — a candidate for lieutenant governor — sent out an announcement mid-day Saturday telling visitors that all lots, garages and spaces had filled up, and that people should park on the MBTA Newburyport/Rockport commuter rail line and travel by train instead.
On Thursday, town officials announced that seven inbound trains and six outbound trains will be added to the Newburyport Rockport Line during the weekends of October 22 to 23 and Oct. 29 to 30.
For a Los Angeles resident visiting Massachusetts last weekend, a spontaneous visit to Salem turned out to be more than anticipated.
“A friend had mentioned Salem as a cute town to visit, so without thinking we hopped in the car to go up there,” Morgan Polikoff told MassLive. “Stupidly, we did not think about Salem, Mass., in October and the implications of our timing. We looked for spots, which of course were impossible to find (my [mother-in-law] is not a great walker), so we quickly decided we would move on and go somewhere else.”
Except, Polikoff said, it was impossible to drive through town. It took Polikoff, his husband, and his mother-in-law 45 minutes to drive through three-quarters of a mile stretch.
“I’d love to return to Salem sometime not in October so I could actually get out of the car and look around,” he said.
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October 21, 2022 at 10:29PM
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Visiting Salem in October? Prepare for ‘frightening’ crowds - MassLive.com
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