Having a strong historical identity for your town can be a mixed blessing. If you're Hershey, Pa., you know that tourists expect everything to be made of chocolate. If you're Salem, Mass., you are reduced to putting a flying-witch emblem on your police cars and firetrucks.

Salem. The Witch City. Halloween Capital of the World. Stay for a spell.

Not everybody in town is entirely comfortable with the quaintifying of one of the more ghastly and appalling episodes in American Colonial history, but it sure is good for business.

There's a Witch Museum, a Witch History Museum, a Witch Dungeon Museum (with live trial re-enactment), a Witch Village and a Wax Museum of Witches and Seafarers where you get a "free informational graveyard scroll." You can get a discount at the wax museum and witch village, "managed and staffed by practicing witches," when you buy the Salem Hysteria Pass.

Almost all the gift shops have a supernatural theme. Instead of Things 'N Stuff or Aunt Ibby's Itsy Bitsy Attic, the kazillion gift shoppes in Salem have names like Black Paw, The Broom Closet and The Magic Parlor ("Fang Capital of the World").

And when you've scored your fangs, there are plenty of spooky walking tours to orient you to the historical sites and amuse the locals, who think it is hilarious that you have paid money to stumble around in the dark behind a cloaked community-theater actress with a lantern.

On the tour I took, we heard about the ghost of a vicious witch-era sheriff who has hair like Diana Ross' and must spend eternity tormented by the smell of coffee and doughnuts coming from the Dunkin' next door.

Also, we learned how to tell if your household ghost is an ordinary stair-haunter you can cope with on your own or a nasty, aggressive spirit who's gotten into your walls and closets and requires a visit from a spiritual Orkin man.

Unfortunately, Salem's cemeteries are closed after sunset, so we had to hear about how Giles Cory was pressed to death while overlooking the scene of his demise from the driveway of a bingo hall with a lively game in progress.

In all the show biz and witch kitsch, it's easy to lose the thread of what actually went on in Salem in 1692. And that's bad, because those who forget history are doomed to sit through repeated high school productions of "The Crucible."

In 1692, the colonists were at war with the local Indians, and for several years, the war had been going very badly. Salem was absorbing refugees, the winter had been unusually cold, and the townspeople were quite willing to believe the devil was lurking around every corner.

The match in this powder keg of fear and distrust came in the form of a gang of adolescent girls who began acting strangely and blaming witches. Nowadays, they would just ridicule each other. But good Puritan girls like Abigail Williams couldn't sneer that Mary Warren's bonnet was SO 1680s, so they had to accuse her of witchcraft instead.

This set off a disastrous chain reaction of accusations and trials that produced more accusations, imprisonments, hangings and still more accusations. Purported witches were charged with such charming Old-World wickednesses as stealing eggs and pinching children.

Defense was nearly impossible. Chief Justice William Stoughton, a former minister with no legal education, allowed spectral evidence (you were home in bed, but Deliverance Hobbs saw your spirit handing out canapes at the devil's happy hour, so you're guilty), private conversations between judges and accusers ("Your honor, what do I have to accuse this jerk of to get him hanged?") and spectators' personal remarks during the trial ("She looks like a pincher to me!").

One thing Stoughton didn't allow was defense counsel. And the judges made little pretense of impartiality.

In the end, 19 were executed; four died in prison; an octogenarian man was stripped naked and crushed with stones; more than 100 were imprisoned, including a 4-year-old girl; and two dogs were executed as accomplices.

Afterward, there was remorse. Three hundred years later, it's a business. But it would be a shame to forget that people who live in fear can convict their neighbors, my pretty.

And your little dog, too.