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More Weight: A Salem Story
This is going to be an ironic entry in this series, because it is about a new book related to witches and witchcraft …
… in which no witches or witchcraft appear.
In fact, that is the whole point of the book: There were no witches or witchcraft — only murder victims. I’m talking about the new graphic novel MORE WEIGHT, by writer/artist Ben Wickey.
MORE WEIGHT is ostensibly about the the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, but in reality, this brooding comic covers much more than that. I’ve just finished reading all 500-plus pages of it, and for me it is an example of how a good graphic novel can carry as much substance as any “real” novel. Personally, I would call MORE WEIGHT an instant classic in the field, so I want to make others with an interest in comics — as well as an interest in history — aware of it. (In fact, the book has been singled out by both the New York Times and Forbes as one of the best books of 2025.)
(NOTE: Before I get into it more, though, I’d like to acknowledge a serendipitous recent diary which inspired me to write this one. Recently A Pagan in Arizona wrote about “spirit traps” and “witch bottles”. I had only just learned about such things, because one of Wickey’s recurring symbols throughout MORE WEIGHT is a vessel called a “Bartmann [bearded man] jug” — used in exactly the same way A Pagan In Arizona described, to ward off hexes and evil spirits. In fact, the very cover of MORE WEIGHT depicts its central character, Giles Corey, as a shattered Bartmann jug.
Bartmann jug from the 1600s.
Before I continue, full disclosure: Ben Wickey is a friend and occasional creative colleague of mine. I’ve known that he has been quietly working away on this book in his off hours for the better part of the last decade, between animation and other illustration jobs. But even I had no idea what a stunning piece of work it would turn out to be; not until it arrived in my hands from Barnes and Noble. I will also note that Ben is one of the nicest people I know.
That said … everything I say from this point forward I would say even if that wasn’t the case. (And, no, I had no involvement with the book itself, and have no financial stake in it.)
MORE WEIGHT is an epic, thoroughly researched book about one of the most bizarre and tragic moments in American history. During the Witch trials of 1692, a whole town and its surrounding region … well, basically went mad, and hundreds of innocent people were accused of being witches and jailed. Twenty were actually put to death, while another five died in jail before they could be put to death. One of the accused and imprisoned was — I wasn’t aware of this — five years old.
This was all largely done on the word of a small group of “afflicted” young girls who … well, basically, lied a lot. For some unfathomable reason no one can quite agree on.
(Note: If you know the Arthur Miller play The Crucible, about the same events, some of the names and events will be familiar, but don’t be fooled. The Crucible is a great drama, a deserved classic — but it is completely inaccurate.)
To make things even more infuriating as one reads about the court proceedings, it seems the distinguished and respected judges who oversaw the trials of the accused innocents just took it for granted that if a person was accused of being a witch … well, that person must really be one. It didn't matter if the accused were people they had known personally for decades, and even known to be good, exemplary, pious people. Even ministers were accused and hung.
It never seems to have occurred to those in authority that the accusers might be lying. Even after one girl was actually caught in an irrefutable, proven lie right in the courtroom, making an accusation toward someone, the way it was resolved pretty much went like this: “Young lady, we will not tolerate lying in this courtroom! Now please continue with your testimony against this person.”
Wickey explores the full context of the time period: the political insecurities and uncertainties in the area, caused by the Massachusetts charter being withdrawn, but no new governor from England yet appointed, leading to rampant confusion about who was in charge … the genuine psychological trauma so many residents had lived through because of recent wars and battles with Indians, and the valid fear they felt of being in danger from all sides …
… and also — (what a surprise) — local politics and infighting among various wealthy and influential citizens who held grudges and/or wanted other people’s land. This was related to political battles, power politics, and rivalries between Salem VILLAGE (now known as Danvers, where the witch accusations began) and Salem TOWN (now known as just Salem). The first "afflicted" girls were, in fact, living in the house of the resentful, angry new minister in Salem Village, about whom there was much division in the community. (Just coincidentally, many of those accused of being witches fell on the side that was against him.)
(Is anyone seeing any parallels to our current situation yet? Fear and anxiety being stoked for the advantage of wealthy capitalists? With innocent people being harmed in the middle?)
To modern readers it will be mind-boggling to read how people were condemned to death solely on the basis of “spectral evidence”. For example, if I claimed that the “spectre” of my neighbor was appearing to me and harassing and torturing me, then it wasn’t up to me to prove my neighbor was doing that.
No, it was then up to my neighbor to somehow prove she wasn’t coming to me in a spirit form to harass and torture me. It was looking-glass logic, but with people’s lives in the balance.
MORE WEIGHT centers around the story of Giles Corey and his wife, Martha (as well as Martha’s half-Native American son, Benoni) — both accused of being witches, and both killed.
[A bit of background: Wickey was born and raised right in the heart of these places and grew up hearing about all these people. While in the middle of work on his book, he actually discovered that one of the murdered “witches” — Mary Easty — was his tenth-great grandmother. Thus he is also related to two of the most famous of the so-called “witches” — Mary’s two sisters, the saintly Rebecca Nurse (also killed), and Sarah Cloyce (imprisoned in a dark, isolated shed for months, but finally released).]
Giles Corey was a cantankerous 80-year-old man who had led a questionable life in some ways — quarrelsome, accused of killing someone by beating him to death (likely true) — but he had recently remarried and was trying hard to be a good man. In the end Corey was not hung, but pressed (crushed) to death, because he simply refused to speak in court to make even the preliminary statement required before entering a plea. Thus, the court was stuck on a matter of procedure and couldn’t proceed. He was pressed as a form of torture, to get him to say “By God and my Country” — but even then he refused and his torture became fatal as, over three days, they piled more and more large, heavy stones on him as he lay under a board.
When it was demanded one final time that he say the words, Corey supposedly replied, “More weight!” — likely his last words before dying (graphically and gruesomely depicted in the comic, but based on a real eyewitness account of the effects being pressed to death has on the human body). Martha Corey was hung a few days later.
But … the story doesn’t end there. Some comments under MORE WEIGHT’s listing on Amazon ask why Wickey has also included sequences set in the 1860s — scenes in which the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne and poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wander the streets of 19th century Salem, at a time when Longfellow was attempting to write a play about Giles Corey.
The answer lies in a quote from Hawthorne’s sister — that “Salem is a series of pasts.” For, befitting the book’s subtitle (“A Salem Story”), MORE WEIGHT also explores the aftereffects of the tragic 1692 events on the city — because, almost immediately after the executions, within a few months of them, the whole town did a big “Whoops!”, realizing it had just murdered a bunch of innocent people.
Realizing its mistake, Salem immediately leapt into action to … um … cover up and forget about the whole thing. For centuries.
One of Salem's pasts included people like Hawthorne and Longfellow finally starting to wrestle with the shame of the city's history, rather than just ignoring it. That led to some backlash and animus against them. That is part of Salem's story too.
One aspect of Wickey’s storytelling that really resonated with me is his sense of time. I’ve always had a nagging feeling that if one could get a paint scraper and scratch away at the surface of the world, one might be able to peek through layers of time and history to see what has happened in that very spot in the past — what is still occurring there in the eternal NOW, that close and present.
Similarly, Wickey jumps around in time: For example, in one panel we see Giles Corey’s broken, bloody corpse being tossed into an unmarked grave in a field by a dirt road, and the gravediggers driving away in their cart.
Jump cut: The very next panel shows that road and field as it is today, with power lines everywhere and cars passing a convenience store, drivers and customers going about their everyday lives, completely oblivious to what happened right on that spot 300 years earlier.
The past is always living right below the surface in MORE WEIGHT. (image © Ben Wickey)
As the book proceeds, different time periods start overlapping, until finally, in the hallucinatory climax, 1692, 1865, and 2025 all come together at the site of the dark, dank jailhouse where the “witches” were held.
Why 2025? Because the story of Salem continues into the present day — and not in an entirely positive way. To its current shame, Salem has come to crassly exploit and commercialize the witch hunts of 1692, styling itself “The Witch City” -- with witches on broomsticks even appearing on police cars, and a Witch City Mall -- and Salem becoming a Halloween destination for literally millions of people every year. Modern-day, self-proclaimed “witches” have also swarmed to Salem — many NOT of integrity, with scores of rip-off “psychic” shops now infesting the city.
Yet, as Wickey repeatedly points out — there weren't any witches in 1692. Salem’s history has ZERO to do with witches (or Halloween). There were only innocent people, falsely accused, tortured, and murdered. The last thing those victims would have wanted was to be associated with witches and witchcraft. The thought was so repugnant to them that they were willing to die rather than associate their names with witchcraft. (In another outrage, people who lied and “confessed” to being witches, and then “repented”, were allowed to live — especially if they lied and “named names” and accused other innocent people.)
Wickey writes very personally of his mixed feelings — his love for Salem and its history, as well as for Halloween — but also his anger and contempt at the way the city has exploited that shameful chapter of its history, with Salem even reluctant to exonerate all the accused “witches” until recent decades, because as one politician actually said: “If we exonerate them, what will become of our tourist trade?”
What Salem is pretty much doing, to this day, is the equivalent of if the Jack the Ripper section of London pandered to tourism by promoting cute caricatures of butchered prostitutes. When the city recently put up an ugly statue of Elizabeth Montgomery from Bewitched in downtown Salem to celebrate that sitcom’s connection to the city — (ironically, the statue literally and crassly stands on the very plot of ground where the chief witch-killing judge’s home had been) — one person disgustedly suggested that maybe Auschwitz might similarly put up a statue of Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes.)
And while open to spirituality in general, and even expressing fondness and respect for modern-day Wiccans and pagans of integrity, Wickey has some very harsh words for a school of modern day “witches” who have, to be blunt, hijacked the Salem victims, taking possession of them for their own purposes — claiming those victims were actual, REAL witches — supposedly pagan followers of the so-called “Old Religion” — and even going so far as to claim, “They died for our freedom!”
Nothing could be further from the truth. They died because people lied about them. And because other people believed the lies. That’s all. As Wickey points out, if that murderous miscarriage of justice had never happened, Salem would be a far different place today — and one without millions of tourists pouring money into the local economy.
Wickey also expresses concern at the lack of recognition, even among modern self-professed witches, that in various parts of the world today (Africa and India, for example) this is still going on. Today. Right now. There are still witch hunts happening, with people — including elderly women and children — dragged from their homes and hung and burned — exactly analogous to what happened in Salem in 1692. It could be happening right now, even as you read this. (He also contrasts the brutal reality of these literal witch hunts with the way that phrase has been so cheapened, with Trump regularly claiming that the Salem victims supposedly “had more due process than he’s had.”)
MORE WEIGHT is a dense book -- both in terms of the beautiful, detailed, varied artwork — (the different time periods are depicted in different styles, from the ironically cartoony to depict the tragedies of 1692, to more realistic as time marches forward) — as well as the unapologetically wordy and old-fashioned writing. It is so full of information that I found it best to read a little at a time, then take some time away to think and absorb. (The book actually contains over fifty pages of minutely researched, small-print endnotes. How many comic books can say that?) I found it a book to be read over time, not "binged". MORE WEIGHT is a book and story that requires effort to glean its full rewards.
Since Ben Wickey is an animator, as well as a writer and illustrator, his publishers asked if he would like to do the promotional trailer for MORE WEIGHT himself — so of course he said yes, and he asked me to provide the music. Here it is, with the various shots directly based on panels from the comic book:
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(Available at Amazon):
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