c. 2000 Religion News Service

SALEM, Mass. _ On the surface, Halloween season in this city of witch fame appears to mean little more than a ghoulish good time for 500,000 tourists and $42 million worth of serious fun for the retailers who sell to them.

But witch-emblazoned T-shirts and signs for “eerie events” mask the genuine October tension here between Wiccan pilgrims and Christian pastors who see them as ambassadors of something insidious, even evil.

A few thousand of those who flock to Salem every year at this time are self-proclaimed witches. Local witches, who count themselves at 2,000-plus in this city of 39,000, say their counterparts come from around the world to gather in circles, communicate with the dead and pay homage to the 20 alleged witches who died nearby in the Witch Trials of 1692.

“It’s safe for someone to be a witch in Salem,” said witch and spiritual counselor Therese Pendragon. “That’s why Salem is a witch mecca.”

The Rev. Kenneth Steigler also knows Salem is a witch mecca. He came here in 1991 not only to pastor Wesley United Methodist Church but also to use his expertise in cults to expose what he sees as dangers of witchcraft.

This year, Steigler and area evangelical pastors have given six months of preparation time and raised more than $10,000 to beef up a late October campaign to reach witches and seekers with the gospel. Students from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary will hand out 50,000 anti-Halloween, pro-Jesus tracts. The Wesley Church will have a weeklong open house where dabblers in paganism can hear praise music and testimonies every night through the 31st.

“Here are people looking for spiritual life, a little deceived, and we’re here to say, `Here’s a way to find real spiritual life,”’ Steigler said. The week’s events bear the name “Holy Happenings,” a purposeful twist on Salem’s high-profile tourism campaign known as “Haunted Happenings.”

Steigler’s concern is that seekers, drawn to Salem by promotions and desires for new experiences, “will die spiritually” if they take up Tarot cards, crystals, drugs and free sex to gain “control, authority and power” in their lives. Imitating the novice witch, he says, “I take a bite, then another bite. I lose my sense of right and wrong. I lose my moral compass.”

Not so, say Salem’s witches.

At Crow Haven Corner, Salem’s oldest witch shop and witchcraft hub, the owner says her goal is not just maintaining a thriving business but also helping others become “good spiritual people and then choose their own religion.

“You help people get power in their lives,” said owner Laurie Stathopoulos. “But you tell them, `The first one you have to help is yourself. Before you practice the magic or put a love spell on someone else to love you, you have to love and take care of yourself.”’

Salem’s witches refuse to harm anyone else and don’t worship a devil, according to Stathopoulos. Steigler agrees some don’t, but says those who have advanced through Wicca to Satanism do. Either way, evangelicals find the Oct. 31 rituals troubling.

Minutes before midnight on the 31st, dozens of circles form across Salem to celebrate Samhain _ the pagan new year when “veils are thin” between the living and the dead. Anywhere from 15 to 150 men and women might sit in a given circle. They dot the cityscape from back yards to Gallows Hill, where more than 1,000 marchers pay tribute to those who died for being branded “witches.”

Stathopoulos says circles are disciplined: no booze, no drugs, no one under 18 allowed. She says she’s turned people away this year because so many serious seekers from far away want to communicate with the dead in circles and welcome their own new identities for the coming year in a community setting.

But Steigler fears that witches often recruit newcomers interested in new experiences to take part in the circles. From there, he says, seekers are apt to abandon their moral and spiritual roots.

“One of my greatest joys was helping a Jewish woman, who had been experimenting in Wicca, find her way back to Judaism,” Steigler said.

Tensions in Salem have threatened to become violent at times. Steigler says he received a death threat warning him to stop teaching about cults. Stathopoulos says just this month she found a noose hanging outside her door at home.

Yet with business booming at Crow Haven Corner and other local witch shops, witches say they’re not worried about Christian missionaries.

“We can’t get too bent out about fringe groups,” said witch Michael Pendragon. “Christians are our biggest customers anyway.”

Meanwhile, as Salem gets ready for 80,000 visitors on Halloween and the witch community makes room for thousands of their own, evangelicals are hoping for at least 600 at the Oct. 31 “concert of prayer” from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. But according to Stephanie Petringa, a former Wiccan high priestess who joined the Wesley Church in 1998, few of those considering Wicca will be there.

The church “isn’t prepared to meet the needs of a lot of people,” Petringa said. “I don’t think they have the right or authority to reach out to the pagan community because they don’t understand it. … In the past nine years, I’m the only one who came.”

DEA END MACDONALD