A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts 

Edgar Award-winning travel writer spends an autumn living in one of America's spookiest tourist destinations: Salem, Massachusetts
Salem, Massachusetts, may be the strangest city on the planet. A single event in its 400 years of history―the Salem Witch Trials of 1692―transformed it into the Capital of Creepy in America. But Salem is a seasonal town―and its season happens to be Halloween. Every October, this small city of 40,000 swells to more than a quarter million as witches, goblins, ghouls, and ghosts (and their admirers) descend on Essex Street. For the fall of 2015, occult enthusiast and Edgar Award-winning writer J.W. Ocker moved his family of four to downtown Salem to experience firsthand a season with the witch, visiting all of its historical sites and macabre attractions. In between, he interviews its leaders and citizens, its entrepreneurs and visitors, its street performers and Wiccans, its psychics and critics, creating a picture of this unique place and the people who revel in, or merely weather, its witchiness. 25 b/w photographs

J. W. Ocker is the Edgar Award-winning author of Poe-Land: The Hallowed Haunts of Edgar Allan Poe. He runs the website OTIS: Odd Things I've Seen (Oddthingsiveseen.com), where he chronicles his visits to various oddities of culture, art, nature, and history. His first two books, The New England Grimpendium and The New York Grimpendium are personal travelogues of his visits to deathly sites in those regions. Both won Lowell Thomas Awards from the Society of American Travel Writers. His work has appeared in Rue Morgue Magazine, The Boston Globe, CNN, The Atlantic, and other places people stick writing. He's from Maryland, but has lived in New Hampshire since 2008.