Aldric Fenn
Salem, Massachusetts sells one thing better than any city in America: the feeling of standing somewhere the rules of reality have worn thin.In 1970, a former nightclub dancer named Laurie Cabot opened a shop, put the word 'witch' on the sign, and set off a chain of events that would turn a town ashamed of its own 1692 atrocity into a billion-dollar seasonal economy. Fifty years later, Salem’s occult marketplace is a tangle of feuding warlocks, dueling 'official' witches’ balls, a fortune-telling licensing board that doubles as a cartel, a curse-removal fraud case, a housing crisis its own tourism dollars helped create - and, most recently, a comedian’s cursed-doll museum that got publicly disowned by its own landlord.Aldric Fenn - Elder Warden of the Green Circle Tradition and a working witch for three decades - goes inside Salem’s economy of manufactured dread to ask the question the town’s tourism board would rather you didn’t: when a whole city discovers that its most valuable asset is a feeling nobody can verify, who actually profits, who gets left holding the bill, and what does it cost everyone else?Equal parts investigative history, cultural criticism, and insider account, Witch City, Inc. is the story of what happens when belief becomes an industry - told by someone who has never stopped believing, and never stopped asking hard questions about the people who sell it.
