Something Witchy This Way Comes: Fictional Books and Movies About Witches

Witches are portrayed in books and movies in many different ways, and have been showing up in literature for a long, long time. Take Circe from The Odyssey or Morgan Le Fay in the legends of King Arthur. Now, real witches may not have actually been portrayed in The Crucible by Arthur Miller (whose birthday happens to be today!), but you can see the relationship between witchcraft and society during the time of the Salem Witch Trials. If you’re interested in reading or listening to the play, you can check it out in the following formats: print, book on CD, Overdrive ebook and e-audiobook, and hoopla e-audiobook, and the movie adaptation. 

For other fictional portrayals of witches and witchcraft for teens and adults, check out the titles below! Print copies can be reserved on your online account for Curbside Pickup (read the full instructions here). Currently there is no check out fee for DVDs, so now is a good time to reserve them! For electronic versions of titles, all you need is your library card to access them on Overdrive/the Libby app or hoopla.

Fans of the beloved Bewitched series, starring Elizabeth Montgomery as witch and housewife Samantha Stevens, will enjoy the film adaptation (which currently has no check out fee!) with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. For more magical romances, try one of hoopla’s October Movies of the Month, You Cast a Spell On Me, about a warlock who is having problems with his powers after meeting a mortal with whom he has an instant connection; or Hallmark channel’s The Good Witch, about Cassie Nightingale, a mysterious new resident of Middleton who seems to have the magic touch with helping the people in the small town.

also on hoopla

In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, you’ll find out how the character from the popular TV show found out about being a witch, much like how Harry Potter discovers he’s a wizard in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Local residents will appreciate the Salem setting in the movie Hocus Pocus, which even has some scenes shot in Marblehead! Read Hocus Pocus and The All-New Sequel in ebook format on Overdrive or hoopla, or listen to the e-audiobook on Overdrive. 

Click the item covers below for more portrayals of witches, including more witch stories set in Salem or Massachusetts, fairy tale retellings, and more macabre tales to give you goosebumps!

also on hoopla

book or movie

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Explore and Help Museum and Library Archives from Your Computer

You’ve been on the virtual tours. You’ve made recycled art masterpieces and kept up with the real masterpieces, watched live animal feedings, and done science experiments. You’ve successfully done the museum thing during quarantine. Or have you?

Many museums, including some of our museum partners, historical societies, libraries, and the like have preserved their collections in digital archives that anyone can access from the comfort of their own home. These archives contain the rare, important, illuminating, and sometimes just plain weird documents that tell our collective story.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum is the primary archive of all documents relating to the life and work of President John F. Kennedy and his administration. It is also the primary repository of the papers of Ernest Hemingway. Visit their website to view some of JFK’s personal papers and photographs from his life, and listen to audio of his speeches and oral histories from those that knew him best.

The Cape Ann Museum has put together an entire online archival exhibition, Unfolding Histories: Cape Ann Before 1900, exploring the early history of Cape Ann, in addition to their thorough list of digital resources for continuing research projects from home. You can even try your hand at creating your own archival content during this moment in history, with some advice on creating oral histories with your family members.

The Museum of Science Collective Memory archive tells the fascinating history of the museum through staff discussions, photographs and artifacts, and quizzes! Be sure to check out the Junior Explorers Bulletin from 1945, their collection of animal photography, and invertebrate glass models.

The Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum is also a wonderful resource for documents on the cultural heritage of Massachusetts. Through a new digitization initiative, some of the Phillips Library’s extensive collection of manuscripts, photographs, maritime journals, and even documents from the Salem Witch Trials, are now available online.

And if you’d like to do more, many institutions welcome volunteers to transcribe documents to make them more accessible. All it takes is a computer, patience, and time! 

By the People from the Library of Congress is a crowdsourced effort to transcribe and tag digitized content from the Library’s collections, including letters to Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman’s writings, documents from the Women’s Suffrage movement, and more. 

The Smithsonian Museum’s Transcription Center is also full of interesting transcription projects, including Sally Ride’s papers. 

Atlas Obscura has also compiled two lists of various ways to volunteer remotely, such as tagging photos of America’s scenic byways for the National Archives, transcribing science fiction fanzine from the 1930s, and fixing transcripts from public broadcasts, including a conversation with James Baldwin. Check out more of their ideas here and here to get started today!

You can also visit the Abbot Public Library’s own digital archive, featuring articles from the Marblehead Messenger and Marblehead Reporter!