Written by Joe Krzyston
In a move sure to invite the ire of college students and the amusement of residents, the City of Salem announced a plan today to reenact the Salem Witch Trials of colonial lore with Roanoke College students. The plan was a long time in the making, and it was met with its fair share of hurdles and obstacles.
“It was tough,” said a representative of the city, “getting through all the legal hurdles with the original Salem, Massachusetts. Apparently they laid an intellectual property claim to the whole ‘witch-hunt’ idea back in the day. But we checked with legal, and it turns out if you make it a little different, you can do it.”
College students were a natural choice. Indeed, the witch hunt is to involve little more than a typical police patrol on a Friday night.
“Back in colonial times, the idea was that a person accused of witchcraft was pretty much guaranteed to be a witch. Nowadays, there’s a similar operating assumption, which is that if we see a Roanoke College student out after dark, they’re probably up to no good. You know, to make it different than the original witch trials? Legal stuff. Anyway, it’s pretty easy to figure something they’re up to, which makes us confident that the trials will be a rousing success.”
While the original Salem witches were subject to death, our Salem has agreed to be marginally more lenient. A weekend in jail and over a thousand dollars in legal fees is implemented in lieu of the traditional drowning and burning of the sixteen hundreds. Students met the news with little more than a shrug.
“I mean, it doesn’t sound like very much is different,” said one RC student. “I actually had figured that was the idea all along.”
