In Halloween Traditions in Boston, Anthony Sammarco discusses the history of the Salem Witchcraft Trials which caused such tremendous anxiety and fear and the deaths of many innocent people in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692, to the decorating of Beacon Hill as a veritable neighborhood of whimsy, with macabre skulls, bones, and cobwebs, to pumpkins and lighted jack o'lanterns.

On the night of November 26, 1898, with a killer storm of historic proportions approaching, the steamer Portland set out from Boston. By the following night, the winter hurricane had sent the vessel to the depths of Massachusetts Bay off Cape Cod, claiming nearly two hundred lives. On the Cape, a few dozen victims of the Portland disaster washed ashore, while ships piled up in harbors, high tides swept away railroad tracks and the landscape and beaches were changed forever. Several Cape Cod mariners went to sea and never returned, caught in the gale’s evil clutches. Local author Don Wilding revisits this disaster and the heroic deeds of the U.S. Life-Saving Service and the Cape’s citizenry in what came to be known as “the Portland Gale.”