How Did Salem Residents Feel About Halloween 2022 In The Witch City?

SALEM, MA — Halloween in Salem is a festive time filled with wonder, entertainment, history and lots and lots of crowds.

For the latter reason, it can be a conflicting time for residents who may be all for the fun of it but don't exactly enjoy having their city and their lives upended for six weeks or so each fall.

To better help mitigate any aggravations in the holiday's unofficial hometown, the city has devised a survey aimed at determining how this year went with its historic crowds and what can be done in the future to make things a little better for residents and city businesses.

The Haunted Happenings survey can be found here.

The survey is intended to gauge feedback on events, public safety response, public information and other aspects of Haunted Happenings in Salem. This is the 12th year Haunted Happenings has sought this feedback.

The survey will online until noon on Nov. 18.

This year's crowds smashed records in the Witch City with an estimated 921,100 visitors during the month of October.

That number is an 8 percent increase over 2021 and a 36 percent increase over pre-pandemic 2019.

There were 54,700 visitors on Halloween alone — which just about matches the five-year average for visitors on the holiday itself, not counting 2020 when visitors were told to "stay away" from Salem because of the COVID-19 health crisis.

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)