I can't say for sure, but I suspect those shadowy figures were some sort of ogres or zombie elephants.
We didn't make too much of it and kept going. Little did we know it, but Salem still had some magic in store for us. Our first hint was that the city government has taken control of the weather.
Apparently they weren't enforcing the snow ban today, but it still turned out sunny.
Bizarre people that we are (Although maybe in Salem's case it makes us fit right in), the first thing we sought out was a cemetery.
This cemetery is on the grounds where Giles Cory was pressed to death. They say that his ghost can sometimes be seen walking the grounds, which indicates that tragedy is soon to befall Salem. That must explain why he mysteriously appeared in this photo:
Megan is going to kill me for suggesting that Giles Cory was a totally awesome looking wizard, but I contend that we have no evidence to suggest that he wasn't.
That's when things got spooky.
We started taking tours through the various museums there. Each turned out to be slightly more ridiculous than the last. We started to let our guard down, thinking that Salem was just squeezing it's tragic history for every penny possible. Unfortunately, as so many have found out, and as so many will, that's when the zombies showed up.
This is no time to think. Just shoot him!
Perhaps you are now saying, "Scott, not every shadowy figure is a zombie." Not only do I disagree with you as a matter of principle, but I offer you this:
Convinced?
Having left our sawed off shotgun in the car, we had no choice but to run for it. Unfortunately, Topher got lost along the way and was discovered by the witches themselves.
Looks like we need to start working on Topher's fear response.
Thankfully, Megan's history major really started pulling its weight when she remembered that witches only eat babies if they've been left outside for a few days. We quickly made our way to the town stocks and snuck away with him.
Why didn't they put him in the baby one on the right there? That's just cruel.
We tried to make a break for it, but the witches sent their familiars after us.
Which one would you say is the bigger imp?
While running for our lives, we found an informative sign that noted that the wharf was the one safe place in town. While I still have no idea what a wharf is, we went for it, not realizing that the wharf was longer than the town of Salem itself.
I know I could look up what a wharf is, but I prefer to be able to make jokes about not knowing what it is.
With the threat of witches and zombies off our backs, we took a moment to take a family photo.
Topher was still a little suspicious.
The wharf was more powerful than we thought. As we returned we found the witches to be decreasing in resolution.
Eventually they just became grayish smudges.
Not only did we vanquish the witches, we were happy to find some friendly faces.
I know it looks like he's pretending like he doesn't know me, but he's just fooling around. We go way back.
Unfortunately, it turned out that most of the pirates were zombies, too.
Things got really dicey when they tried to recruit Topher onto their crew. They gave him a hat to keep, regardless of his decision and offered him a free tattoo, just for signing up. He thought about it, but refused. He didn't even keep the hat.
That was actually a mash-up of scenes from Peter Pan and Speed Racer. I think it worked out pretty well.
We finally realized that things were only going to go downhill from here, wharf or no wharf, and high-tailed it out of Salem. We were worried about what might have followed us or what might await us at home. However, all of our fears were allayed when Falcor made a brief appearance, reminding us of our neverending friendship.
I certainly hope that everyone now has the theme song from Neverending Story stuck in their heads. I know that I will for days.
As a parting, unrelated note, I was looking at our visitor tracker and noticed that some visitors had found us by searching for "Monkey Business with the Huffs." I got excited to see if maybe we had made the big time: Maybe we'd show up on Google's predictive search. All my hopes were dashed when this was all that came up.
Thwarted by Shia Labeouf again. I would say "You could do worse," but I'm not so sure that's true.
