REVIEW: 2025 Salem Witch Trial, Gretchen Wylder, EdFringe 2025 ★★★★

Welcome, sinners, to 2025 Salem Witch Trial!

So says Gretchen Wylder at the start of her solo late night show, and as she draws the audience in with the story of her true yet horrifyingly creepy housing nightmare  – move in with a Christian cult under false pretences, what could go wrong? – one thing becomes clear. There may be no such thing as a sinner, but there is definitely such a thing as hell on earth…

It is obvious that the audience of 2025 Salem Witch Trial is in the hands of an experienced performer from the moment Wylder walks out on stage, dressed in all black jeans and T-shirt, red hair tossed over one shoulder and her face lit up in a big mischievous grin. We’ve just watched an unsettling video clip projected onto the PowerPoint screen at the back of the stage; one where Wylder herself seems to be in the middle of the woods, and in distress. “If something happens to my house, it wasn’t me that did it,” she states, tears in her eyes. 

The growing discomfort in the audience as we all collectively try to decide whether this is acting or real is punctured by that impish Wylder smile as she pops up from backstage with the cheerful cry of, “I’m still alive!” Turns out that yes, that was a real video clip. Wylder is here to tell us all the story of how she, a down on her luck tarot reader with a part time job in Salem, became broke enough to commit a minor bout of identity fraud and lie her way into a Christian commune in the Massachusetts forest in order to buy a little wooden cottage within the cult, sorry, community village. (Why, when you are quite literally psychic, would you do such a thing as attempt to deliberately buy property in a place with such dodgy culty vibes, especially when the cottage itself is almost definitely haunted? Surely there would be some sort of sixth sense – not to mention common sense – warning you off such an idea? Well… as Wylder herself wryly points out, when you’re homeless and desperate you just have to take anything you can get or sleep in your car. Even if your only chance at home ownership requires you to swear your life to Jesus Christ and to forsake the Devil before you can pick up your house keys from the local Elders.)

Wylder’s storytelling abilities keep the room entertained and laughing along throughout this show, but as the tale of her desperation-driven decision to move into Maybury Grove gets slowly darker and more disturbing a more serious tone begins to emerge under all the lesbian jokes and tarot anecdotes. When her new neighbours find out that Wylder bent a few truths in order to fit the religious requirements side of the Christian community housing application it all goes very wrong, very fast, a truly terrifying escalation of threatening behaviour which leaves Wylder ultimately unsafe in her own home. 

There is a certain irony, she points out, that all this is happening in the same place where hysteria against financially independent,  unmarried women led to the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. This community doesn’t seem to have come all that far from the hysteria of four hundred years ago, and by the time Wylder finishes up the story of her brush with genuine danger the audience is left feeling very glad that this all ended with a stage show and not a true crime podcast episode. 

Wylder has an easy going, charming way of talking about her spirituality – “I’m not eating babies, I’m turning herbs into salves to treat my early onset arthritis” – but it’s clear that although she has a sense of humour about craft it’s also a calling she takes seriously. Along with her own personal story Wylder uses the show to introduce ancient female deities such as Asherah and Lilith, and invites us to reimagine religion from the perspective of divine holy women. Religious trauma is an underlying theme throughout 2025 Salem Witch Trial, and it is in these moments – and at the end of the show, although saying anymore about that would be a spoiler – that we feel a sense of Wylder’s reclamation of herself from the conservative Christian dogmas which once ruled her own life, long before she found herself at the Maybury Grove gates.

This is a show which still feels a little in development in some places, but that is hardly surprising considering that Wylder went through the experiences documented within it only last year. For a performance piece which has been put together in under twelve months it’s incredibly well crafted, and the fact that Wylder has made all of this into art rather than solely the topic of many, many therapy sessions is nothing short of remarkable. 

“Sure,” Gretchen Wylder says dryly whilst explaining why she was so reluctant to give up on her dream of house ownership, “it was a potentially haunted cottage in a Christian commune, but it was my potentially haunted cottage in a Christian commune.”

By the end of 2025 Salem Witch Trial the audience feels as though we were in that cottage right alongside her, and by the end of the hour we are equally desperate to escape Maybury Grove and its creepy, unsettling inhabitants. God can’t save you in a place like that…but Lilith might. 

Recommended Drink: A Bloody Mary is the perfect pairing for this show full of folk horror and witchy empowerment. 

Performance of 2025 Salem Witch Trial have now concluded at EdFringe 2025.