By Larry Claflin Jr.
SALEM — Even in broad daylight — with the lights on — Life and Death Walking Tours is a dark place. And its owners prefer things that way.
With a gallery and storefront in Salem's Museum Place Mall, the new tour company gives an expected nod to the Salem witch trials, but it's keenly focused on Salem's darker side — "a long and cursed history of horrific murders and violent criminals."
Life and Death Tours is co-owned by Salem residents Nichole Feree and Rhys Babich, friends who share a common fascination with all things macabre. They opened in April and give tours concentrated on gory tales of past murders, suicides and hauntings in downtown Salem.
"There's a lot of true crime (in Salem), a lot of true stories that haven't been heard in 100 years or more," according to Babich, who said he researched tales through newspapers, diaries and other documents at the Salem Public Library and Phillips Library last winter. "We sort of them dug them up from the crypt, so to speak."
Babich has early memories of his father taking him to local cemeteries to study gravestones, from which he said you can learn a lot about a region if you take the time.
"I've always been interested in history, and I have a lot of patience, a prerequisite for research," he said.
During the candlelit trek, people learn about Josie Manning, a dressmaker who was bludgeoned to death and found next to her lover, James Flynn, after a fire in her Central Street shop in 1896, and an unnamed man who may have met his end in a case of spontaneous human combustion in a Washington Square rooming house in 1944. The tour ends with the story of James Linehan of Fitchburg, a vagabond whose body was identified by his wife and mother following his "suicide" on Salem Common. Problem is, the real James Linehan returned home a year later, and an unidentified corpse still lies in a Fitchburg grave.
"A lot of Salem's history hasn't been told," said Feree, a former marketing manager who worked part time for another Salem tour company for six years before going into business with Babich.
Feree and Babich predict that business will be brisk this fall, with tourists who return to Salem looking for something new and different. And the current fascination with true-crime television should attract customers, Feree said.
Before a tour, participants gather in Life and Death's retail spot, an "Oddities and Curios Shop" stocked with a hodgepodge of macabre items — Victorian-era mourning cards, and a rare embalmer's kit, bone saw and skull drill from the 1930s. There are also Salem Official Body Bags and bracelets made from bone by Babich's mother, who has X-rays of her surgically repaired back hanging from the ceiling.
The vintage stuff, including Absinthe accessories and an examination table from the '40s, are procured from collectors, antique fairs and estate sales.
"Everything is on the darker side, but not too scary. We don't want to frighten people," Babich said. "We're doing this to have a good time and enjoy ourselves. We're not morbid people."
In grade school, Feree said she wrote a letter to her "favorite celebrity," the horror-film actor Vincent Price.
"I love Halloween. I love witches and all the supernatural," said Feree, while wearing a pendant adorned with a post-mortem photo of an infant from the 1800s. "The earliest books I read were related to witches and supernatural things; I've just always loved them."
Besides being business partners, Feree and Babich play music together: She often tours as Orange Nichole, and Babich backs her up.
"It's sugar-sweet pop with a kind of dark twist at the end," Babich said about the songs, in which they sing and play guitar.
If the tours and oddities don't pique your interest, there's also the Ghastly Gallery, where torture devices of Nuremberg Castle will be on display in mid-July, followed by an exhibit, "The Art of the Crime Scene," in mid-August.
According to Babich, the place has something for everyone.
"Death is the thing we all have in common," he said.
