It is well known that the victims executed as witches on Gallows Hill in Salem, in 1692, were thrown into mere shallow graves or crevices in the ledge under the gallows, where the nature of the ground did not allow complete burial, so that it was stated at the time that portions of the bodies were hardly covered at all. It was natural that the relatives of those thus cruelly put to death and left practically without burial, should, where they were able and courageous enough for the dangerous undertaking, remove the bodies to their homes for interment. It is the tradition that this was done in several cases, secretly and during the night, that it might not incur the opposition of the frenzied and deluded people. This removal was made by the children of Rebecca Nourse, and a beautiful monument now marks the spot to which her body was removed. There is a similar tradition in the Procter family, and there is good reason to believe that his body was removed in a similar manner. But if so, the necessary secrecy with which the sad duty was performed has caused the place where he was buried to be known only by the slender thread of tradition which I have mentioned. The boulder inscribed to the memory of John Procter, which was dedicated this past year at the junction of Lowell and Summit Streets in Peabody, must be considered to have been placed there not as indicating the locality of his burial, but because that was the most suitable and available ground in the near neighborhood of the house where for so many years and at the time of his death he lived as the tenant of the great Downing Farm. There was the entrance to the Farm from Salem, and from that spot one obtains a full view of the farm house where he lived, believed to be in part still standing on the same site, and of the fine and far extending tillage land which probably first attracted the admiration of Emanuel Downing two hundred and seventy years ago, and is now found so attractive and admirably suited to the purposes of a golf ground by the Salem Country Club. What is now known as the Procter Tomb on the north side of Lowell Street at the southeastern corner of the Downing Farm is of modern origin. We cannot believe that John Procter's family would have deposited his body in ground to which they then had no title except as tenants. At the time of the imprisonment of John Procter and his wife Elizabeth the family was no doubt broken up and the house stripped of everything that could be taken away to pay the fees of arrest and imprisonment. The great farm was no longer their home and they were not again in a position to return to and occupy it as their own until nearly a decade had passed, when, through the efforts of Thorndike, one of the sons of John Procter, the Downing Farm in its entirety was purchased from Charles, the grandson of Emanuel Downing and son of Sir George Downing, then deceased.