Don't eat it. Well, you can if you want, but don't.

I'm concurrently reading two books about Salem, Massachusetts, and the witch trials of 1692. One is on audio, the other in print. Does that count as reading two books at once? I'm going with yes. My eyes and ears are working in shifts.

The audiobook is Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese, historical fiction inspired by the woman who may have given Nathaniel Hawthorne the idea for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. The book in print is Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard, a history of the real-life witch hunt. So, one book is making things up, more or less, while the other reminds me that the truth was plenty horrifying without any help from a novelist.

It's a little like having two tour guides in my head. One is introducing me to Isobel Gamble, a Scottish seamstress who arrives in Salem in 1829 with her troubled apothecary husband, Edward. He soon disappears off to sea, leaving Isobel to fend for herself. Between her remarkable needlework, her mysterious family history, and her growing attraction to a young writer named Nathaniel Hathorne (who will eventually add a w to become Hawthorne), there's plenty of trouble brewing.

My other tour guide, O'Reilly and Dugard, takes me back to 1692, when the strange afflictions of two young girls helped ignite a terrifying wave of accusations. Names like Mercy and Sarah crop up in Salem's history, where neighbors turned against neighbors and more than 200 people were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen were hanged, one man was pressed to death, and others died in prison. No fictional embellishment required.

Both books have Salem, suspicion, and the supernatural on the menu. One serves it with a side of romance and literary intrigue; the other serves it straight up, with a generous helping of human folly. I'm enjoying both, although I may need something cheerful to read next. Perhaps a cookbook. Just not one from 1692.

Here's a little historical tidbit: witches in Salem were not burned at the stake. They were hanged. Giles Corey, who refused to enter a plea, was pressed to death beneath heavy stones. In Scotland and parts of continental Europe, people convicted of witchcraft were sometimes burned, although Scottish executions often involved strangling before the body was burned. So much for the charming Halloween image of a witch and her bubbling cauldron. The real history was considerably uglier.

Now, back to the cake.

It's in Hester that I encountered the witch cake, a particularly revolting remedy from the Salem panic. In 1692, a neighbor advised the Reverend Samuel Parris's enslaved workers, Tituba and John Indian, to make one. The recipe called for rye meal mixed with urine from the afflicted girls. The mixture was baked and fed to a dog in the hope that the animal would reveal the identity of whoever had bewitched them. It never did, but it loved the cake. Clearly, this form of counter-magic was an attempt to fight suspected witchcraft with a little witchcraft of its own. And not the sort of recipe you'd find in a Puritan church cookbook.

The minister condemned the practice, and the episode became another disturbing part of the story. Instead of providing a reliable answer, the cake belonged to the same atmosphere of superstition and fear that helped propel the accusations.

Which brings me to my current reading predicament. I have a fictional woman with mysterious talents whispering in one ear and a historical account of mass hysteria in the other. Both remind me how easily people can mistake fear for evidence, and how dangerous it becomes when everyone else agrees.

So, if someone offers you a witch cake this Halloween, remember: rye meal, urine, and a dog could very well be the ingredients to an unhappy ending. Slice the pumpkin pie, layer it in whipped cream and I'll take my chances with that.