An “explosive device” was discovered on the porch of the Satanic Temple in Salem Monday afternoon, the latest in a series of bomb threats and hate crimes directed toward the temple, police said.
The device was thrown onto the porch at the temple on Bridge Street in Salem around 4:14 a.m. Monday, where it sat for nearly 12 hours while the building was unoccupied, Salem Police said in a statement posted to Facebook. A staff member discovered the device around 4 p.m. Monday, triggering a response from the State Police Bomb Squad, which shut down the immediate area surrounding the temple to conduct a sweep.
State Police bomb technicians discovered the device was “no longer a threat” and explosive ordinance detection K9s searched the area for possible secondary explosives, but did not find any, according to the statement.
Monday was not the first time a threat or hate crime has taken place at the temple in recent years.
In 2022, a Chelsea man was accused of intentionally setting fire to the temple, an act police say he described as a hate crime. Earlier this year, Salem and State Police went to the temple for a reported bomb threat on Feb. 27, the second threat in a matter of months, after a Michigan man who police say was plotting to bomb the temple was arrested in that state in January, according to police.
The temple’s mission is “to encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits,” according to its website.
