8 - The Ways Of A Witch

"My mother says I must not pass too near that glass ... she is afraid that I will see ... a little Witch that looks like me ..."

(Sarah Morgan Bryant Piatt)

What's it like to be a witch in the modern-day world? If someone says she is a witch, there are many ways in which to react:

1. She really is!
2. She is lying!
3. She thinks she is - and since there is no such person - she is crazy!
4. She knows she is not - but thinks you are crazy!

A real witch doesn't care what people think about it, because what they think doesn't change what is. A witch doesn't behave obnoxiously, going around and declaring she is a witch, at a local church meeting, for example, just for the shock value, any more than witches fly about scaring people on Halloween.

Why go about making people in your society unhappy or upset - without a reason? On the other hand, witches do not hide out in dimly lit rooms, seldom emerging. Personally, I am very much accustomed to public exposure. I speak at numerous club luncheons and am the centre of attention for thousands and thousands of people when I do two-way radio broadcasts for four hours at a time. I was the first astrologer in the United States to broadcast on a large, metropolitan station, and my newspaper column has been read by millions.

Witchcraft is my method of doing things, the way I operate. It is a modus operandi. A witch is a female who is able to understand your thoughts, read your emotions - to be psychic - and yet, not only receive thoughts but send them, project emotion and change destiny. A witch is not passive; she is an activist.

My husband knows I'm a witch. With reason. We've had a lot of weird things happen to us, and I've told him in advance many things that are going to happen. He knows I'm psychic. He knows that I pick up things before they happen and that I'm somehow aware. There is a metal piece on the gate that jingles when anyone comes in. Sometimes I hear the jingle, and I go to open the door, but my husband isn't there.

So I put dinner on anyway, and in no more time than it takes to drive up the hill, maybe ten minutes later, he arrives. And, you can figure how it happens: As soon as he reached the bottom of the hill, he had the mental reaction, "Well, I'm home," and I would pick this up.

Maybe it will sound just too, too typical of a witch, but I DO live in a haunted house. We have all sorts of manifestations. One ghost that's almost always around is a child-sized one who for some reason always stands just a few feet from the piano in our living room. There is nothing to see, just the strong odour of decaying roses, which has been present off and on for years in this particular spot. Many people notice it and ask about it. We have no roses in our garden, but there were some, years ago.

The house was built by a man who lived in it for years with his family. It sits high in the Mount Washington area northeast of downtown Los Angeles, surrounded by tangled vines and foliage. We know that there were three violent deaths in the family who previously resided there, in close succession, shortly before we moved in.

There are many unusual things about the house. We had to remove two doors to rooms inside because they wouldn't stay open. As soon as anyone would enter the room, the door would slam, and it created such a disturbing influence we had to remove them.

Other ghosts haunt our home too. One persistent ghost comes to mind in support of the belief that such projections may be uncontrolled energy bursts from a restless, living mind also occupying the house. The ghost appeared for the first time shortly after the family returned home from travelling through Europe.

A series of hardships beset us: sickness, storms, and the like. Each of the children came down, one after another, with one childhood disease after another, and I got all of them in turn. Finally I came down with mononucleosis and was forced to stay in bed for a long period of time, which was difficult for me because I am rarely sick and am always active.

My husband discovered the ghost. He was the first. He used to start out the day very early to get ready for work. While he was shaving, he was accustomed to hearing the children going by on their way to the front room to watch the early morning cartoons on television. One morning, a little bit TOO early, he heard something shuffling from the children's bedroom down the corridor, and he assumed it was the kids; when he called out to them, however, and then investigated, no one was up; no one was in the front room, no one was stirring.

It continued to happen every day, so that he could listen carefully and distinguish a definite shuffling noise, and the direction it took. There was no explanation for it, except that it disappeared after I regained my strength. Our guess was that the noises were an extension of my own psyche, which in sickness I was no longer controlling. In addition to the shuffling, there was frequently a noise like a deep sigh, exactly the kind of sigh I frequently use when exasperated. I think the ghost was me, my wild, restless, uncontrolled unconscious, roaming around free.

Another ghost, manifesting itself in a completely different way, often appears in our doorway. Because our home is high in the hills and cut off from visibility by heavy foliage and trees, light cannot reach this area of the house. There is no way, not even from an airplane, that light from the outside could penetrate the point where this happens. But out of nowhere, there are little explosions of light, child-sized, sometimes taking the shape of a cone.

The flashes come and go with equal mystery. No reflections, no prisms could cast that burst of light. We alway check and find nothing. Many of our friends have witnessed the phenomenon and are mystified.

Speaking of lights, I remember that when we were on the road driving in Italy one night I suddenly screamed and told my husband, "Watch out, there's a truck!" Well, there wasn't a thing on the road in our lane, but because I had screamed that there was a truck in our lane, he pulled over to the kerb, as far as he could go, and at that split second, a truck came up over a hill, straight at the lane where we had been driving. That's a kind of ghost, a ghost of a truck.

My mother had many psychic experiences. I recall one night a woman who had been a madam had been found strangled, and the story appeared in a New York newspaper. My mother felt, in a dream-like vision that night, that the murdered woman came to our home and told her that she had a daughter that nobody knew about, and that somebody had to help her because her life was in danger.

My mother woke us all up, and we tried to figure out what to do, but my mother did not know this woman or anything about her except what had been in the paper. There was nothing we could do. The next morning, the daughter was found dead in a distant city, she had committed suicide. The discovery of her body was the first indication that the woman had a daughter.

I think we are all turned-in to a wild energy-life impulse, and that sometimes something inside us understands a vibration that is outside of us. Or perhaps our inner mind understands the vibrations from all around us at all times, but only lets us become aware of them when there is danger or excessive energetic emotion.

My mother, who is a very powerful witch, has a special spell that I call her "Goodbye Spell." If you meet her, and if she doesn't like you for some reason - maybe she doesn't like your attitude towards her, for example, you'd better be prepared to travel. People she doesn't like go on her get-rid-of list, and she's very successful at it. People on this list just all of a sudden lose their jobs or decide to move thousands of miles away. Somehow they are just removed from the area.

After being in one place for ten or twenty years, they're gone in two weeks after she puts them on that list of hers.

We had one neighbour who lived just a little way down the hill; she was a terrible bother and a real annoyance to me. I projected the thought that she would be out of the neighbourhood in two weeks. And she was. Now you can say that what really happened was that perhaps I picked up telepathically, through her subconscious, the fact that she already had plans to leave, and that triggered me into casting a spell for her to leave. I won't argue. But the truth is - she did leave!

Witches are very self-centred and consequently don't waste much time casting spells against other people. We are not so much concerned with somebody else failing as with ourselves succeeding. If you fail as a by-product of my success, that's something else again. But I'm not going to waste energy trying to knock you down. So I find it difficult to believe that most of the people who think they are hexed by witches really are. They may be just hexed by themselves, and a good way to get rid of that is to start casting spells in another direction.

Once, however, I felt that a woman I knew had been malicious long enough. It so happened that she was a member of a group of couples that were going to dinner one night. Well, another witch and I decided we would work a spell that would give the woman stomach cramps that were strong enough for her to leave the table at 9 p.m. At exactly that time, she got up from the table and ran to the John. Later, she mentioned she had severe stomach cramps - out of the blue. So once in a while I fool around, but to sustain a hex takes so much energy that I could use elsewhere, I just don't want to be bothered. I'd rather spend the time psyching myself and projecting constructive emotions.

Many primitive people don't want to have their picture taken. Just an old superstition? Well, I had a spell worked against me by some crazy witches a few years ago, and they used a photograph of me to concentrate on. Their idea was to plant in me the seeds of self-destruction.

My mother was in New York, and while there, she visited some psychic friends. Friends and family - all of them had a feeling that something was being done to me. What happened, actually, was that I was getting extremely rushed. I didn't attribute it to witchcraft. I just thought I was becoming involved in hectic situations for other reasons. When you are rushed and you're nervous, you seem to do everything wrong, and then other things go wrong and all parts of your life are affected as a consequence.

You're not at your best, and in the end you're bound to slip up. The idea of the hex is to get you into a nervous state, then depressed and to the point of feeling that nothing is worthwhile. I was getting a bit jumpy. A dog came along and had eight puppies on the front door step. The cleaning lady who came to the house twice a week, who didn't know anything about the psychic's warnings, kept telling me that something was wrong with the house.

She insisted that some kind of wind was blowing through the house; she would go from one end of the place to the other cleaning and by the time she was done, the "wind" had disrupted everything behind her. This is interesting, because if those witches were affecting only me and my own self, getting through to me and making me feel funny, how could they get through to me enough that objects in my home could be manipulated? Newspapers and magazines were flying about; clothes were falling off their hangers.

My mother called me from New York that night and asked what was going on. Then she suggested the witches we knew should get together immediately, not in the same place, of course, but at the same time, in order to concentrate on whatever force was coming in, repel it, and send it back to where it came from. We cast a spell. The whole situation cleared up. Everything righted itself.

Later I discovered, via the Mandrake Vine, that a woman who couldn't stand me had taken my photograph, and she and some people who were studying witchcraft concentrated on my photograph every day and attempted to plant havoc in my life. Was what happened just our imagination? I doubt it. We had felt all the strange things happening before I had heard from my mother and friends sensing the spell against me. So what was it? Could the spell have caused such chaos in my subconscious that I was creating disorder everywhere in the house?

Witchcraft, from my point of view, is not supernatural, but it certainly is a supernormal activity. It's the way I operate. For me, being a witch is a way of being. Witchcraft is not a talent; it's a method. Being psychic is a condition that could exist for anyone. I am psychic. I utilize witchcraft. I do shows demonstrating what I do, but I'm also a good publicist. I write. I even sing. And many people in various professions also do this. Many fortune tellers are not psychic and not witches. Some people are sensitive, some are not. Being a witch is one facet of what I am, not my entirety.

Some people figure that, with a psychic grasp of the future, I should spend all my time at the race track, making big bets to get rich. Well, there are other, steadier ways to get ahead in life. Being psychic would help me whether I was a dancer, singer, or worked in a bank. Many lawyers practice witchcraft but are not fortune tellers and don't go to the races. Many singers enjoy singing and make money at it incidentally. Why, then, should I go to the races just because I'm a witch?

As a witch, I enjoy establishing a psychic rapport with someone. I do it quickly, and I have become addicted to the sensation, just as people who enjoy making love keep attempting to recreate the experience. The radio offers me, through two-way contact with the public, a delightful supply of psychic stuff - for me to "rapport."

When people ask if I get together with other witches and I say, "No, very rarely," they want to know if there is competition between witches. My answer is that I'm not competitive with a witch who is a housewife but I would be competitive with any woman who was after a job I wanted, witch or not. For instance, I like doing radio and television shows, and I would compete with a woman who was after the same show I wanted. Witchcraft is not my profession, although it is rapidly becoming something like that. I am me, and I have nothing in common with any other witch. If I were not a witch, I'd probably be singing or dancing or doing anything I could to get in front of an audience. It just so happens that I'm a witch.

Many witches on the lunatic or fake fringe advocate doing their stuff very hush-hush, but I don't have the kind of personality to do things secretly. I know some women who practice witchcraft, keep quiet about it, and worry that they might someday surprise their husbands. I don't keep quiet about anything, not even about being a witch. I'm not quiet about my political or religious views so I'm not likely to be quiet about that. Most witches I know make no bones about it, and everybody knows what they are.

When I was a teenager I worked at fortune-reading parties. They were like the Tupperware parties of today. One woman would invite ten or fifteen others who would pay for their reading, and the hostess would get her fortune told free. One day a woman came through the door of the kitchen, where I was doing these readings one at a time. The minute she walked through the door I looked at her and became so sad that I could not stop crying.

Tears just poured out of me. She sat down at the table with me, and I was terribly embarrassed. I said, "I'm awfully sorry, but I feel so overwhelmed with sadness that I don't know what's wrong with me." She said, "That's right; you've got it right," and that was my reading for her. She sat there crying, and I sat there crying with her. I never said another word, and after a half hour she got up and went into the other room and told everybody I was marvellous.

I felt such an immediate rapport with her that her whole life had hit me, and I was so overcome that there was nothing to say. Later I heard that she had had many ghastly things happen to her; she had a horrible life. I had never seen her before, but somehow I could feel it. I could not have told her the specific things that happened to her, but I was drowning in sorrow. I've always been very good at getting this type of psychic impression - something emotional that concerns the person I am in contact with. But it doesn't always work.

I remember another woman who came to me, and I threw the cards out for a reading. Suddenly I became immobilized and did not want to give her a reading. She demanded, "Well, aren't you going to tell me anything?" I said no; I just told her I didn't feel like it. She got up and left and just then I did get an impression: I visualized her grabbing somebody by the throat and choking him to death. I gave several other readings that night.

The party was soon over and forgotten, but about a week later the hostess called me and said I certainly had disturbed the woman I had refused. The hostess said, "She said if she ever sees you again, she'll choke you to death." I have never lied in a reading. I have never made up or changed things I felt. But I have many times refused a reading, and I don't care how people react; I just don't believe that some things should be brought up, and maybe encouraged to happen. I feel that we're not really sure what takes place between two people in a situation like that.

We know that there is an exchange of ideas and thoughts, but if I'm picking up something from you, I'm not really sure it's a thing that you have in your subconscious that you want to do or plan to do. Maybe you feel consciously you shouldn't do it, and maybe there's every good reason why you shouldn't; maybe it's something you will never do, but have strong feelings about. Sometimes I pick things up that really are going to happen that nobody knows about, but there's really no way to distinguish what it is that is received mentally.

So it must be considered just an intriguing experiment in telepathy to tell someone what they're thinking and feeling, but just because I tell you what you are thinking and feeling doesn't mean that you should race out and do it. That's a problem a witch runs into all the time.

One woman called, and I immediately felt very strongly that there was something that would take her back east. She asked me, "Should I go east?" I said, "Are you in a position at this time to go back east?" She said she was. I said, "Do you have enough money to do this?" Again she replied affirmatively. I asked, "Do you have any ties here to keep you from going back east?" She said she did not. I asked, "Do you want to do it?" She said yes, she did. I told her, "Well, if you want to do it, and you have no ties here to keep you from doing it, and you can afford to do it, do it." She said, "Should I?" I said, "Yes." She said, "God bless you!"

Actually I told her nothing she did not know or feel, just cleared up what was in her mind, what she felt. That's not giving advice, to point out what she desired. She was very thankful, but I didn't send her east: She wanted to go. I'm in favour of people doing what they want to do when they can do it.

A witch constantly gets impressions of a telepathic nature. When I was driving home, recently, I was very depressed about a dress that a seamstress had just turned out for me. It looked very ordinary, and what's the sense of getting a dress made if it's going to look like any dress you can buy off the rack in a store? On the way home I was thinking that I should find somebody who is a competent seamstress but who has no need to be a designer; that way I could design my own clothes without having to sew them.

Finding somebody who only wanted to sew was the problem. It was about 6 p.m., and while driving on the freeway this thought was very strong. I decided to call my sister, who lives in another town, and maybe there find someone. So I called her at 9 p.m. and asked if she knew a seamstress. She said she would call a friend the next morning and then call me back. Instead, my sister called to say that the seamstress had called her!

Now, that's understandable. I had talked to my sister, and we had put a thought out together between the two of us. The woman was probably contacted telepathically and called because she thought my sister wanted her for something. However, the woman said she hadn't started to think about my sister at 9 p.m. Rather, she had started to think about her at 6 p.m. She heard my sister's voice call her at that time and believed that something had happened.

Her husband had told her it was just her imagination, but she was impelled to call early Sunday to see. That means she didn't pick up the thought because we were talking about her; she picked up the thought at 6 p.m. - before I even knew she was the woman we were going to get in touch with! That's a different kind of a psychic thing.

My sister has a mysterious psychic link with all other members of the family. It frequently happens that I have the urge to telephone her but postpone the call because it might be a time of day that she is busy with her children - or maybe it will be too late in the evening. When this happens, when I want to talk to her but for some reason do not, she hears me talking in another room of her house. She hears a mumbling and knows it's me. So she telephones me and says, "What is it you want?"

This strange power extends even further: Whenever any member of the family dies, that member will appear to her, in her home, exactly as they are. So if an older member of the family, someone we know to be physically far away, walks into her house late at night, we fear the worst. Invariably an emergency telephone call comes later to inform us of the death. We gulp and say, "We know."

There seems to be no end to the mysterious things that happen every day in the life of a witch. But who knows, perhaps the strange things are not inexplicable, perhaps they could happen to everybody, except that most people are not attuned to the sixth sense, the extra sense, the way witches are.

Whenever there is an unusual happening in my life, I try to explain it to myself in terms of psychic energy. Somehow out in the air that separates, and yet connects, all human beings, like water links all fish to one another, something is able to travel between us. We don't know enough about the nature of energy and the power of the mind to refute this possibility, and the sometimes amazing cases of extra sensory perception that occur and which scientists have verified, speak volumes in favour of the strange phenomena.

The thing that most persuades me to adopt this theory of the existence of another force beyond everyday experience is the feeling that comes over me when I am giving psychic impressions of complete strangers. All I know for sure is that when I talk with them I feel united with them. Not in a spiritual or brotherly sense - but in a joyful sense similar to love. I feel we have blended our personalities for an instant.

There is no touch, no word, nothing, so what has made this contact? What is that invisible thing that happens? If such a mental contact can be made between any two people, then there must be a whole world of unexplored communication that lies beyond the horizon of the mind, waiting to be explored. And since it is a bond between humans, not unlike love, it seems very desirable that we do explore it.