NEWS YOU CAN USE? Want to curse a former lover? There’s a spell for that on Etsy.
The scent of dried sage and beeswax does not normally travel over the internet but for a growing group of spiritual consumers, the magic begins with a Google search.
Self-styled witches are selling spells on Etsy and TikTok for good luck or an increased social media following to finding love, curing male baldness and enacting revenge, with prices going as high as several hundred pounds.
The term “Etsy witches” — people providing witchcraft services over the internet — went viral last year after several influencers claimed to have successfully changed the weather on their wedding day after purchasing a spell.
Since then online witchcraft has been booming as people turn to “metaphysical services” to help with everything from selling a house to dealing with stress. On Etsy, customers only need to type in “spell”, “hex”, “jinx” or “curse” to find hundreds of offers from shops boasting thousands of five-star reviews.
Those in the Beltway area can simply drop by the offices of the Washington Post: Rod Dreher on Sally Quinn, Georgetown’s Madame Blavatsky.
Ouija boards, astrological charts, palm reading, talismans—Quinn embraces it all. And yes, she has been in contact with her husband since his passing. Through a medium. Repeatedly.
Some friends have voiced reservations that Quinn is now showing all her cards, so to speak. “Don’t play up the voodoo too much,” one implored. But Sally does nothing by halves. She reveals that, in her less mellow days, she put hexes on three people who promptly wound up having their lives ruined, or ended.
The first, cast in 1969, was spurred by old-fashioned jealousy. Some exotic beauty at a Halloween party inspired lust in Quinn’s beau at the time—and then killed herself just days after Sally cast her spell.
Her second victim was Clay Felker, the longtime editor of New York magazine who oversaw a brutal profile of Quinn in 1973, just before her catastrophic debut on the CBS Morning News. Quinn hexed Felker not long after flaming out at CBS and returning to Washington. “Some time afterward, Rupert Murdoch bought New York magazine in a hostile takeover, and Felker was out,” she writes. “Clay never recovered professionally. Worse, he got cancer, which ultimately caused his death.”
Target number three: a shady psychic who, the autumn after Quinn Bradlee was born, ran afoul of Sally’s maternal instincts. The woman dropped dead before year’s end.
Though it’s worth noting that there limits to the kinds of spells even she can cast: The end of Sally Quinn’s Washington.