A few days after the election, I attended a panel on witch hunts. It felt appropriate—after all, this was the year of “Lock her up” and “Trump that bitch,” when a topless Hillary Clinton effigy was hung atop a crane in Oregon and individual members of the media were targeted and harassed. In the month following Donald…
With his bouncing body, looming grin, and wild hair, Richard Simmons might have terrified me as a child, but it gives me no pleasure to report that the New York Daily News published a story on the fact that his friends are pretty convinced the exercise mogul and TV personality is being held hostage in his own home by…
British authorities have reported that child abuse related to accusations of witchcraft and exorcism is on the rise. Project Violet, a specialized unit within the Metropolitan Police Service that specifically handles faith and belief-based child abuse, reports 60 crimes occurring this year alone. This is compared to…
As if the presidential race hadn’t been interesting enough, witches have now entered the fold. Yeni Sleidi gathered her fellow brujas, asked them to perform a series of curses on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and recorded footage of the rituals. The end result is an energetic video titled, “Brujas Hex…
If you’re looking for a handcrafted love spell or someone to put a curse on your archenemy, you’ll no longer be able to scour Etsy for your magickal needs.
A Florida woman who was six months pregnant was attacked by a neighbor with a large rock because she thought she was performing witchcraft. Esther Horton was in her driveway, putting her four-year-old son in a car seat when Annie Olomua came running towards her, screamed an obscenity and threw the rock at her head.…
I found this week’s episode of Outlander draining and emotionally exhausting and personally I am ready to time-surf the centuries and turn the tables on some witch-hunting creeps. Queue to my left to join the misandrist time-traveling witch-hunter-busting vigilante squad. But at least we got a firelight fingering…
Some might argue that everything that passes for "paranormal" is a hoax. (There's no fun in that, but insist if you must.) But even the biggest unexplained-phenomenon junkies have to admit when a fraud's a fraud ... as the 10 cases below will attest.
Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling author who recently edited The Penguin Book of Witches, a primary-source reader about witches and witch-hunting ranging from the medieval period into the early eighteenth century.
Lilias Adie died in the 1700s, when fear of witches ran rampant and the belief that those who had had their souls sucked by the devil (through their teat, I have been informed) would come back to exact vengeance after death was much more common. But her torment didn't end there.
Eighteen years ago, on May 3, 1996, The Craft hit theaters. The teen witch genre never looked so fierce.
Paris Fashion Week: The perfect time to call the corners. Gagatella!
Meet Carlton Gebbia, the newest cast member of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. She's a 40-year-old interior architectural designer, the mother of three children—Destiny, Mysteri, and Cross—and a pagan witch.
Police in Papua New Guinea have charged two people with the murder of Kepari Leniata, a 20-year-old woman, who, late last month was horrifically tortured by a mob and then burned alive atop a trash heap after having been accused of using sorcery against a 6-year-old boy who had recently died in the hospital.
Nate Silver, will you please get your bestie Dumbledore on the line? Or at least send an owl to Clortho? We've got a teen witch on our hands and it's not Robyn Lively, so take that! (sorry)
One of the biggest bummers of all the Republican rape talk this election cycle is that it's distracted from Republican witch talk, which is much less rage inducing and much more hilarious. At the end of a stressful day, I like to unwind by watching old Christine O'Donnell videos where she talks about Satan, and now,…
Embarrassingly not-long ago, human beings in Europe (and even here, in Amurrica) were fond of rounding up people who they thought might be secretly magical and then setting them on fire, because that’s what God wanted them to do or something. Accusations of witchcraft ended the lives of thousands of people. Would you…
Normally, Liberty University is one of those bizarre/annoying things you can just forget exists, like Branson, Missouri or the band Smashmouth, but not this weekend. Nope, this weekend, centrist and totally rational Presidential candidate Mitt Romney will be addressing the hyper conservative evangelical university as…
Here's a macabre reminder of what happened to women who got out of line in medieval times. 800-year-old remains were found with seven nails driven through the jaw bone, leading archaeologists to conclude that the woman was believed to be a witch. The area in Tuscany is thought to be a witches graveyard, since another…
By some measures, True Blood is the most popular show on TV. But one group isn't too happy with it: Wiccans.
