I performed my first exorcism at the age of twenty.\u00a0 I was still living with my parents.\u00a0 My best friend, Aurvandil, and his lover were living in a strange, half-underground two-but-really-one bedroom apartment in the biggest apartment complex of our hometown.\u00a0 They had a ghost.<\/p>\n
They lived with the ghost fairly amiably for most of the year.\u00a0 He\u2019d slam the cabinets closed if they left them open, slam the sliding shower door open if they left it closed, and a few other things I can\u2019t now recall.\u00a0 He was easy to appease, and Aurvandil was (and is) a superstitious sort, so he let it be \u2026 until things went awry.<\/p>\n
We never figured out what set the ghost off.\u00a0 Aurvandil was sitting in his easy chair watching television, his lover was laying on the couch with her book.\u00a0 He kept his \u201cwater pipe\u201d by the chair, invisible from most angles, beside an end table where the ash tray and the TV remote lived.\u00a0 Out of nowhere there\u2019s a loud, glassy, CRACK, <\/em>and the smell of bong water fills the room.\u00a0 The ash tray has moved itself from the center of the end table to the center of the bong, which is now laying shattered in a pool of resinated water.<\/p>\n I was the only witch he knew.\u00a0 Of course he called me.<\/p>\n I brought over my Tarot deck, cast a circle, burned some mugwort, and asked the ghost what was wrong.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t answer so much as give me the finger.\u00a0 The ghost was mad, it wouldn\u2019t say why, and it was pretty hostile.<\/p>\n I got scared.\u00a0 Aurvandil got scared.\u00a0 So I recast the circle, and pushed it to the edges of the house.\u00a0 I pushed the ghost out with the circle, and anchored the circle to the walls.<\/p>\n No more banging shower door.\u00a0 No more slamming cabinets.\u00a0 No more exploding paraphernalia.<\/p>\n Aurvandil did tell me that he could sometimes hear knocking on the walls \u2026 coming from the underground side in the office-sized second bedroom.<\/p>\n We were young and dumb, and if I had it to do over I\u2019d do it differently \u2026 but that\u2019s beside the point.\u00a0 We were both very pleased with the results at the time.\u00a0 Looking back, though, I wonder what I might have done differently.\u00a0 I know things now that I didn\u2019t know then, but I think if I\u2019d approached the problem differently, there might have been a more peaceable resolution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I performed my first exorcism at the age of twenty.\u00a0 I was still living with my parents.\u00a0 My best friend, Aurvandil, and his lover were living in a strange, half-underground two-but-really-one bedroom apartment in the biggest apartment complex of our hometown.\u00a0 They had a ghost. They lived with the ghost fairly amiably for most of … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[134,149,258,265],"class_list":["post-117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-keeping-score","tag-magic","tag-stories","tag-talking-to-spirits"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-1T","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}