Witchcraft

Grandmother Pendragon gets into the game.

Do you believe in the supernatural?

If you don’t — if you’re a skeptic who believes only in science — then please explain the following documented incident:

Early on the morning of April 17, 2016, 54-year-old Ramona Fendecker was asleep in her home in Zanesville, Ohio, when she had what she later described as a “terrifyingly real” dream — a dream in which her 21-year-old son, Todd, a student at Boston College, was involved in a serious automobile accident.

At exactly 3:21 a.m., she was awakened from that dream by the ringing of her phone. Disoriented, drenched in sweat and trembling in fear, she sat up in bed and answered it.

The caller was a Massachusetts state trooper.

Are you getting chills yet? Well you should be. Because as unbelievable as it may sound, the trooper was calling to remind Ramona that she did not, in fact, have any children, so she should stop worrying and go back to sleep.

Go ahead, Mister or Mrs. or Ms. Skeptic: Explain THAT with your “science.” You can’t, and I will tell you why: I made that particular documented incident up. But that does not detract from my central point, which is this: Strange things happen. We all know it. There are inexplicably weird, sometimes disturbing, phenomena that we cannot account for using logic and rationality. The Kardashians are only one example.

Recently I encountered such a phenomenon in a Florida town called Manalapan, which gets its name from the Native American word “Manalapan,” which means “Napalanam spelled backward.” I was in Manalapan to attend the wedding of two fine young people, Ashley and Jacob. The wedding — which, as is typical of the modern American wedding, had been in the planning stages for approximately 311 years — was to take place on a hotel lawn overlooking the Atlantic, a popular local ocean.

In other words, it was going to be an outdoor wedding. This meant that the weather forecast for Manalapan for Saturday, March 14, was crucial. Am I saying that it was as crucial as, say, the weather forecast for the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944? Of course not. It was WAY MORE CRUCIAL than that, because (a) the D-Day landings did not involve professional hairdressers, and (b) the Allied Forces had not paid a large nonrefundable deposit for the use of France.

So as the wedding week arrived, the eyeballs of the wedding party rarely strayed from the weather app on their iPhones. And what those eyeballs saw was not good. Here’s what it looked like on Tuesday evening:

That’s right: After literally weeks of sunny weather, rain was coming at EXACTLY the wrong time, with an 80 percent probability for the wedding day. That meant that in all likelihood the ceremony would have to be moved indoors, to a ballroom.

At this point you may be thinking: “OK, but what really matters is that they’re two people in love, surrounded by friends and family, about to embark on a life together. That’s much more important than the specific venue where they take their vows, which makes absolutely no difference in the long run.”

You’re right, of course. And when I say “You’re right, of course,” I of course mean ARE YOU COMPLETELY OUT OF YOUR MIND? We’re talking about a WEDDING here. The bride has been dreaming about this moment since before she was born. She has a specific vision in mind, of her and the groom gazing lovingly into each other’s eyes in front of a romantic backdrop featuring palm trees swaying gracefully against a brilliant blue sky as gentle ocean swells softly kiss the white sandy beach, and you’re saying this is essentially the same as tying the knot in a hotel ballroom THAT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A BEACH, LET ALONE SOFTLY KISSING OCEAN SWELLS???

Forgive me for shouting in capital letters, but frankly you were asking for it, with your idiotic statement about the venue not mattering. It mattered a LOT, which is why, as friends and loved ones gathered in Manalapan for Ashley’s and Jacob’s Big Day, everybody was talking about the weather. Which was horrible. It rained, sometimes at monsoon level, all day Friday, and the forecast for Saturday, no matter which app you checked, was for more of the same.

But guess what? Saturday was glorious: bright sun, brilliant blue sky, all day long. The ceremony was spectacular. Ashley was radiantly beautiful; Jacob was rakishly handsome; the ocean swelled gently and the palms swayed gracefully; and at the end of the ceremony, as if on cue, roughly two dozen pelicans, in V formation, flew spectacularly past directly over the newlyweds. It was a great wedding, followed by a joyous reception featuring a band that inspired me at one point to do several pushups on the dance floor — real ones, not the kind where you go only halfway down — which is a sure sign of a good wedding band. I should mention that there was also a well-stocked bar.

The next day the weather was horrible again, pouring rain. Yet somehow, in the midst of all the storminess, Ashley and Jacob got their perfect day. Of course this sometimes happens with weather, right? Surely there’s a scientific explanation for why all the forecasts were wrong!

Or is there?

I ask because of something I learned a few days after the wedding — something that suggests there might have been another reason, a non-scientific reason, for the miraculously good wedding-day weather.

I’m talking about witchcraft.

Yes. What I learned is that Ashley and her mom, leaving no stone unturned, had, among other strategies, employed the services of witches, which it turns out you can hire for a very reasonable price on the global online marketplace Etsy. There are pages and pages of Etsy witches, offering to perform a wide range of spells:

Many of the spells involve either money or love, but Ashley and her mom were strictly interested in the weather. I texted Ashley to ask what the procedure had been for her witch, and she texted this back:

So Ashley did not take the witchcraft effort 100 percent seriously. Nevertheless, despite the fact that she failed to say her manifestation list, she got perfect weather, PLUS a perfectly timed flyover by a squadron of pelicans, which wasn’t even part of Ashley’s spell request and which the witch apparently tossed in as a freebie.

You can call me a dedicated highly professional award-winning journalist if you want, but when I stumble across a story that as far as I can tell has been completely ignored by the so-called “mainstream media” — namely, witches controlling the weather — then by God I am going to get to the bottom of it no matter how many minutes it takes.

So I decided to hire an Etsy witch. Her name is Grandmother Pendragon, and I selected her because her ad says she offers a “custom spell” and a “same day cast.” Plus she looks like a witch, but the nice kind, not the kind that tried to eat Hansel and Gretel.

The spell I asked Grandmother Pendragon to cast involved a college basketball game. My local school, the University of Miami, was going to play Purdue University, which is in Indiana — a state that has absolutely nothing to do with having sex with caribou,¹ so please get that disgusting image out of your mind — in the NCAA “March Madness” men’s basketball tournament. Miami was the underdog, but I figured that with Grandmother Pendragon on our team, we had a shot. So I asked her to cast a victory spell. Ordinarily this would have cost $22.99, but she had a 50-percent-off sale going for March, so I ended up paying only $11.93, including tax.

Shortly before tipoff in the big game, I received via email an extremely authentic-looking .pdf file from Grandmother Pendragon explaining in detail how she cast the spell. Here’s the first page:

There’s more, but you get the idea. Clearly this is a witch who knows a little something about the game of college basketball.

So I was feeling hopeful as the Miami-Purdue game began. And I felt even more hopeful when Miami took the lead. You may say, “Dave, that wasn’t because of a spell cast by some Internet ‘witch’ who is almost certainly generated by AI. That was because of the actions on the court of the actual, physical Miami basketball players.”

Perhaps! But perhaps there’s more to it than that. Let’s consider this photograph, which captures a moment of the action during the game:

Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Look closely at this photo. Look especially closely at the faces of the players, these four in particular:

Do you see it? Their expressions? Clearly these young men are seeing something unusual. Something... disturbing. Something that the other people in the arena — the spectators, the coaches, the officials — cannot see, but that is clearly visible, and troubling, to the players directly involved in the game.

What is the “something” these players are reacting to? I think I know. And I think that, deep down inside, you know, too.

That’s right: Miami was leading because Grandmother Pendragon was playing defense for the Hurricanes. She had them up by one point at halftime. And she kept them close until the final minute of the game.

Unfortunately, in the end Purdue won. I guess I can’t complain. Because ultimately, basketball is a game that rewards skill, physical size and that intangible quality we call “heart,” and it was clear, as the game wore on, that the Purdue team had hired a witch with more of those things than Grandmother Pendragon. Next time I’m going to pay full price.

But enough about me. It’s time now to hear from — speaking of winners — you lovely paying subscribers.

1. More on that here.