Let’s rewind to 2012. I was working front desk at a luxury hotel in North Vancouver, you know, the kind where people demand a refund because the rain ruined their ocean view.
It was late October, and North Van had that misty, gothic mood: fog rolling in off the harbour, trees shedding leaves like secrets, and me, in my early twenties, just trying to figure out who the hell I was.
Back then, I wasn’t out yet. I knew I was queer, I’d known since I was twelve, but when you grow up Indian, Catholic, and female, “coming out” wasn’t even in the vocabulary. You just quietly fold that truth away and date boys like it’s your job.
So one day, the COO of the hotel, very corporate, very blonde, probably owns crystals, tells us her psychic is coming to town and staying in the hotel. She says, “She’s doing readings! One hour for $100!”
And the front desk girls all gasped like it was Beyoncé tickets.
I thought, why not? A hundred bucks to find out if my life was going anywhere sounded like a good deal. But I didn’t tell my parents. My mom, especially, she’s religious and would’ve said, “That’s how the devil gets you!”
Which is funny, because she also used to tell me ghost stories when I was a kid. All the time. Indian-style horror bedtime stories, spirits in the trees, footsteps on the roof, shadows that followed you home.
So yeah. I grew up terrified of ghosts. I still can’t watch scary movies; I’ll have nightmares for days.
Anyway, it’s my turn for the reading. I knock on the hotel room door. She opens it.
She’s this older white woman with wild curly hair and about fourteen scarves. The room smelled like incense and something vaguely floral, like Bath & Body Works met a séance.
She invites me to sit down and immediately says “Your grandmother is here.”
And I froze. Because one, I hate ghosts. And two, I didn’t even like my grandmother.
So I ask, “Which grandmother?” And when she says it’s my paternal grandmother, I’m like, “Oh crap.”
My grandmother was this cold, iron-fisted lady who always made me feel small. The kind of woman who could peel you with a look.
The psychic smiles softly, like she’s listening to someone invisible. “She says she likes your hairstyle,” she tells me.
And I’m like, “Okay, thanks?”
Apparently, the dead are into bangs now.
I’m trying to stay calm, but my heart’s racing. The air in the room feels heavy, like it’s watching me.
Then she moves on. She looks at me with these piercing blue eyes and says, “You’re dating someone just like your father.”
And that one hit me like a punch. My dad and I have always had a complicated relationship. He’s a narcissist, emotionally abusive, unpredictable. My mom and I learned to walk on eggshells around his moods.
And suddenly I saw what she meant. My boyfriend at the time, two years in, had the same energy. I was always chasing approval, tiptoeing around disappointment, trying to earn love that never felt safe.
It took me eight years to finally walk away. Eight years to break the spell.
It was like the psychic peeled back my life and said, “Look. You’re reliving the ghost of your father through this man.” That was spookier than any ghost.
She said other things too, that I’d travel, that I’d eventually end up with a white man. And, you know, I was twenty-something and eager to believe. So I made it my personal mission to fall in love with a white guy. Like it was fate.
Which, looking back now, is hilarious. Because, well, she wasn’t wrong that I’d end up with someone white. She just got the gender wrong.
After the reading, I found out I was her last appointment of the day, and she mentioned she was eating dinner alone. So I said, “Well, I can join you!”
We sat in the hotel restaurant, dim lighting, rain tapping on the windows. She kept glancing around, distracted.
At one point she sighed and said, “It’s hard for me to turn it off, the voices, the spirits. They don’t stop just because I’m tired.”
And I remember thinking, God, that sounds exhausting.
Now, years later, I realize I knew what that felt like. To not be able to turn off the voices in your head.
Not ghosts, exactly. But that constant whisper of you can’t be who you are. The haunting of expectations. The echo of your parents’ fears, my mom always thought a lesbian was going to steal me away in college.
I carried those voices for years. They followed me through relationships that weren’t right, through the polite small talk of hotel lobbies, through every time I laughed at jokes that weren’t funny just to fit in.
It took me a long time to exorcize those ghosts.
When I finally came out, I thought about that psychic. How she told me I was dating someone like my father. And how she said my grandmother was watching over me.
Back then, I didn’t believe in spirits, still don’t, not really. But sometimes, when I think about that moment, the air thick, the quiet between us, I wonder if maybe what she really saw wasn’t a ghost. Maybe she saw the version of me that was trying to break free.
Maybe she wasn’t channelling the dead, maybe she was channelling me.
And that’s the thing about witches, right? They don’t always ride brooms or wear black hats. Sometimes they’re women who hand you a mirror you didn’t know you needed.
Sometimes they say something that sounds like a curse, “You’re dating your father,” but it turns out to be the spell that wakes you up.
So now, every October, when the air smells like rain and cedar and possibility, I think about that night. About the woman who couldn’t turn off the spirits. About the grandmother I swore I’d never forgive, who maybe just wanted to say she liked my hair. And about the girl I used to be, scared of ghosts, scared of the dark, scared of herself.
Maybe we’re all haunted, in our own way.
But the older I get, the more I realize, not all ghosts want to scare you. Some just want you to see them.
And maybe that’s the most witchy thing of all.
