Am I cursed? Signs of a real curse, and what is not one

I get asked this more than anything else. More than about spirits, more than about love, more than about the dead. Somebody writes to me at two in the morning and says: I think I have been cursed. And then they list what has happened to them, and it is always a hard list, and I read it carefully, and in most cases my answer is the same.

No. You have not been cursed. You have had a bad year.

I know that is not what you wanted to hear. A curse is, in a strange way, a comfort. It means there is a reason. It means somebody did this, and somebody can undo it, and it is not simply that life has been unkind to you for eleven months for no reason at all. I understand why people want it to be a curse. I have wanted it myself.

But I would be a poor sort of witch if I told you what you wanted instead of what I see. So here is how I tell the difference, and how you can.

What is not a curse

A run of bad luck is not a curse. The car, then the tooth, then the job, then the cat. Three or four bad things in a row feel like a pattern because we are built to see patterns, and because bad things cluster: when the car goes you drive the old one, and the old one goes, and you miss the interview. That is not somebody's doing. That is a Tuesday.

Being tired, flat, sleepless and sad for a long time is not a curse. I will say this plainly and then move on, because I am a witch and not a doctor: if you have felt heavy and wrong for months, see a doctor before you see me. I have had people arrive at my door certain they were hexed, and they were ill, and the thing that lifted it was a prescription and some sleep. There is no shame in that, and it is far more common than any curse.

A person who hates you is not a curse. An ex, a mother-in-law, a neighbour with a face like a shut gate. People who wish you ill are everywhere and most of them have no idea how to do anything about it. Ill-wishing is real, and the old North took it seriously, but it is weak and it is lazy, and a salted doorstep and a good night's sleep sees most of it off. Being disliked is not the same as being worked against.

Guilt is not a curse. This one is harder to say to people. If you did something you are not proud of, and your life has gone wrong since, you may find yourself quite sure that you are being punished. You are not. Nobody is keeping accounts on you but you. That is its own kind of heavy, and I can help with it, but it is not a curse and I will not pretend it is.

A bad house is not a curse on you. A house can be wrong. It can have something in it, or something under it, or a history that leaks. But that is the house's problem, and it was there before you came and it will be there after you leave. If your life was fine until you moved, look at the house, not at your enemies.

That covers, I would say, nine letters out of ten.

What a curse actually looks like

A real working against a person is rare, because it is hard. It takes somebody who knows what they are doing, or somebody who does not and has got lucky in the worst way. It takes something of yours. It takes time and intent, and most people who hate you cannot be bothered. But it does happen, and when it does, it has a shape. These are the things I look for.

It started on a day. Not gradually. A curse is sent, and sending is an event. People who are worked against can usually tell me the week, and sometimes the day, when things turned. Before it, ordinary life. After it, a different weather. Bad luck drifts in. A curse arrives.

It is aimed at one thing. A curse is a wish with a shape, and the shape is the sender's. Somebody who wanted your marriage wants your marriage to fail, so it is your marriage that fails, and oddly, specifically, while the rest of your life limps on. Somebody who envied your money goes for the money. Somebody who wanted you gone goes for your health or your sleep. A bad year hits everything. A curse hits the same place, over and over, like a dog that has been shown where to bite.

It is too neat. Coincidence is messy. A curse is tidy. The buyer pulls out on the exact day the other offer expired. The one person who could have helped is the one who got ill. You will find yourself saying "you could not make it up", and that is the point: nobody made it up. Somebody made it.

The body knows. A person under a working often has a particular set of things wrong with them that doctors cannot find a reason for. Not vague tiredness. Specific, odd, repeating things. The same dream. A pain that moves. Waking at the same hour. A taste in the mouth. Hair coming out in one place. Your doctor finds nothing, and you are not imagining it, and it does not fit anything, and it started on the day.

Animals and children avoid you. Not forever, and not cruelly. But a dog that used to lean on you now sits across the room. A child who climbed on you now hangs back. They can see the thing on you, and they do not like it. This is one of the signs I weigh most heavily, because animals and children do not read the internet and cannot be talked into it.

You know who. People who have been worked against nearly always know who did it. They say "I don't want to accuse anyone", and then they say the name without being asked, and it is somebody close, somebody who was in the house, somebody who had reason and had access. Strangers do not curse you. It is nearly always family, a lover, a former friend, or somebody who thinks you took what was theirs.

If you have four of those six, write to me. If you have one or two, read the next part first.

How to check, at home, in nine days

This is what I give people before I will look at them, because most of the time it settles the matter on its own.

Write it down. For nine days, every evening, write what went wrong that day and what went right. Both. Be honest about the right. At the end of nine days, read it. A bad patch has good days in it, and the bad days are different from each other. A curse has no good days, and the bad days rhyme.

Salt the doors and the bed. A line across every outer threshold and a pinch under the mattress, at the head. If the trouble is ill-wishing or something in the house, you will feel the difference within three nights: better sleep, a lighter kitchen. If the trouble is a true working, salt will not stop it, and you will notice that too, because the house feels fine and you still do not.

Water under the bed. A clear glass of water on the floor under the bed, at the head, every night for nine nights, poured out at the door each morning without looking at it until it is in your hand. Water takes what is near. If it is clear in the morning, night after night, there is nothing on you. If it clouds, or smells, or has something in it that was not there, do not tip it down the sink. Take it outside, pour it on the ground away from the house, and write to me.

Do not talk about it. For the nine days, tell nobody. Not your mother, not the group chat, not the woman on the internet who says you are cursed and will take it off for two hundred. A working feeds on being spoken about, and so does the fear of one. Nine days of silence is the cheapest test there is, and it works.

If it was not a curse

Then you have had a bad year, and I am sorry. Those are real, and they are hard, and the fact that nobody did it to you does not make them lighter. It only means the way out is the ordinary one: time, rest, help, and no longer looking over your shoulder for an enemy who is not there.

Shut the door on the idea properly. Say out loud, once, in your own house: "Nobody did this. I am done looking." It sounds like nothing. It is not nothing. The idea of a curse is itself a thing that sits in a house, and it is better out.

If it was

Then there are three things to do, and they go in order.

First, cut the thread. A working needs a line to you, and the line is usually a thing of yours in someone else's hands, or a thing of theirs in yours. Get rid of what they gave you. All of it, even the nice things, especially the nice things. Do not throw it in the bin inside the house. Take it out past the gate.

Second, iron. A nail over the door, a knife under the pillow, something iron on your body. The old North put iron between itself and every ill-wish for a thousand years and it was not for decoration. Iron does not break a working. It stops it getting any further in while you deal with it.

Third, turn it. A working is a thing that was sent, and a thing that was sent can be sent back, and the one who sent it knows that, which is why most people who do this work badly do it only once. How my family turns a working is kept for my kin, because it is not a thing to do by halves and not a thing to guess at from a page. But know that it can be done, that it is not dramatic, and that it is mostly a matter of order and nerve.

And know this before you start. A real curse does not always lift in a night. If it has been on you for years, if it was made by someone who knew the work, or if it has been fed, by the one who sent it or by your own fear, it has put down roots. Roots come out slowly. Some workings are gone in a week. Others take three rounds, a month or more apart, and every round loosens a little more. A curse that was tied into a grave, or into the blood, is harder still, and that is not work for a first attempt.

That is not a sign you did it wrong. It is a sign it was real. Ill-wishing and a bad year lift the moment you stop feeding them. A true working has to be taken apart in the right order, and sometimes by someone other than the person it is sitting on.

The difference between slow and false is easy to see. When a real working is coming off, you can feel it going: the good days come back, a few at a time, and the bad ones stop rhyming. When someone tells you it is coming off and nothing in your life has changed, but the price has, you are back at the next part.

The commonest curse of all

I will end with the one I see most, because it is the only one that is nearly always real.

Somebody frightened writes to a stranger on the internet. The stranger says: yes, you are cursed, I can see it, it is very serious, I can remove it, it will cost this much, and it must be done tonight. The frightened person pays. The stranger says it is done, and then, a week later, that it has come back, and it will cost this much more.

That is a curse. It is aimed, it has a sender, it started on a day, it goes for the same place every time, and the person who did it is somebody who had access to you when you were afraid. It is also the easiest one in the world to break. You stop answering.

Anyone who tells you that you are cursed before you have told them anything is not seeing a curse. They are seeing you. Walk away from them the way you would from a dog that has been shown where to bite.

~Hazel