IT HAPPENED TO ME: I GOT SCAMMED BY A PSYCHIC

IN THE END, I REALIZED I WASN’T ANGRY WITH HER ANYWHERE NEAR AS MUCH AS I WAS -- AND STILL AM -- ANGRY WITH MYSELF FOR LETTING SOMEONE CONVINCE ME OF SOMETHING THAT I KNEW TO BE TOTALLY ILLOGICAL.I USED TO THINK OF MYSELF AS, VERY GENERALLY, A VERY RATIONAL PERSON. I HAD NO REASON TO QUESTION THAT UNTIL I FOUND MYSELF AT AN ATM ON A SATURDAY NIGHT, TAKING OUT $100 DOLLARS TO HAVE A CURSE REMOVED BY A PSYCHIC.

A couple of weeks ago, I was waiting for a friend outside a bar on the Lower East Side. After standing around for a while I figured I could at least go in and check out the happy hour specials, but when I turned I noticed a woman sitting in a chair behind a glass door, banging on it to get my attention.

When I made eye contact with her, she waved at me and pulled the door open to reach out to me. I laughed and went over to her, mostly out of curiosity, but also because I was confused. I’d never seen a psychic call someone into her parlor before. I assumed I dropped something in front of her shop.

This happens to be one awfully convenient street. Photo credit: Janice Yi

“You! You need my help, I can see it on you. For you, I’ll give you a reading for $5. I’ll tell you what’s wrong.” She moved aside and I noticed that all there was inside the door was a narrow staircase leading up to lord knows what, some kind of heating lamp, and a little folding chair, which she told me to sit on while she sat on the stairs. Not creepy at all. 

When I sat down, she introduced herself as “Sister Sylvia” -- a psychic favorite?  -- and she asked me to show her my right palm. After looking at it for a moment, she tut-tutted about how there was a lot of misfortune there (sure), which was especially unfortunate because I’m a good person (arguable) who goes out of my way to do good things for other people (sometimes true). I smiled benignly at her, glad I only had to give her five bucks.

“You try and you try, but you can’t make good happen for yourself. You’ve been especially stuck lately. You are stuck in work, stuck in love, and you can’t move forward. You found love with the man you wanted, but it won’t work out,” and so on. At this point, she hadn’t really said all that much specific to me, although all this was generally true, but the next thing she said kind of freaked me out.

“You want to know why it’s like this? I know you know, because you’ve been told this before: You have a curse on you. Someone close to you doesn’t want you to be happy. This curse is taking all the joy from your life.” 

I actually have been told this before. Several times.

This wouldn’t be the first time my right hand got me in trouble.

I didn’t know what to say. I explained to her that I really didn’t want her to put herself out trying to help me and that I wouldn’t be able to pay for whatever it was she needed to do. Rent week is kind of the worst week to fork over a large amount of money for lifting a curse. Lift the curse of having to pay rent, Sylvia.

“You don’t have to pay all at once,” she said. “You can pay me back in little bits whenever you can. I just want to help you find happiness. How much do you think you can contribute tonight? $200?”

TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS! Inexplicably, I felt guilty. I couldn’t pay her that much that night, if ever. I shook my head no.

“$150? You need to let me get rid of this because if we don’t, I’m at risk and my son is at risk. Even worse, the curse may come back to you.”

I felt even guiltier and felt my eyes stung. I shook my head again.

“Think about it,” she told me. “Can you go downstairs to the ATM and get just $100 to give me now so that I can start this process? You have to decide now because there isn’t much time before this curse will start affecting other people. You need to decide tonight.” 

Sylvia reached onto a little shelf and took out a baggy filled with crystals. She picked out two and wrapped them in a corner ripped from a paper towel.

“Put this in your bra and keep it there until ten o’clock tonight. At ten, take it out and put it in your purse. This will help protect you. Now please decide -- can you give $100 tonight? It will be hard, but I know that you can do this.”

Again, completely against my better judgment, I felt like this was something I had to do. With crystals nestled against my left boob and feeling a strange combination of guilt, shame, anger, and a little bit of fear, I went downstairs to the ATM, took out exactly $100, and came back. 

Walking back up the stairs, I thought to myself, maybe I can still leave, maybe I don’t have to do this completely ridiculous thing; it’s not too late. But every time I turned the thought over in my head, I felt guilty about wanting to leave. Guilty for getting myself involved with this woman and somehow guilty for wanting to abandon her.

When I got back to the parlor, I noticed that a couple had come in for palm readings. I grabbed my things and she led me into another room. It looked like a lounge area, but had a kitchenette on the side. She’d gathered up the accursed egg, the regular ol’ eggs, and the paper towels and put them in a black plastic bag.

When I handed over the cash to her, she slipped the money into the bag without counting it and tied the bag shut. “I won’t touch this until I start making my plans for the burial. You come back tomorrow afternoon and we’ll do another reading so I can tell you for sure who did this to you. Don’t tell anyone what we talked about.”

I grabbed my purse and ran out the door.

That night I’d gone out for a friend’s birthday and felt more and more torn up about what I’d done. I knew it was a mistake and I knew that I needed it to not go any further. I also knew I’d taken it far enough that I couldn’t tell any of my friends about it -- it was just too embarrassing and I should have known better. Yet at ten o’clock on the dot, I found myself taking the crystals out of my bra and slipping them in my purse. I didn’t even look at them. 

I’m keeping my magical boob crystals. They’re pretty. 

That night, I barely slept. I kept having dreams about the black seeds, only in my dreams they squirmed. I couldn’t stop thinking about the curse. The next day, I stayed in for hours anxious about what would happen if I didn’t go back.

In the end, I decided not to. So what if there was a curse on me? I made it this far. And what if messing around with Sylvia and her rituals just got me into even more spiritual trouble? I’d never heard any stories about anything remotely similar happening to anyone else, so I decided to look online. I didn’t even know where to start. Google “psychic egg,” “common psychic scams,” “how to get rid of evil curse”?

After looking around for a little while, I came across a few websites -- most with totally lame, Altavista–era layouts -- that had a few posts about people who’d lost hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars on psychics. Most of them were people who bought dozens of readings or spent a lot of time on psychic hotlines, but then I found a story that mentioned a curse, but referenced another website.

There I found a story that mentioned an egg being used in a ritual that involved a burial in a graveyard. I was crushed. Granted, I hadn’t lost a huge amount of money at that point, but going from not having heard of anything like this before to finding dozens of stories that were similar to mine was devastating. I was angry and scared, but I decided that I needed to confront Sylvia to get rid of my anxiety about what she convinced me to do.

After I got off work the next day, I went back to the psychic parlor. I went alone (although in retrospect, I realize this was a less than stellar idea) armed with the voice recorder on my iPhone. I figured if anyone gave me a hard time, I could record the conversation and do what with it, I don’t know, but people do hate being recorded.

I had a whole speech in my head about how shameful it is to prey on vulnerable people and how horrible she made me feel, but when I got there and she came to the top of the stairs, I immediately forgot everything I wanted to say. I ended up just telling her, “I know what you’re doing now and I don’t want any trouble. I don’t care about what you told me would happen if I don’t do this, I just want my money back now.” 

I didn’t even want the $30 dollars I’d give her a few days before; I really just wanted the $100 I’d given her on my second visit. That seemed right somehow. She made an attempt to explain again that she “works with God” and that she only wanted to help me, but I told her that I wasn’t interested.

She went back inside—I refused to come up the stairs because I was afraid of who might be up there—while I waited. I heard her speaking to someone and she returned a few minutes later with a hand full of ten dollar bills. She counted off $100, double counting to show that she wasn’t trying to cheat me. She told me that she didn’t know who I talked to, but that she hoped I knew she wasn’t like those people. I just shook my head and left.

                                                                 

Lesson #1: Don’t talk to a woman sitting in a doorway that looks like this. Right next to… “boner co.”? Photo credit: Janice Yi

                                                     

In the end, I realized I wasn’t angry with her anywhere near as much as I was -- and still am -- angry with myself for letting someone convince me of something that I knew to be totally illogical.

I can’t even explain how it happened. In a weird way, I do feel better after this whole bullshit adventure. I surprised myself by going back to Sylvia to stand up for myself -- something I never do because I hate confrontation more than anything. I surprised myself again by telling my friends about what was for me a thoroughly humiliating experience. And I’m surprising myself yet again by sharing this story. I’d like to think I’m a stronger person for it.

                 

http://www.xojane.com/relationships/psychic-scams