Witchcraft and Spiritism in Eastern Venezuela

When I was a kid, I used to beg my grandmother to tell me stories about ghosts, witchcraft and any other supernatural-related thing that she could remember, and boy did she have a lot of those stored in her head! My grandmother was born in Cumanacoa, a small town in Eastern Venezuela long forgotten by politicians, right in the middle of the 20th century. She was a strong-willed, grounded and realistic woman. When my mother was a little girl, my grandfather hit my grandmother and she grabbed a machete, sat right in front of the bed they shared and told him that she’d kill him as soon as he was asleep. As it could be expected, he never fell asleep. The next day, he took his only son, my uncle Eusebio and left for good. I never met him.

(Photo: my grandmother and my mother)

My grandma used to call herself a “curious person”, which is what people around her hometown region call those who know about plants and their medicinal or non-medicinal uses. When I asked her if witches were real, she said “absolutely”, that there were witches and warlocks, and they were capable of turning into tigers or black birds. According to her, tiger men would devour other men they found in the wild at night, and if you ever felt someone was knocking on the door and then discovered a black bird when you opened it, it was probably a witch, and in this case you had to utter the words “come tomorrow for salt” so that she wouldn’t steal your soul.
She also told me that if you found the tree of a certain fruit in a crossroads, you could kill any person you wanted just after performing a small ritual. I asked her for scary stories and she filled me with tales about her own life, of how once in a coffee plantation, a dead man would blow out a candle so she would look for a pot filled with ‘morocotas’ (gold coins) that she never dared to find; of how three of her friends went looking for a sorcerer to help them with money problems and he gave them a list of tasks which finished with a confrontation with “the Evil one”, a name she used to refer to the devil, who was defeated by the last of the three friends who survived thanks to a desperate prayer on the break of dawn; of how La Sayona would kill unfaithful men, and many more stories that I heard sitting on her lap.
However, grandma never told me about her best friend, a spiritualist medium named Carmen, whose existence I only came to know thanks to my mother. She told me that this woman had the gift of healing people with prayer and that she was capable of detecting sorcery and spells from afar. She still recounts with amazement how once a man with throat pain went to see Carmen and she said, not even knowing where he lived, that the pain was caused by a spell that his wife’s daughter had cast on him and that all of the spell components were buried under a table. My mother and grandmother walked the man to his house and they in fact dug out an object that included some of the man’s belongings, from under the table. The man got better immediately and the evil stepdaughter was forced to leave the house.
Apparently, Carmen was healing people for free and eventually became so well-known that all the sorcerers and mediums from the neighboring town of Cumaná (who charged for their services) were put out of business. Enraged and envious of Carmen, the sorcerers started a war of magic against her, which finished with Carmen’s hospitalization and death after a candle ritual in which, inexplicably, her lungs were burned inside. Everyone who knew her and saw her die ruled that she was murdered by witchcraft and that Cumaná’s warlocks were to blame. Her case will remain in the files of Divine Justice to be investigated on the day of reckoning.
About 40 years later, on a night of supernatural stories, my cousin who is also from Cumaná, told me about the case of two friends, inseparable since they were kids, who did everything together and as they grew up they were both led to the wrong path, but always as friends: they would rob together, they would do drugs together, they would kill together. One day, very high on drugs, they started fighting for no reason and one of them ended up stabbing the other in the heart, killing him. After realizing what he did and filled with regret, he took the dead body of his friend and placed him at the door of his mother’s house. The dead man’s mother, who was a sorcerer, did not file any charges and instead prepared her son’s dead body, placing inside his mouth a piece of paper with the name of his murderous friend, so that the corpse would not rest in peace until he takes his killer with him, then he would be buried without much ceremony. A few days later, the friend and killer who I shall name Pope, started to see the ghost of the boy he killed, he told my cousin and other friends about his vision, but they didn’t see anything and thought he was going crazy. A month had passed and Pope, clearly disturbed and looking like a homeless person, spoke only to his dead buddy, he had made peace with him and was even seen walking with his arm around his invisible friend. Some said he went insane with guilt; others blamed the witchcraft of the boy’s mother. While listening to this story, I wondered whether that woman was a descendant of those who killed Carmen, my grandmother’s friend.
It is hard to believe that in this century, what with electricity and scientific progress everywhere, witchcraft and spiritism still exist. Personally, I’d like to think that there is magic in this world, even if it isn’t always the good kind, and even at my most skeptical I say: “I don’t really believe in witches, but they may very well be flying above us”. In any case, if you ever visit Eastern Venezuela, you better take a lucky charm with you, just in case.

My entry for the contest onstellar:
https://steemit.com/onstellar/@onstellar/the-paranormal-onstellar-contest-win-225-steem-for-articles-and-memes