This Freshman Was A Trendy Witch. Now, She Lives In The Woods.

By Audrey Russell

It’s no secret that witches are slowly, as if by magic, working their way back into mainstream culture. It almost feels like it’s seventeenth-century Salem again, but with fewer diseases. MacKenzie Ralph, a Bard freshman absorbed in teenage witch culture, agrees. To learn more about witchy trends and their place in the Bard community, I set off to visit Ralph in her Tewksbury double. However, it turned out that she moved to a hut in the woods, so I went there instead.

“I first got interested in magic when American Horror Story did a season on it, and I really got into witches when I found some love spells online,” she excitedly told me while chopping up what appeared to be the long, shriveled claw of a wendigo. “Ooh, I love hearing that crunch! But the first time I felt truly able to call myself a witch was when I bought a few crystals and started throwing around the word ‘aura.’ I’ve been developing my powers on my own ever since.” She then paused for several minutes to close her eyes and speak ominously in either tongues or Latin.

“At its core, I think being a witch is more about girl power and self-expression than about the magic itself–that’s just a cool side effect,” were Ralph’s final remarks about her new lifestyle before she invited me outside to help catch a human child to sacrifice to the Horned God. “For example, I have plenty of witch friends who wouldn’t go so far as to sacrifice a living thing to the Horned God. They stick to skincare potions and sagebrush, and that’s perfectly fine. Everything does witchcraft differently,” she said with a shrug. The warts and boils on her long nose seemed to fluctuate with her movements. “But I’m going to dedicate my entire life to the practice of magic. That means walking around a retirement home to see if my old-age spells have worked. It means reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards every goddamn day and showing it to anyone who will listen. It means killing people just so I can practice necromancy. I haven’t gotten the hang of it yet, but I have plenty to practice on!” She threw her head back to laugh, and a hellish, menacing cackle came out of her mouth. Spiders crawled out of it as well. It was the worst.