Sally Quinn has cast 3 hexes, and worries they worked

Susan Page | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Sally Quinn: I have psychic abilities; Trump won't last USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page sits down with journalist and author Sally Quinn to talk about her new book, 'Finding Magic: A Spiritual Memoir.' In her book, Quinn talks about her family's use of hexes, or spells and President Trump.

In her new "spiritual memoir" titled Finding Magic, veteran journalist Sally Quinn, founder of the website On Faith, describes her lifelong belief in the occult and worries that hexes she once put on three people may have worked. The widow of legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, Quinn describes the current environment in Washington more toxic and poisonous than ever before, and the investigations surrounding President Trump as worse than Watergate. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Your book talks your lifelong search for meaning, but the headlines are really focused on one thing — the power of the hex.

Quinn: You get to a certain point in your life, and you think, I might as well tell it, because this is the truth.

I’m an Army brat but we spent our summers in Statesboro, Georgia. I’m from Savannah, Georgia, and Statesboro, and my family were Scots. So they all believed in Scottish myths and mysticism and the stones and psychic behavior and ghosts and astrology and palmistry and all that. And then of course we all went to church or Sunday school at the local Presbyterian Church. And the household staff were all black and they went to their Baptist church but they all practiced voodoo. So I had this kind of two-pronged religious upbringing. I would pray, I would say my prayers to God and Jesus every night ... but I also believed in all this other stuff....All the women in the family are psychic, and I have psychic abilities, and my sister.

I watched the members of the staff often practice voodoo....They would put hexes on people. I saw my mother put hexes on two people....They died....They were two people who had hurt me very badly and she just said to both of them, ‘I hope you drop dead,’ and they did, and I saw her do it....

When I was in my late 20s and early 30s, there were three people who hurt me in some way, or (hurt) somebody I loved, and so I decided to put a hex on them. I had never done it before. What I wanted to have happen was for them to feel what I had felt. I didn’t mean for them to die.

Q: How do you put a hex on someone?

Quinn: I’m not going into total detail. There’s sort of a ritual. I light candles and music and fire and notes and that kind of thing. I just sort of made it up. This was what I had seen. Unfortunately, bad things happened to these three people over the period of five years....

My brother, I told him what had happened, and he said, ‘You’ve really got to cut this out. This is bad karma. You’re putting out bad energy.’ But I just didn’t take it that seriously.

Q: Two of them died right away.

Quinn: One person died right away, another person got fired immediately and then died, and then the other one died right away. . . .

In the end, my brother said, ‘In some way, you have put out bad energy and it comes back at you threefold, and you’ve just have got to stop this.’ And that was when I was in my early 30s, and I never did it again. And I have always felt guilty about it. Even though intellectually I don’t believe in it, there’s something emotionally and psychologically that makes me worry maybe I did have some responsibility for it....

I’ve never done it again....And believe me, since (Donald) Trump was elected, and since the election, I can’t tell you how many friends have asked me to put a hex on Donald Trump, and I won’t do it. I just said no. I don’t do that anymore....

Q: Your husband, Ben Bradlee, was the editor of The Washington Post, which he led during the Watergate investigation. Does this feel like Watergate to you — the investigations into the Trump administration?

Quinn: Oh, absolutely. I could be wrong, but I think this is worse than Watergate, because what you’re talking about here is collusion with a foreign enemy, and that’s treason. And that was never Richard Nixon’s issue....Honestly, I don’t see Trump lasting this whole four years. I just don’t....

The environment right now is more toxic and more poisonous than I’ve ever seen....(But I have) still been able to pull away and still find a sense of faith and joy and magic in the world....

Q: As a child, you declared you were an atheist. How do you describe yourself now?

Quinn: What I do believe is there is a Creator...but I don’t have a personal God I pray to....I can’t understand that any God who was omniscient and all good could allow suffering, and that’s the big hurdle I have about a confessional God.

And then I also had this epiphany, which was that all of the things that I had believed in, all of the magic that I had believed in, was just as legitimate as organized religion, of Islam or of Judaism or of Catholicism, or of Protestantism. And it was just that it wasn’t organized in that way and that therefore didn’t have that respect.

So I began to see that all religion was magic, and it is.