Sonnet has been complaining all week about the dead people in our house.

Even though I’ve been a Third Degree High Priestess for over a year-and-a-half, I still don’t feel other entities or energy shifts as quickly or as easily as either of my teenage daughters, Rhiannon and Sonnet. I’m an Indigo child, too, one of the older ones of the forerunners, but I still find it fascinating to watch their generation, the ones born in the 1990s. They’re so quick to pick up on the vibrations in the gemstones. They feel things intuitively and empathically, feel so much, too much, and it’s overwhelming. I remember that feeling and that age, how I shut off my own “antennae” because there was no one for me to talk to and how overwhelming it was.

It’s much the same for them. Their parents are my age or even a little younger. They don’t feel and they don’t understand, or if they ever did, they’ve forgotten. So they give their kids a hard time whereas I encourage it in mine.

So when Sonnet tells me there are more dead people in the house the usual and ones that she doesn’t know, I agree. She’d warned me of this last week.

I have a new enemy now to deal with, yet another witch war. It’s bad enough with normal human dynamics when people become manipulative or controlling, but with magickal people, it’s exponentially worse. Non-magickal people—my ex-husband Quent, for example—can amass plenty of energy against you, but if witches can’t manipulate and control another with words and subtle actions, just wait until they start pulling in Voudun practices or invoking Kali or even Aphrodite to assist them.

But I’ve been through this before, and this time I’m better prepared.

It’s not that the energy in a house has been bad, but there’s been a certain heaviness to it, and it’s been on my mind all week to do a cleansing. In fact, it’s been brought up to me three times this week.

First? By Jan—who has seen a TV show with a popular psychic who talks about exorcisms and banishings from a Christian point of view. Jan told me I needed to put sea salt in every room. I started laughing. Although we’ve been best friends for years, I don’t tell her everything I do. Then she told me that I needed to make holy water and tried to tell me how to make it, that all I needed was salt and water and to bless it, but I’ve been making holy water for at least five or six years. As many times as she’s been to my house, she doesn’t know that that’s what’s in those bottles on the window.

She told me, too, to put crucifixes in every room, but I blanched at that and she corrected herself. The psychic didn’t actually recommend crucifixes, which Jan knows I hate. I hate the whole idea of a Roman cross and of Jesus nailed to the cross. Even as little girl, I always thought if Jesus came back, He would be really pissed to see that we were all wearing symbols of His torture around our necks.

But Jan corrected herself. No, it wasn’t a crucifix.

She said that, not the psychic. She shouldn’t have said that, Jan said. She shouldn’t have interpreted it that way. It was actually crosses in every room, not crucifixes. Jan said it wasn’t a matter Christianity but rather, it was a matter of a symbol, that the cross was an intersection and that if there were any dark entities in the room, that gave them an exit point.

I had to nod at that. Crosses have been a spiritual symbol since long before Jesus walked the Earth. And it’s odd that I do have crosses in just about every room, more crosses in some rooms than others. But I guess Jan forgot that I already have crosses all over my house, more than she does in hers, in fact, and she’s a Christian.

But Jan wasn’t the only one to suggest a house cleansing.