WitchTok has passed forty billion views. Spells, readings, house clearings and exorcisms, all of it a swipe away, and I wanted to understand why so many people believe it rather than argue about whether they should.
So I went to Liverpool and spent time with Molly Simpson. Molly talks to demons. She clears haunted houses for two hundred and seventy pounds a time, and her friends call her the Ghostbuster. I followed her into a house she said was occupied, watched her banish what she said was in it, and met the people who pay her to do this.
Her clients were the part that shifted it for me. They are not people looking for a laugh. They are people with something wrong in the house or something wrong in their life, who have tried other things first, and who have decided this is worth two hundred and seventy pounds. Whatever you believe is actually happening in that room, their end of it is real.
Molly's own story is what I was least ready for. She told me about the childhood she came out of, about her familiar, about black magic she says saved her dog, and about selling her soul to a demon. She told me she joined a satanic cult and why she left it. She told me she went to hell and met Jesus. She has also reverted to Islam. I know how all of that reads written down, which is why I would rather you heard her say it than take my summary of it.
At the end she cleansed my soul, which was a stranger twenty minutes than I had prepared for.
I went in thinking I knew what kind of story this was and by the end I was not sure any more. I am not trying to prove or debunk anything. What I want to understand is what people believe and why they believe it, and Molly gave me far more of an answer to that than I expected.