I learned tarot in a haunted house

My bedroom had an exorcism certificate...

Let’s go back to where it all began, in my teenage bedroom, where - visitors would report - pictures slid off the walls and books jumped off the bookshelves. The house was in the middle of nowhere, at night it was so pitch black outside you couldn’t see your own hand in front of your face. It all added to the spooky vibe of the place. A neighbour had told me when I first moved in that there was a story of a girl who was locked in her top floor bedroom until she died, and who then was secretly buried between our houses… so far so EEK.

I did not enjoy living in this house. I was a tearaway teen and moving to this house had been my punishment for ignoring groundings and skipping school. Every night I’d run up the stairs, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end - everywhere I went I’d feel like I was being watched. And at night, I’d hear heavy breathing in my room and footsteps outside the door.

The room opposite mine, on the top floor, was wallpapered in a floral blue paper, walls, ceilings - it was like one of those optical illusions you stare at to see the picture underneath. As I was lonely and had no countryside friends, I went in there one day with a copy of my mum’s Rider Waite Smith tarot, an old deck she’d had since the 70s (and one I’d use for the next 20 years until it was lost in a house move). I studied the cards, tarot books and also other divination systems like the runes. Somehow that blue room seemed more friendly than my own room.

When I told my mum about the weird feelings in the house she’d say it was just because I didn’t want to live there. Although she did admit an increasing amount of items would go missing and later turn up somewhere different, she put that down to middle aged brain fog. When I moved out aged 16, mum decided to redecorate that ugly blue room. They stripped all the wallpaper and found another layer of paper under that - pages of the bible. On one panel near the door, they uncovered an exorcism certificate pasted to the wall. Yep. I know, right.

My mum stayed in the house for another 20 years or so, but only when she moved out did she reveal that something spooky had happened to her. She’d been away on holiday with the only keys to the house, and when she returned, a big old heavy armchair had been moved from the front room into the hallway and was sat facing the door.

I felt that this house had led me to explore the tarot and open up my intuition so I could feel the energies of past situations and people who had lived there. But I was too busy doing teenage things to explore more deeply at the time. It wasn’t until the covid pandemic hit and I began experiencing premonitions that I remembered that early experience…