Ordinary people -- except for the witch part
It is roughly 7 on a recent Saturday night. A black-and-silver cordless telephone sits on the dining room table of Lori Bruno's Somerville home. From the other end of the speakerphone, Francesca Romano is crying.
"Oh thank you God, thank you God," she says in a thick Italian accent. "My Ryan, he saved my house."
Romano tells her story to the group sitting around the phone: Only hours earlier, she and her grandson, Ryan , had been eating at a Burger King in Medford when the child suddenly refused to finish his hamburger and insisted on immediately going to his grandmother's nearby house.
The reason: He said his grandmother's home was about to burn down.
"All of a sudden he said, 'I don't want to eat, my house is going fire,' " Romano tells the group. The 5-year-old would not stop repeating this frightening, if ungrammatical, phrase, so Romano, who says her grandson often has psychic abilities, decided to return home.
"I go inside my house, and as soon as I went in the house I smell the smoke," says Romano, 58, who had left meatballs cooking on the stove. "I kissed Ryan and said, ' You saved my home today.' "
Sitting at the table, listening to Romano's story, is Bruno's coven. Romano, also a member, had left the meeting earlier to take her grandson to eat and was now calling in a near-frenzy of relief to relate what had happened.
For her, and her listeners, it is not strange. In fact, it is perfectly normal. For them, this is just another day in the life of a witch.
Bruno, 66, founded her witches' coven, Our Lord and Lady of the Trinacrian Rose Church and Grove , in 1992 . Initially, the church met in the basement of Bruno's Medford home , then briefly in the back room of a Bickford's in Woburn. Since last year, the group has held its regular weekly meetings in Bruno's new home in Somerville.
When everyone is present, there are about 15 witches, all of whom practice Wicca -- a pagan religion that combines nature and magic -- and "Sicilian Witchcraft." Some are middle-aged, some are young. Most are female, but some are male. Some have what they consider to be magical powers -- they are psychics, healers, herbalists, or believe they can see the dead.
Otherwise, they are fairly ordinary: a Postal Service clerk, a seamstress, a nursing student.
"We are everyday regular people," said Bruno, the coven's high priestess, who founded the group when she was 51, the age she says one must be to teach witchcraft.
"We are not going to come out and do something that scares people, and we are tired of this scary stuff coming out about us."
The coven generally meets every Sunday around 2 p.m. in a small room adjacent to Bruno's kitchen. The room is layered with trinkets of witchery: candles, golden gargoyles, broomsticks, and bowls of camphor (to fend off evil energy). Sicilian Witchcraft, Bruno says, "is something very secretive, and always will be."
When the witches arrive (some live in Boston, others in Medford and Billerica), they gather around Bruno's small dining room table and wait for the high priestess, also known as "mama," to enter and begin the weekly lecture.
Bruno lectures on an array of topics: women's empowerment, world religions, geology, and ancient history. She shows videos and assigns readings (the coven has an account at
At the meeting last Sunday, Bruno told her coven to "clean their tools" for Halloween. The "tools" consist of chalices, ritual blades , pentacles, wands, and robes. All will be worn on Halloween, one of the coven's two most sacred holidays. The other, Beltane , is celebrated in the spring.
For Halloween, the witches abstain from eating meat for 48 hours, organize their homes, and prepare two very special, but distinct, lists.
One list contains names of deceased relatives who they will try to contact during a ceremony on Halloween night.
This list is tied with a purple ribbon and burned in a cauldron.
The other list contains names of evildoers.
"All year long we look in newspapers and cut clippings out of people who done evil in this world," said Bruno. "We have a little box, and we put them in there."
The witches cast a spell on this list, tie it with black ribbon, and burn it in a separate cauldron. She declines to give the names of this year's evildoers, saying publishing them could jeopardize the magic used against them.
Following the lecture, the group eats and talks. While the food is standard fare, (cupcakes, fruit, cheese, and crackers), the conversation is definitely not. One underlying theme centers on family pets, their psychic abilities, and the things they will say to their owners.
"People don't believe I can talk to my cat," said Darcy Velez, 39, a visiting witch who traveled to Boston from Puerto Rico for Halloween.
Another theme is the psychic; members who are psychic say they are constantly hit with visions, and when they are hit they share them with the table.
"The best way I can describe it is the prick you get when the needle goes in your arm when you are donating blood," said Arthur Ercolini, describing his psychic episodes. "It is a shiver going right down your spine."
Before the meeting is over, coven members have one final order of business -- they must perform witchcraft.
The coven casts spells for friends and family, for the homeless and the helpless, and for world leaders and local politicians. If the witches think they can help someone or something, they try.
"We are in service for all people," said Bruno.
When all is said and done, the witches leave Bruno's home and head back to lives in which, for the most part, nobody but family or close friends knows they consider themselves witches.
Christina Perry continues full-time dog walking in Brookline. Gary Gregory works as a counselor at the Boston VA Medical Center . Dennis Kirkpatrick enjoys retirement in Roslindale. Angela McDewell returns to bookkeeping in Billerica. "You don't follow the craft unless you are called to it," said Bruno. "The craft makes a person free."
