Science journalist Erik Vance decides to get cursed by a witch doctor for science.

Erik Vance is an award-winning science journalist based in Baltimore. Before becoming a writer he was, at turns, a biologist, a rock climbing guide, an environmental consultant, and an environmental educator. He graduated in 2006 from UC Santa Cruz science writing program and became a freelancer as soon as possible. His work focuses on the human element of science — the people who do it, those who benefit from it, and those who do not. He has written for The New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, Harper’s, National Geographic, and a number of other local and national outlets. His first book, Suggestible You, is about how the mind and body continually twist and shape our realities. While researching the book he was poked, prodded, burned, electrocuted, hypnotized and even cursed by a witchdoctor, all in the name of science.

This story originally aired on October 25, 2019 in an episode titled “Cursed: Stories about superstitions”.

Story Transcript

A couple of years ago I was working on this book about how belief affects your body. So I was learning about things like placebos and hypnosis and false memories, and I had this one chapter that was on nocebos. If you guys don't know, nocebos are basically like if placebo is when you expect something good to happen in your body, and it does, a nocebo is when you expect something bad to happen to your body and it does.

So the problem is, though, that we don't really know much about nocebos. They're kind of mysterious. So I was trying to figure out how I could write about these things and it got me thinking about things like superstition and mass hysteria.

I was living in Mexico at the time and I had this amazing idea. I was like if I want to write about nocebos, I should just get myself cursed by a witch doctor, right? Like that's a great idea. I mean, how hard can it be?

So off I went now. The first person I talked to was my photographer, the photographer I worked with, and I said, “You know, I want to get cursed by a witch. Do you want to come by and shoot me getting cursed by a witch doctor?”

And he's like, “Hell, no. I don't want anywhere near that.”

I was like, “Why not?”

I'd just say this guy has literally been shot at, like he's been in war zones. He's taken photos of actual hired killers and he was like, “No. Way, way too dangerous. I don't want to go near you.”

I was like, “I don't get it.”

He's like, “Yeah. I don't want to get any of that bad juju to splash all over me. That'll happen.”

And I was like, “Is curse splash-back a thing?” I didn't know it was a thing.

And he said, “Yeah, I’m not going to do it.”

Turned out he wasn't the only one. The biggest objection came from my then pregnant wife who thought it was the dumbest idea she'd ever heard, and let me know. I was confused by this because I was saying like, “Well, you don't believe in magic, right?”

And she said, “Well, no, but there's just some things that we just don't know.”

I can see by similar looks of your faces that you agree with her, but I did know. Like I don't believe that there are forces that can make a piano fall on your head just because someone says some words. What I do believe is that your own fear and expectation can affect your health. It can negatively make these things real inside you.

And that's what I wanted to happen. Maybe get a little sick, maybe a cold. I don't know. Something.

So off I go. Despite everyone's worries I go off to get cursed. I bring with me my newly hired assistant who was going be my translator who I just hired the day before.

I said, “Okay. So you're hired. That's the good news. And our first assignment is to go harness the evil powers of nature and bring them upon myself because that's journalism, I think.”

She thought for a moment and said, “Yeah, okay. What the hell.”

So off we went. We went to a place called Mercado Sonora, which is a famous witch doctor market. It's like a lot of Mexican markets, if you've ever been to one. There's little stalls and people selling things, except what they're selling are things like burned-out doll heads and live rabbits and coyote skins and ceremonial swords. Basically everything that your average witch doctor would need. And it's this amazing place.

We started talking to people and we learned two things about curses. The first one is that the curse industry is pretty much driven by romance. Yes. It's what you think. The people who ask for curses (a) put them on people who are dating the people they want to be with or, (b) they put them on the people that they were recently with. That seems to be what drives the curse industry, most of it. That's the first thing we learned.

The second thing we learned is that the only way that a curse can be completed is if you tell someone that they are cursed. That's an important point. So we started talking to various people and we figured out that there were two sort of dark lords of the market. Now, you'd think that the curse scene would be kind of underground.

Maybe there'd be like back rooms or some guy with a jacket or something like that going. Actually, there's nothing illegal about putting a curse on people. It's totally fine so people should be out front like, “Yeah, I'll curse your cousin. What do you need?”

It's really good. You want to go and kill someone. I can do it like a hex. No problem, which is really surprising.

So we talked to these two people. We went to two dark lords. First guy is this like really happy sort of hippie guy. He was really sort of the new-age, laid-back version of a dark lord. He had like a Hawaiian shirt buttoned down to here and like kind of a necklace of skulls that were

really more cute than anything else. And a big pot belly.

And he was like, “Yeah, are you going to pay me?”

I was like, “Yeah, of course. Whatever.”

So because I like to comparison shop I went to another one and she was literally one of the most frightening people I've ever seen. First of all, she was dressed completely all in purple which, apparently, wards off evil spirits. And she tended to talk in sort of these long diatribes of sentences where she didn't really take a breath. She would just sort of sound would come out. And my new translator would, the first five minutes, answer a question. The first five minutes is just her speaking and my translator like listening, listening, listening and focusing.

Then I finally say, “What is she saying?”

And she said, “Okay, in order to make an Ouija board properly, you have to peel the face off of a convict and spread it over the board,” and that's about all she said.

I was like, “Oh, this is great!” She's in some very dark place. This woman is in a very dark space. This is exactly what I want.

So we started learning all these interesting things from her. For instance, if you do want to kill someone with a hex, you have to get twelve other witches and put them in a circle and have them take off their shoes and put them in the dirt in the forest. Or you can use their photos, if you want, if you don't have them.

And then you can channel the powers of ancient evil and focus on with whoever you want but you need to make sure you're wearing one of those Mexican wrestling masks while you're doing it, because she said it's just safer, protection. I didn't ask any more details than that.

So by the time we get to the end of this conversation, I've got these two choices. I've got the happy hippie, sort of laid-back warlock and the crazy, scary, assassin witch. I realized in that moment that there's a limit to my sense of myself as a scientific person. You know, like a man of science. I went with the happy hippie because he wasn't scary.

So he started the curse and the first couple days nothing really happened. I remember I had like a coughing fit that turned into a sneeze. Then immediately I was like, “The curse.”

My electric toothbrush stopped working and I was like, “The curse.”

But then nothing else happened. I started getting a little bored so I started trying to push it a little bit. Like one night, I got drunk, walked home alone just to see what would happen. I started riding my bike around and cutting people off to see what would happen. And nothing was happening. I was kind of let down.

So I go back to have the curse lifted and the guy is not there anymore. He's there but he's gone for the weekend, so I was like cursed for another weekend.

All right. Let's see if I can push this a little bit more. So on Saturday, I go rock climbing and, actually, traditional lead climbing, so it's like a little bit of a dangerous version of rock climbing. I noticed that my partner would stand back when I started climbing so that he didn't get the splash-back on him when I’d like plummet to the ground.

And he was like, “No, it should be fine,” but again nothing happened.

So I was kind of disappointed until, late that night, my wife started having stomach pains. They got more and more until early the next morning they got so bad the doctor said, “You know, you need to go to the emergency room now.”

So we got in a car and we started driving to the hospital. Of course, my wife is worried about the baby and what's going on and my only thought is, “It's the curse.”

We get to the hospital and they immediately take us in the back room. We skipped the line and everything. They don't find a heartbeat.

I've come to understand that the power of a curse is in the agency. It's in our desire to have control over the chaotic world that we live in. To say that, whether it's good or bad, that our actions dictate the things that happen to us.

And standing, sort of facing the potential of a lost child, you’d say, “My God, what have I done? What have I done?” That is the power of a curse.

Finally, they find the heartbeat and it turns out the whole thing was some bad tacos from the day before. So we go upstairs just to do a sonogram, just to be sure. And that was the day that I actually learned that my child would be a boy. It was also that Sunday was my very first Father's Day. It was Father's Day that day.

I'm sitting there and I'm sort of laughing with the hospital techs and we're making penis jokes and I remember just thinking, “Am I cursed today or was I blessed?”

And the only difference between those two things is the way that you see it, is the agency that you bring to it.

I walked away from that and, having learned my lesson, I went back in two days and definitely got that curse lifted. And I walked away with two sort of lessons from it. The first was the more powerful the things that happen to us are the way that we see the things that happen to us. The stories we tell ourselves are really more important than the things themselves. That, in fact, we are not a collection of our experiences. We are a collection of the way we see our experiences.

And the second thing is if you're going to play with black magic, wear a wrestling mask. Just protection. Thank you.