Haunted by Magic
The Origins of Magical Fight Club
How you arrived
Magical Fight Club Origins: Forging a Fellowship in the Supernatural
Hello, Jason, who is not here,
We must seem strange to you. A band of distant friends who once bonded to help–well–me. However, what binds us is more profound than friendship. Like Frodo and his companions, we are a fellowship born from facing the spirit world together.
We knew each other, as you know, from the time that the spirits who looked like Birdmen were in my life. By the time this fellowship began, I’d been haunted by the Birdmen, humanoid figures with bird wings, since my first memories. And like so often happens in horror movies, when others tried to help, they were spiritually attacked too. For a long time, for most of my life, I endured the Birdmen alone.
So our group bound together, friends who all knew the horror of being haunted throughout their lives. We had each other’s backs, and we taught each other how better to fight back.
The four women of this little team are the surviving members of a motley this magical group we nicknamed “Fight Club.”
We, Celeste, Diana, Evelyn and myself, were all psychic children. All psychic freaks, all subject to spirit attacks since children, our unity became our sanctuary.
- We helped each other.
- We played with magic.
- … And sometimes we battled spirits.
Originally, Magical Fight Club focused solely on mutual support among its members. For most of the group’s existence, we have remained secluded and secretive. Our group met on sites like Facebook and private forums. Content interacting with each other we rarely worked with the public as a group. It was a world others wouldn’t understand, a realm where we were both hunters and hunted. Our paranormal investigation techniques were developed to track and document the spirits around us naturally. We compared notes, validated each other, gave each other tips–and left the rest of the world alone.
The Emergence of the Paranormal Investigation Branch
Over the years, we began to get referrals for cases. At first from friends, then friends of friends, then others. The public side of Magical Fight Club, the paranormal investigation branch began from there. Even then, we rarely took on cases ourselves, preferring instead to refer the client to a different, local group or to their own priest or shaman.
Magical Fight Club took the case only if the spirit was considered dangerous and if others had already tried and failed to placate or remove the spirit. Our role evolved. We became exorcists.
The group has changed over time—added more, lost some. My husband Devin, as you know now too, died during one of the fights with spirits. My husband’s best friends, Raven and Emma, still practice magic and are doing well, but lost heart in the group after Devin’s death. Their grief mirrored my own and I don’t blame them for wanting to leave it all behind. So have I.
As the last remaining founding member, I talked the group into doing other magics and exploring other paths. We shut down the paranormal investigation branch of the group and went back to our roots, focusing on personal growth and exploration.
Now here I am, confessing my past publicly and breaking our own rules:
- The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.
- The second rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.
I need to decide if Magical Fight Club will be willing to take on cases again, to fight again. I am both terrified and lethargic. But I don’t know if I can leave the world of Magical Fight Club behind or the work we used to do trying to help others.
Beyond Clichés: Real-Life Encounter with Spirits
If anyone ever asks, I’ll tell them I’m an atheist. Sometimes on a good day, I’ll say I’m just agnostic.
I wasn’t always. Not that I would claim any one religion, but was an omnist with a hint of Taoism. But still, I believed in something, a divine force that I would call “the universe” or god.
In a way, this story is the result of a horror movie cliche. Medium and former “exorcist,” traumatized after witnessing the possession and eventual death of her partner and husband, loses faith and spends years bitterly avoiding the work that she once thought of as her calling and passion.
But this is not the cliche. In the years since my husband’s death, I have not become an alcoholic or vagabond. I am still active in my career. (It’s not as if Fight Club ever paid.) I’ve not stopped or slowed the practice of magic. We just changed course.
- And I’m wondering if I made the right choice.
Now here I am, writing a blog like a message in a bottle, after building this series of magical spells over the last two years to call to your soul. This blog, a blend of personal musings and magical theory, is my way of reaching out to the world, and perhaps to you, “Jason,” wherever you might be. The magical training in this blog, including the modded video games, is meant as a beacon in the dark, an invitation to a world many never see. My world. Your home.
“You,” the soul of you who has been projecting here all of these years, are the central focus of Magical Fight Club as it is now. We have all seen you as you possessed the bodies of various people around me. You have often asked what I wanted out of our relationship whenever we met physically and I talked only of a life free to practice our sex magick and spirit games as we chose.
The question I keep asking myself, however, is what would I do if someone asked for help? What if we are asked to take on another exorcism case? Could I stand myself if I became like those who left me behind during those many years I was hounded by the Birdmen?
- And life, and the future, doesn’t seem as clear anymore.
If I Love You, I Cannot Be With You
From Devotion to Disillusionment
I don’t believe in a god. If anyone ever asks, I’ll tell them I’m an atheist. Sometimes on a good day, I’ll just say I don’t care if there is a higher power behind it all or not.
Nor did this start with the death of my husband at the hands of spirits. I decided to table the question of higher powers the day in 2016 when I saw what the Birdmen looked like and saw the potential depth and breadth of their influence. The Birdmen claimed to be Biblical angels, and I am aware that their appearance could remind you of “fallen angels.” But I have never actually believed either. Before 2016, if I spoke of the Birdmen at all, I simply referred to them as “Them.”
Growing up an omnist, I was once considered devout. I spent my life in churches and later monasteries, looking for sanctuary from the Birdmen like the kid in The Sixth Sense hid from ghosts. Other than with the members of Fight Club, I don’t talk about the Birdmen much. To others, I simply summarize that time of my life as “like a horror movie” and leave the rest to the imagination. This isn’t about keeping secrets; it’s that words fail to capture the relentless dread ‘they’ infuse in every moment.
- Just as there are not yet words to describe the look in my husband’s eyes the day that he told me he was not only dying but could feel his soul withering away inside his body.
- Or to describe the sacrifice he made–to save the rest of us.
As a writer, I believe in the power of words almost like my own faith or superstition. They have the ability to transcend the space that separates us all. I believe one day the words will come to talk about these things. It is just not today.
Exorcising the Unknown: Protecting the Vulnerable
Suffice it to say, growing up with the Birdmen in my life prepared me to face situations and entities that most only read about in books like ‘The Exorcist‘ or the novels of Stephen King.
Magical Fight Club started after several people, including my husband, decided to develop a system of training others to do the type of magical and spiritual assistance that each of the founding members once conducted on their own or with other groups.
- In short, Fight Club trained people how to communicate and interact with various types of spirits, aiming to ‘exorcise’ locations, objects, or people–to help protect those who could not protect themselves. If God or the universe had a plan, we believed that our work was a part of it.
Our approach didn’t always prioritize the living. But that was just our style. If the entity wasn’t hurting anyone, then we would tell the living person to suck it up and deal with the fact that the house was haunted. The ghost was there first after all.
We were the ones you’d call on if you were thrown across the room by an invisible force while the lights turned on and off. (True story, btw.) We negotiated with the spirits and the living but were also prepared to respond to spirit attack.
- We are, after all, FIGHT Club.
The Spirits Volunteered
Trauma and Recovery: Conducting Experiments with Spirits
From time to time on this blog, you’ll see us post things like video and photographic experiments that we are conducting with the spirits. These showcase our psychic games and the friendly spirits who are regularly around us.
In the years since we defeated the Birdmen and then later suffered the death of my husband, Devin, the roots of the group–our core philosophies, and styles of practice–have stayed the same. In more recent years, we simply did not openly work with outsiders anymore. After my husband died, we put the word out that we were taking a break and people respectfully stopped asking.
Instead, our journey turned inward, focusing on deepening of our understanding of our own skills through practice—and fun. The friendly spirits who are around us consistently volunteered to help. We built the original Skryim Love Spell mod list that the modding guide in this metafictional novel is based on, and we learned to use it.
Still I, and we, did not completely stop fighting even then. There have been several times in the last two years where one of us has encountered a problem that Fight Club was uniquely equipped to handle.
- I acknowledge that I fought begrudgingly.
- …And that I bitched about it the entire time.
So you see, I am not the movie cliche of a bitter faithless woman who has seen too much horror to ever sleep well at night.
After 2019, and the fight with what we call the “tentacle monsters,” I acknowledge that sleep with the TV on and the closet door open. However,
- I do not wile away my days in a bar grumbling about the world gone to hell despite mourning and PTSD.
- I do not have issues with any religion or faith as anyone practices, never did. My beliefs are simply personal, that’s all.
- I do not spout platitudes about the futility of life or love or spirit or go uber “rational” to deny it all.
When my husband died, Fight Club tabled any interactions with outsiders and focused on rediscovering the joy in our practices instead of helping others. It was a reasonable course of action, and one I don’t regret even now.
- If there is some ledger of sacrifice out there, then I’ve paid my dues.
Besides, even this Confessio Amantis of mine that you are reading now could help others in the end. The members of Magical Fight Club are certainly not the only ones in the world who have been subjected to spiritual attack because they were born psychic. But at the heart of this metafictional novel and multi-year love spell is the search for you.
We Can Have Levitation
Harnessing the Power of Technology: Integrating Mods for Magical Craft
The Skyrim Love Spell (as we called last year’s series of magical experiments) has been both highly successful and thus far in perfect timing with all goals except for one: meeting and joining with you to “make magic real,” as we say in the group. Progressive experiments throughout 2020 and 2021 demonstrated that your “soul” could not only temporarily merge with another individual in a sort of benign possession, but also, utilizing our advanced magical skills, you could essentially control an individual human body for the duration of his lifetime, effectively becoming the person in the living human body.
Following a long-standing tradition of narrative progress:
- Our spell work has evolved from Skyrim to Sims 4 (both modded for more than just gameplay, but as integral parts of our magical craft).
- Electrical glitches and anomalies are now fine-tuned to reflect both context and story more accurately.
- More and more spirits are volunteering to assist with Magical Fight Club, enhancing our collective abilities in electrokinesis.
- Everything is working exactly as it should be. And except for not yet finding “you,” everything progressing exactly on schedule.
And I don’t give a shit.
Finding Meaning in Spirit Work and a Magical Life
A recent essay in Harvard Business Review posited that the single most important factor in job satisfaction was whether or not the individual felt purpose in their work. This idea resonates with life as well. Many people, from dedicated soccer moms to high-flying executives, describe feeling satisfied and happy with their lives when they sense a purpose.
Growing up, I often questioned the higher power I once believed in about the curse of the Birdmen wondering how any benevolent deity could allow a child to endure such haunting and terror. As an adult, especially after developing a training system for Fight Club, I believed I had found my answer and purpose. As a mage, I triumphed over spirits and grew unfazed by the workings of “them” in my life. I thought perhaps my struggles were a form of training to aid others.
But I now recognize this as a convenient narrative, a way to validate my psychological needs. Believing in a purpose gave me a reason to continue, a justification for my efforts. It was, in many ways, a form of self-gratification – seeking those feel-good hormones released by acts of altruism.
Biochemically, altruism is narcissistic. Ironic, isn’t it?