The Hex'

If you’re thinking of ticking off Sally Quinn, don’t! It may seem like a stern warning, but the author of Finding Magic: A Spiritual Memoir has been successful at placing hexes on people that have treated her unfairly and they didn’t end up in a good place – they’re dead actually. While she prefers not to focus too much on this aspect of her book, which was celebrated at the residence of The Ambassador of Germany Peter and Mrs. Huberta von Voss-Wittig at their Berliner Salon, you can’t help but go there – it’s fascinating. Think Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

In order to understand her ‘hexes’ you first need to meet Aunt Ruth. Quinn, who has lived in Georgetown since 1982, grew up in the deep South of Savannah Georgia and summers in a small town called Statesboro. While the area is known for it’s beautiful parks, horse-drawn carriages, antebellum architecture, there’s also Bonaventure Cemetery that became famous when it was featured in the novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil – which is where Aunt Ruth comes in! Her family were Scottish Presbyterians and Aunt Ruth played the organ in the church. “She also had this whole other side to her,” Quinn told Hollywood on the Potomac. “They believed in the Scottish Stones and time travel and psychic phenomenon and ghosts and Ouija boards and tarot cards and astrology and all that and voodoo. And so I was brought up with that as my sort of alternate religion. I call it my embedded religion, because it was something I believed in. And then I watched people put hexes on other people; I mean that was part of the routine. When you go to Savannah or Louisiana, New Orleans, every other store has a voodoo doll or something like that. And so when I got older, I used to tease my friends all of the time about putting hexes on people.” In her book she references it this way: “I began to see the power of the mystical, the mysterious, and the magical. I had a glimpse of the spiritual as a possible substitute for religion – unorthodox as what I was seeing and feeling may have been.” She also described to us her lifelong belief in the occult and worries that hexes she once put on three people may have worked, but hopes that wasn’t the reason for their demise.