Curses
The Curse on Maplewood Road
A Taoist practitioner recounts a disturbing case: someone's family targeted by a multi-layered hex placed on their ancestral grave, home, and bodies—and the disturbing truth about who was behind it.
# The Curse on Maplewood Road
Catherine called me at six in the morning on New Year's Day.
I picked up thinking it was a greeting. Then I heard her voice. Shaking. Wet. She was crying before she even got a full sentence out.
"It's my father. He's dying. The hospital sent him home."
I sat up. Fully awake.
"How bad?"
"Brain hemorrhage. The doctor said it's too deep. They can't operate. He might go any minute."
I was already getting out of bed. Already reaching for my jacket.
"Stay where you are. Don't panic. I'm coming."
---
I've been practicing Taoist ritual arts for eighteen years. It's not something I advertise. Most of my clients find me through word of mouth—people I've helped before, people who believe in what I do. Catherine had been a client and a friend for almost three years. She was a businesswoman, practical, not the type to call crying over nothing.
I got to my studio in forty minutes. While she drove to meet me, I prepared.
There are things I can do in emergencies. Techniques passed down from my teacher, things most people only see in television dramas and dismiss as fiction. But I've used them. A handful of times, when everything else had failed.
The Seven Star Lamp is one of them. It's real. It's also extraordinarily difficult. I've only used it twice in eighteen years.
The first time was nine years ago. This was the second.
I won't go into the specifics of how it's done. Only that it requires focus, specific objects, and a kind of trance state that most people wouldn't believe if they saw me during it. It buys time. Not much—maybe hours, sometimes a day. But it buys time.
I focused. I waited.
An hour later, Catherine called.
"They transferred him. He's in surgery. The new hospital said they can try."
"Good. That's good. Keep me updated."
---
Two hours after that, the surgeon came out.
"He made it through. He's stable. But there's brain damage. We won't know the extent until he wakes up."
Catherine was beside herself. She found me afterward, sitting in the hospital chapel, the kind of place you end up when you don't know what else to do.
She asked me something that stuck with me.
"Before New Year, I paid for a full purification ritual for my whole family. We cleared our karmic debts. We made offerings. Everything was supposed to be protected. Why did this happen?"
I didn't have an answer right away.
I had read her father's birth chart months earlier. By the numbers, this year should have been stable for him. Unremarkable. Nothing like a sudden hemorrhage.
"Tell me everything," I said. "Everything that's happened in the last few months. Even things that seem small."
Catherine went quiet. Then she said:
"My cousin. Her son. He was in a car accident three weeks ago. Completely healthy kid, perfect driving record. Just—hit a truck on a clear day. He's in the ICU at a different hospital."
Another accident. Another family member. On the same side of the family.
"Catherine," I said slowly. "Your hometown. The region your family is from. What do you know about what's practiced there?"
She looked at me.
"Black magic," she said. "Hexes. Curses. Everyone knows about it but no one talks about it. My grandmother used to warn us about it when we were kids."
She paused.
"Why are you asking?"
I told her what I was thinking. She went pale.
---
That night, I sat in meditation.
It's not something I can explain easily. You enter a state—breathing, stillness, letting go of the body. Then things come. Images. Sensations. Sometimes they make sense immediately. Sometimes they're fragments you have to piece together.
What I saw made me open my eyes and gasp.
I saw Catherine's family compound. The ancestral grave, on a hillside outside the village. I saw hands—someone's hands—burying things in the earth around the tombstone. I saw threads. Red threads. Wrapped around the gate, around the doorframe, around something I couldn't quite see but could feel like cold water in my chest.
Someone had laid a curse on that family. Not a simple one. Not a quick hex from a jealous neighbor. This was layered. Anchored. Placed in three locations: the grave, the house, and—somehow—on the body itself.
I called Catherine when I came out of the trance.
"I need you to verify some things for me."
I asked her questions. Specific ones. She confirmed every single one.
The ancestral grave had been recently disturbed—she'd noticed the soil looked fresh but assumed the family had done some cleaning. The gate to her parents' property had been repainted red last autumn. Her father's health had been declining slowly for months, not weeks, but she'd attributed it to age.
She didn't know any of it was connected.
"Someone did this," I said. "And they did it well. This isn't amateur. Whoever placed this has been trained."
She was silent for a long time.
"Can you take it off?"
---
It took me two hours.
I worked on the physical body first. That's the anchor point. Without removing the anchor, clearing the house and grave wouldn't matter—the effect would just reset.
I won't describe what I did. Some of it involves symbols I drew in the air over her father's hospital bed, when no one was watching. Some of it involves words in old Taoist dialect that aren't used anymore in any living language. Some of it involves something my teacher called "summoning the tiger"—pulling destructive energy away from a target and dispersing it.
When I was done, I felt drained. Like I'd run ten miles.
"It's done," I told Catherine. "The anchor on your father's body is cleared. Observe him. If he wakes up and is more coherent than expected, we'll know it worked."
She called me the next morning.
"He woke up. He recognized me. He asked for water."
"That's good. That's really good. But—"
"But the doctor says recovery will be slow. There may be permanent damage."
"I told you. I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a practitioner. I can move things. I can't undo physics."
She thanked me. Then she asked the question I knew was coming.
"The grave. The house. What do we do?"
---
What we found, she told me later, was buried near the grave and around the perimeter of her parents' home.
I won't describe it in detail. It's not for shock value. But when she sent me photos—after I'd walked her through exactly what to look for and where—I sat in silence for a long time.
Some of it was recognizable. Charred cloth. Bone fragments. Wax figures with needles in them. Things that had names in old texts, practices that had been illegal in China for decades but persisted in certain rural areas.
Some of it didn't have names I recognized. I'm not sure I wanted to.
The local spiritual practitioner Catherine found—someone she'd known since childhood, an older woman who still practiced folk religion in the old way—confirmed everything I suspected. She helped clear the physical objects while I worked remotely on the deeper structures.
The curse had been building for months. Maybe longer. Whoever placed it was patient. They knew the family's movements, their schedule, their ancestral lands.
Catherine wanted to know who did it.
"Did anyone have a grudge? Recently? Historically?"
She thought about it.
"There was a business dispute. Three years ago. A partner accused my father of stealing intellectual property. They took it to court. My father won, but the other family lost everything."
There it was.
---
She asked me if she could curse them back.
I told her no.
Not because I'm moral. Not because I'm good. But because when you mirror a curse, you don't cancel it—you complete it. You bind yourself to the same thread. Whoever uses black magic on another person will eventually face the consequences of that energy. Not because of gods. Not because of karma as some cosmic judge. But because the energy follows its own logic. It goes where it was sent. And eventually, it comes back to the hand that threw it.
I know this because I've seen it. The people who do this work and think they're getting away with it—they're not. The world doesn't punish them with lightning from the sky. It does something slower. Quieter. It just stops working for them. Piece by piece. Like a house slowly succumbing to rot no one can see.
I told Catherine to let it go. I set protections around the grave, the house, and the family compound. I gave her procedures to follow—a kind of spiritual maintenance, routine offerings and cleansing rituals that would prevent anything like this from taking root again.
She agreed. Reluctantly.
---
It's been eight months. Catherine's father is home. He walks with a cane and his speech is slower than before, but he's alive. He's present. Her cousin's son is out of the hospital and doing physical therapy.
Catherine still runs her business. She still makes her offerings. She still calls me when something feels wrong.
She never found out who placed the curse. She probably never will.
And that's probably for the best.
Because the person who did it—whoever they are—is already living in the shadow of what they made. Whatever they were after, whatever they thought they would gain—it's eating them from the inside, the way these things always do.
I don't say this to be poetic.
I say it because I've seen it. Again and again.
Hexes are a debt. And debts, one way or another, always come due.
---
*Have you had an encounter with something you couldn't explain? Share your story at CreepyVibes.*
Catherine called me at six in the morning on New Year's Day.
I picked up thinking it was a greeting. Then I heard her voice. Shaking. Wet. She was crying before she even got a full sentence out.
"It's my father. He's dying. The hospital sent him home."
I sat up. Fully awake.
"How bad?"
"Brain hemorrhage. The doctor said it's too deep. They can't operate. He might go any minute."
I was already getting out of bed. Already reaching for my jacket.
"Stay where you are. Don't panic. I'm coming."
---
I've been practicing Taoist ritual arts for eighteen years. It's not something I advertise. Most of my clients find me through word of mouth—people I've helped before, people who believe in what I do. Catherine had been a client and a friend for almost three years. She was a businesswoman, practical, not the type to call crying over nothing.
I got to my studio in forty minutes. While she drove to meet me, I prepared.
There are things I can do in emergencies. Techniques passed down from my teacher, things most people only see in television dramas and dismiss as fiction. But I've used them. A handful of times, when everything else had failed.
The Seven Star Lamp is one of them. It's real. It's also extraordinarily difficult. I've only used it twice in eighteen years.
The first time was nine years ago. This was the second.
I won't go into the specifics of how it's done. Only that it requires focus, specific objects, and a kind of trance state that most people wouldn't believe if they saw me during it. It buys time. Not much—maybe hours, sometimes a day. But it buys time.
I focused. I waited.
An hour later, Catherine called.
"They transferred him. He's in surgery. The new hospital said they can try."
"Good. That's good. Keep me updated."
---
Two hours after that, the surgeon came out.
"He made it through. He's stable. But there's brain damage. We won't know the extent until he wakes up."
Catherine was beside herself. She found me afterward, sitting in the hospital chapel, the kind of place you end up when you don't know what else to do.
She asked me something that stuck with me.
"Before New Year, I paid for a full purification ritual for my whole family. We cleared our karmic debts. We made offerings. Everything was supposed to be protected. Why did this happen?"
I didn't have an answer right away.
I had read her father's birth chart months earlier. By the numbers, this year should have been stable for him. Unremarkable. Nothing like a sudden hemorrhage.
"Tell me everything," I said. "Everything that's happened in the last few months. Even things that seem small."
Catherine went quiet. Then she said:
"My cousin. Her son. He was in a car accident three weeks ago. Completely healthy kid, perfect driving record. Just—hit a truck on a clear day. He's in the ICU at a different hospital."
Another accident. Another family member. On the same side of the family.
"Catherine," I said slowly. "Your hometown. The region your family is from. What do you know about what's practiced there?"
She looked at me.
"Black magic," she said. "Hexes. Curses. Everyone knows about it but no one talks about it. My grandmother used to warn us about it when we were kids."
She paused.
"Why are you asking?"
I told her what I was thinking. She went pale.
---
That night, I sat in meditation.
It's not something I can explain easily. You enter a state—breathing, stillness, letting go of the body. Then things come. Images. Sensations. Sometimes they make sense immediately. Sometimes they're fragments you have to piece together.
What I saw made me open my eyes and gasp.
I saw Catherine's family compound. The ancestral grave, on a hillside outside the village. I saw hands—someone's hands—burying things in the earth around the tombstone. I saw threads. Red threads. Wrapped around the gate, around the doorframe, around something I couldn't quite see but could feel like cold water in my chest.
Someone had laid a curse on that family. Not a simple one. Not a quick hex from a jealous neighbor. This was layered. Anchored. Placed in three locations: the grave, the house, and—somehow—on the body itself.
I called Catherine when I came out of the trance.
"I need you to verify some things for me."
I asked her questions. Specific ones. She confirmed every single one.
The ancestral grave had been recently disturbed—she'd noticed the soil looked fresh but assumed the family had done some cleaning. The gate to her parents' property had been repainted red last autumn. Her father's health had been declining slowly for months, not weeks, but she'd attributed it to age.
She didn't know any of it was connected.
"Someone did this," I said. "And they did it well. This isn't amateur. Whoever placed this has been trained."
She was silent for a long time.
"Can you take it off?"
---
It took me two hours.
I worked on the physical body first. That's the anchor point. Without removing the anchor, clearing the house and grave wouldn't matter—the effect would just reset.
I won't describe what I did. Some of it involves symbols I drew in the air over her father's hospital bed, when no one was watching. Some of it involves words in old Taoist dialect that aren't used anymore in any living language. Some of it involves something my teacher called "summoning the tiger"—pulling destructive energy away from a target and dispersing it.
When I was done, I felt drained. Like I'd run ten miles.
"It's done," I told Catherine. "The anchor on your father's body is cleared. Observe him. If he wakes up and is more coherent than expected, we'll know it worked."
She called me the next morning.
"He woke up. He recognized me. He asked for water."
"That's good. That's really good. But—"
"But the doctor says recovery will be slow. There may be permanent damage."
"I told you. I'm not a miracle worker. I'm a practitioner. I can move things. I can't undo physics."
She thanked me. Then she asked the question I knew was coming.
"The grave. The house. What do we do?"
---
What we found, she told me later, was buried near the grave and around the perimeter of her parents' home.
I won't describe it in detail. It's not for shock value. But when she sent me photos—after I'd walked her through exactly what to look for and where—I sat in silence for a long time.
Some of it was recognizable. Charred cloth. Bone fragments. Wax figures with needles in them. Things that had names in old texts, practices that had been illegal in China for decades but persisted in certain rural areas.
Some of it didn't have names I recognized. I'm not sure I wanted to.
The local spiritual practitioner Catherine found—someone she'd known since childhood, an older woman who still practiced folk religion in the old way—confirmed everything I suspected. She helped clear the physical objects while I worked remotely on the deeper structures.
The curse had been building for months. Maybe longer. Whoever placed it was patient. They knew the family's movements, their schedule, their ancestral lands.
Catherine wanted to know who did it.
"Did anyone have a grudge? Recently? Historically?"
She thought about it.
"There was a business dispute. Three years ago. A partner accused my father of stealing intellectual property. They took it to court. My father won, but the other family lost everything."
There it was.
---
She asked me if she could curse them back.
I told her no.
Not because I'm moral. Not because I'm good. But because when you mirror a curse, you don't cancel it—you complete it. You bind yourself to the same thread. Whoever uses black magic on another person will eventually face the consequences of that energy. Not because of gods. Not because of karma as some cosmic judge. But because the energy follows its own logic. It goes where it was sent. And eventually, it comes back to the hand that threw it.
I know this because I've seen it. The people who do this work and think they're getting away with it—they're not. The world doesn't punish them with lightning from the sky. It does something slower. Quieter. It just stops working for them. Piece by piece. Like a house slowly succumbing to rot no one can see.
I told Catherine to let it go. I set protections around the grave, the house, and the family compound. I gave her procedures to follow—a kind of spiritual maintenance, routine offerings and cleansing rituals that would prevent anything like this from taking root again.
She agreed. Reluctantly.
---
It's been eight months. Catherine's father is home. He walks with a cane and his speech is slower than before, but he's alive. He's present. Her cousin's son is out of the hospital and doing physical therapy.
Catherine still runs her business. She still makes her offerings. She still calls me when something feels wrong.
She never found out who placed the curse. She probably never will.
And that's probably for the best.
Because the person who did it—whoever they are—is already living in the shadow of what they made. Whatever they were after, whatever they thought they would gain—it's eating them from the inside, the way these things always do.
I don't say this to be poetic.
I say it because I've seen it. Again and again.
Hexes are a debt. And debts, one way or another, always come due.
---
*Have you had an encounter with something you couldn't explain? Share your story at CreepyVibes.*