About Halloween Hunter
Reporter Hunter Spears haunts the DC area looking for the delightfully demented and the spectacularly spooky.
If you’ve gone to any Halloween events this season, you may have noticed some folks with witchy vibes offering to read your tarot cards. The cards, 78 in total, are used to help guide people on journeys of self-reflection and offer insights into aspects of life like relationships and career.
Skye Marinda, a tarot coach from Northern Virginia, has been reading Washingtonians’ cards for years and has spent almost all of her nights this October at Halloween events around the District giving tarot readings. Over 23 days she’s read the cards of more than 450 people from the area, so she’s uniquely clued in to the hopes and desires of people from this area. So just what do Washingtonians want to know about themselves and their future?
Marinda says that people are always interested in questions about love and, with a dating scene as notoriously difficult as DC’s, she sometimes gets people worried that they’re going to die alone. She thinks that people everywhere struggle to find authentic connection, but that plight is especially acute in a city where what you do matters so much and many people plan to be here for only a short time.
Despite their justifiable concerns, she says that people around DC seem more embarrassed to ask about love than those in Pennsylvania, where she also reads cards. Here, they seem to worry that issues of romance feel frivolous in contrast to more weighty issues. “Maybe it doesn’t seem serious enough or important enough to ask about it, compared to things like career.” Career is, if you can believe it, the top question locals want to know about.
“I get a lot of people asking if they should stay in DC or move, which I feel is a very DC question,” Marinda says. On a given night, she’ll get all sorts of job-related questions, questions about quitting jobs, about going back to school, about changing careers and getting out of government. A lot of her clientele are people who work on the Hill, and she says she gets a surprising amount of lawyers. “You never know who is going to be interested!”
At first, it did surprise Marinda that people in a city like DC were so interested in the occult. Now, having done read cards for a few years, it makes sense to her. “I think because DC is not thought of as a very spiritual or eclectic place, that when it is available, people are interested in it because it is new to them.” She will also get the occasional person seeking reassurances that they are not cursed.
What about the actual city itself? Marinda says a good card to represent DC is “The Emperor,” the father figure of the deck, which is associated with leadership. When she pulls it for a client, she usually interprets it as being career-focused and ambitious—apt.
Marinda also wants newcomers to know the reputation it has in some circles, tarot is not scary and can be a great tool for self-reflection. And if you’re wondering what the cards can tell you about yourself and your future, Marinda has her final event of the Halloween season tonight from 6-9 PM at Wunder Garten.
Hunter is a cat-loving Coloradoan who enjoys history, Halloween and board games. He studied audio production and radio storytelling at Hofstra University before moving to DC in 2022. During his editorial fellowship with Washingtonian in the fall of 2023, he ran Halloween Hunter, a section featuring local stories for the spooky season.
