The first night, death, I never imagined that I would ever be the kind of person to believe

in curses years ago in another life. I prided myself in my staunch atheism, my systematic belief

in the unavoidable naturalism, underlying all cause and effect. When bad things happened,

there was always a logical explanation, but there was no meaning behind it. The same with good things,

things just happened. There was no use in trying to figure out why they happened.

All events were predetermined the moment the universe was set into motion.

That's what I used to believe. And then my life went to shit.

My private real estate business, which had been wildly successful,

quickly pulled me into bankruptcy. There was no good explanation. Nothing had changed in my

business model. And my financial planner projected continued growth and prosperity.

But clients stopped coming and it failed. Then there were the personal troubles. My wife and I

had been trying for a kid. We had a total of three heart-wrenching miscarriages. Then a doctor

discovered an ovarian cyst and identified it as the cause of the miscarriages. We had it removed

and I was satisfied in knowing the explanation of our misfortune. We tried again and my wife

carried our son to full term. Then he died in the womb. There was no good explanation.

All that pain drove us apart and my wife left me. Failure after failure, loss after loss, bad

thing after bad thing. A sense of something dark inside me steadily grew. I could feel that something

was wrong. Something beyond my undesirable circumstances. I had nowhere to turn.

And my naturalistic view of the world offered me no comfort and no solution.

In desperation, I met with a spiritual woman. Someone I would have once called a crackpot

or a con artist. She burned incense, muttered gibberish, studied my palms, and told me I was cursed.

She said my energy had been invaded. Something had grown inside of me that was altering

...