You may have heard about tarot cards before. They are spiritual cards that can tell you about your past, present or future. You can get them read just about anywhere, but you might find a reader unexpectedly close.

“I got my tarot cards read when I was 7, and ever since I’ve wanted a deck of my own,” senior Paige Pritchard said. “I’ve always been very, very interested in them.”

Pritchard is a tarot card reader. She said it’s a bit like playing cards — every card means something different.

“There’s the big cards, like Death, the Moon, the S
un, and there’s the little ones that are divided into the cups, the coins, the swords and the staff,” she said. “However they land — face up, backward or turned, tells you what the other person needs to know. It depends on how you lay them out and what you ask for. It’s like an intuition.”

Pritchard said she didn’t begin reading tarot cards until 11 years after she first had hers read.

“I got my first deck [this fall],” she said. “You have to be gifted the deck, you can’t go buy your own or else it’s bad luck — they won’t work. I got my first deck from my ex-boyfriend.”

Most people don’t believe what tarot cards can do, Pritchard said.

“A lot of people are curious as to what it’s all about, and a lot of people are skeptics and are like ‘Oh, what do you know? This is [fake],’” she said. “They’re usually pretty shocked about what I can tell them. People also go for answers. If they’re struggling with inner-turmoil, they want to know how something’s going to work out.”

Pritchard’s friend, senior Maggy Crawford, got her cards read by Pritchard.

“She told me she was going to read my tarot card, and I wasn’t sure what it was about,” Crawfo
rd said. “When she did it I was like, ‘Wow, this is really cool.’”

Besides reading cards, Pritchard said she also uses ouija boards.

“I rarely [get responses out of the board],” she said. “The school [has a lot of energy], though. I’ve done it in the PAC. There was a lot of activity on it — it didn’t tell me anything specific. I got it’s name — it was some generic name like Scott or something. It just moved all around the board, which isn’t a good sign. I want to take it to the warehouse and see what happens.”

Crawford said she turned to Pritchard for answers after experiencing strange occurrences at her house.

“One day we were hanging out after school and some things would happen, and we would just brush them off.” Crawford said. “We were sitting in my kitchen and I moved away from the sink. There were five glasses on the counter, and they all [suddenly] just fell in the sink. [Another] time, [Pritchard] was downstairs by herself and she heard cupboards opening and closing, so she figured my mom was home making food. She got up there and no one was there.”

After hearing about this, Pritchard said she wanted to use a ouija board at Crawford’s house.

“We did the ouija board and nothing really fancy happened,” Crawford said. “It probably wasn’t even real.”

Pritchard said she is still learning about tarot cards, but she hopes to become better at reading and understanding what the cards are trying to tell her.

“I like when people follow up after I read their ca

rds,” she said. “My favorite part about reading is seeing people who are skeptical change their minds.”