Love spells and sex magick create a divine confluence in Pittsburgh’s witchcraft scene

Kali Vee , co-owner of Pittsburgh’s oldest occult shop, Hocus Pocus , — which turns 28 on Oct. 13 — has been noticing a trend: young folks have been walking into her Oakland store asking for a One Wish Willow.  Her shop doesn’t sell them because they were made up. These magical tokens that grant the user one wish are entirely fictional, popularized by the horror movie Obsession (May 2026), where the protagonist uses one to earn his crush’s love. Even if they were legitimate, Vee would have serious reservations; in the movie, playing with someone else’s free will has disastrous consequences. “When they ask me for this, I say, ‘Did you watch the movie the whole way to the end? Is that what you want? People cooking your cats and killing your friends?’” she tells Pittsburgh City Paper . “They just stand there, like a llama, and go, ‘I didn’t think of it that way.’”     Dr. Amber Epps , owner of Wilkinsburg’s Arts & Crafts: Botanica and Occult Shop , also sees an increasing number of people come into her shop with lists of things they learned about from TikTok, and even AI. “I’ve had people come in and say, ‘ChatGPT told me I need to get these things,’” she tells City Paper . While the shop owner wants to sell products, the spiritual practitioner in her feels the need to redirect them. “You have to trust yourself first,” she warns. “ChatGPT cannot help you with spiritual issues.”  As shop owners and local witches, both Epps and Vee see how common it is for folks who know little about magic to want to use it to attract partners and exert some control over their love lives, but it’s a type of magic neither will sell without warning, and often not at all. “You’re tampering with a person’s free will,” Vee says. “If you’re successful at it, it’s not you they are attracted to — it’s the spell.”  Epps, who cited Obsession without my mentioning it, has cut customers off entirely for trying to do love spel