Josh on Magic

"I don't have a specific memory of when I first got into magic, but I remember seeing magicians as a kid growing up in Maryland and loving them. My brother and I would get magic books from the library and do simple tricks for each other. Our first major trick was the old hide a carrot in your palm, cover your hand with a handkerchief, and stick needles into the carrot pretending it was your thumb. We did it to my Mom to freak her out. 

"While my brother ended up having a passing interest in magic, I could not get enough of it. I started doing shows for my family during the holidays or other family events. I used to prepare for these shows by going to the magic shop or to magic meetings. Yes, magicians have magic meetings. It's crazy, you have 50 year old men drinking beer and smoking next to 12 year olds talking about card tricks. A lot of time, the kids are the best magicians because they have nothing but time to perfect their skills. 

"At 14, I started doing magic professionally. I got my first job doing a 45 minute show for $45. I thought a dollar a minute was pretty good back then. The thing is that I was so excited that I did an hour and a half show and pulled out every trick that I knew. The local newspaper, The Carroll County Times, came and from that, I got more work. In high school, I had a show every weekend and was making more money in a weekend than my friends were making all week. I was amazed that I could do something I loved and make money from it. 

"To make my parents happy, I went to college to study graphic design, but the plan was always to do magic professionally. During college, I got involved with a start-up and then after I graduated and came to D.C., I split my time between the start-up and my magic career. D.C. is a great city for magic because there are so many meetings and conventions here that need entertainment and it is a great town for networking. Magic has always been my full-time focus, even if it was not my full-time job. At a certain point, I realized that I needed to quit my job to focus fully on my magic career. I decided that I would give myself a year to try and make it as a magician. After the first two months, I realized that I wanted to make this my life. That decision was so liberating for me. 

"People here are fascinated when I said that I am a magician. It is such an unusual profession anywhere, but especially in D.C. It always sounds like a joke. People say, 'No really, what do you do?' For me, the real pay off to magic is the reaction from people, whether I am telling someone that I am magician or seeing their response to a trick. You do the same trick you have done for ten years and every time, people are fascinated by it. It never gets old. I have also learned that the way that someone responds to a magic trick says a lot about their personality. Some people get mad at magicians when you really fool them. Not to stereotype, but these are largely lawyers, doctors, and accountants who get frustrated because they don't like not knowing how something is done. Other people are capable of not caring about how it is done and just enjoying it as a form of entertainment. Every once in a while, someone calls me an asshole, but this is the only profession where an insult is actually a compliment. It usually means, you really got me. 

"I would encourage everyone to learn a little magic. I think that just like having a joke, everyone should have a magic trick. It's a great, fun thing to know and you don't have to be a magician to do it."

You can see Josh Norris perform every Sunday night from 6-8 p.m. at the Kemble Park Tavern at 5125 Macarthur Blvd NW. See Josh perform one of his tricks on a man at a barbershop here. 

Andrew on Reading D.C.'s Cards

"I am originally from Texas and will spend the next few months travelling around the country. D.C. was my first stop because I had an audition for the television quiz show Jeopardy. I think it went really well and I will hear back sometime in the next 18 months if I made the show or not. I like to read and think a lot and play trivia with friends, so I hope that will help me out. If not, I will keep trying until I get on the show. Oddly enough, as a tarot reader, I really want to get a bible category if I do get on the show. I grew up with all of that stuff and usually get them all right. 

"I remember when I was a lot younger and got my first tarot deck. I practiced a lot, but burned out on it. It can be a very intense experience. I ended up picking it up again when I started studying things of a more esoteric nature recently. There were a lot of similar patterns to what I was studying and tarot. It's an art form more than anything else. Now that I am traveling, I use tarot as a way to meet people, make some money, and learn about a place. 

"I am not a fortune teller. I don't tell the future, but I believe that there are echos of the future in tarot. When someone comes to me with a question, we take a few slow and even breaths together and then look to the cards for the answers. I like to touch the person 's hand as I am doing this to get a feel for their energy as I am going through the cards. When I lay the eight cards out, I look at the Major Arcana or the trump cards of the deck as the vowels of the sentence. The Minor Arcana are the consonants. Tarot is looking for the meaning of and between the cards and reading into the person while you read the cards. Seeing their reactions to things can be amazing and helps to add context to the additional cards and meanings behind them. 

(I asked Andrew to read cards for the city. He touched the deck to the ground, took a few breaths, and then laid out eight cards.)

"I think that D.C. is a place that has a lot going on. It is experiencing a rebirth and revitalization. But it is a place that is always under attack from people on the outside because it can be very abstract and elitist until you get here and see that is really a very honest, flesh-and-blood, and brick-and-mortar place. It is also under attack from people on the inside because of the segregation. There is a comfortable rythme that people have with the segregation and vast social and economic differences, but if three of four things go wrong in rapid succession, it could throw everything off in this city. People need to get to know their neighbors and realize that we have much more in common that we do in different. I think that humility is something that is good for everyone, but I wonder if there may be a deficit of it here. This city has so much potential to do great things." 

John on the D.C. Metro Area Ghost Watchers

"I grew up in Lansdowne, Maryland, in a house that I believe to be haunted. I was about 11 when my parents and I started noticing a lot of activity there. The cat would attack things that weren’t there. We heard hammering noises in the basement. I would go to the top of the basement stairs and it would stop. As soon as I left, it would start up again. The one that really pushed me over the edge was hearing a large crashing noise coming from the basement that sounded like broken glass. I went downstairs and there was nothing there. That pretty much convinced me that the house was haunted. I asked my neighbors about the former tenants of our house. One was a carpenter who died, which is probably where that hammering sound come from. That was my first investigation.

“I then joined the military and did 20 years of service. I got out at age 38 and was not ready to retire. The experiences from my childhood really stayed with me, and I contacted the head of the D.C. Metro Area Ghost Watchers (DCMAG), Al Tyas, about joining the team. He was retiring and ended up giving me the team in 2006 after we did a few investigations together. The D.C. area in particular has a lot of folklore and history around hauntings. Some people believe that Abraham Lincoln haunts the White House. There is also supposedly a demon cat near Congress that predicts doom. Since joining DCMAG, I’ve had some pretty intense investigations. Getting my hair pulled by a ghost was my first physical encounter with a spirit. You just don’t believe that it is happening, but, after a while, you get used to it. Each spirit has something that he or she can do particularly well.  Some can pull hair, some can talk, and some can make footsteps. I even played hide-and-go-seek with the ghost of a child once. 

“There are a couple of theories about why ghosts do this. One is that they don’t know that they are dead. Another theory is that they have unfinished business and are not going to leave until it’s done. This could be something like a ghost finding his murderer.  Other people believe that they just don’t want to leave. That’s like the guy who built up his farm his whole life and finally got it to where he wants it to be, and then he dies. Then, someone else moves in and he gets angry. The other theory is the fear of being judged by God. That could apply to a lot of prisoners and people who didn’t have time to repent during life. They would rather stay in Purgatory than go to Hell. Those are all just theories, though.

"In our work, which we do for free by the way, we use a number of tools to search for spirits, but there is no such thing as a ghost detection tool. Some of the tools we use are closed-circuit televisions, lots of audio recorders and parabolic microphones, Geiger counters, and all kind of meters that measure energy. The body runs on electrical current and, according to Einstein, you can neither create nor destroy energy. When you die, all of that energy has to go somewhere, so we look for that. I am also trained in psychic self-defense, which is teaching people to recognize when you are under attack by a spirit. These places where we work are negative atmosphere environments. A lot of times, you can absorb that energy and it impacts you.

"Before doing this work, there was something missing from my life. Now, things feel right and I am doing what I love. I think that ghosts have taught me more about life than living people have."

Learn more about DCMAG here.