Interviews
Katie Webb on Using Tarot and Divination Tools in Paranormal Investigating [Interview]
Welcome back to DEAD Time. I hope this column will not only share stories of paranormal and unexplained phenomena, but also open up a conversation and clear up some misconceptions about the paranormal, as well as encourage others to share their experiences with an open mind.
For this month’s DEAD Time, I learned a lot and had a fun conversation with Katie Webb about being a divinatrix, reading tarot cards, and using divination tools in paranormal investigating. Make sure you check out Katie’s website to book tarot readings and classes, view her art, and a lot more.
Read on to find out what we talked about…
Bloody Disgusting: I’ve seen the paranormal web series Haunt ME, which you’ve been a part of. How did you first become involved with paranormal investigating?
Katie Webb: It was kind of fate, to be honest with you. I was working at a record store with Ashley, who started the group, and she said, “I have this ghost hunting team that I’m starting, and we want a witch on our team, and I was wondering if you’d be interested.” And I was like, “Yeah, definitely!” Working with ghosts is something that we witches love to do [laughs].
BD: Can you tell me about your most frightening paranormal encounter and how you handled it?
KW: I have had a lot of frightening paranormal encounters, but I think the one that stands out the most happened here in Maine at the Western Cemetery. I was sort of drawn to this area and I went between these trees, and everything turned blue around me visually. I am clairaudient, so I started hearing all these things that were very horror movie-esque. Things like, “Wait until you see what happens when I’m in your brain” and “I want your soul,” and all these classic horror movie things, but very specific to me. One of the things it said was, “I want to penetrate your golden egg,” which sounds sexual, but it’s actually just a meditation I used to use as protection, and I called it the golden egg.
So, that kind of experience made me really scared, but because the cemetery is in my neighborhood, I kept going back, and I kept really focused on that area. It’s been about nine years since that happened and now, I have a really close and great relationship with those specific spirits. I’ve come to learn that that was more of a protective measure on their end. They wanted to scare me, they wanted me to leave because the trust between humans and the spirit world isn’t the best all the time.
BD: That’s so interesting because I know from personal experience that not everyone in the paranormal community has the best intentions and people can sometimes be exploitative when it comes to the spirit world, so it makes sense those spirits would be afraid to trust you. So, it was scary for you because it was so personal and specific.
KW: It was very specific, and it felt like what they were saying could be true. It wasn’t like, “Get out, I’ll kill you,” like sometimes happens, it was very personal. I actually think we ran out of the cemetery that night [laughs]!
BD: You also do tarot readings and classes. Can you talk a little bit about how those readings work, especially for people who have never dealt with tarot?
KW: Sure! Tarot is really interesting, because you can have a lot of different types of readings. You can have people who are really good at reading personal cues, memorize the cards, and kind of know what to say based on what you say to them and what the cards are saying. I think some people look at that as kind of a scam, but that is absolutely a valid way to read tarot cards and you will still get a really good reading from those people. Then you have the more witchy people who are in touch with their ancestors and in touch with other spirits and deities that they work with. So, they will tend to get more of things like premonition-style tarot readings. Tarot cards are basically a bunch of archetypes. Everyone has a different way of reading tarot cards, but the easiest way for the person who is being read to shuffle cards and just put their energy on the cards. That’s kind of the ceremony aspect of it. For the people who are more in tune with different spirit worlds, you will get more premonition-style readings along with the archetypes from the cards. But I’m a big believer that tarot cards help us access our subconscious.
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Dr. Eric Wargo, but he has written an amazing book called Time Loops that goes into our subconscious and our memories and why those are so important when it comes to divination. Time Loops blew my mind [laughs]. It’s really interesting because it talks about the assumption that we know everything already, between things being passed down from our ancestors in our bloodline and in our subconscious, and how do we access that. As a paranormal investigator and tarot reader, reading his book hit so many things for me because that is what I was experiencing. The longer I read tarot cards, the less I actually needed the tarot cards. I was able to look at the person I’m reading for and give them a psychic reading without looking at the cards at all. It’s really interesting when you make those connections within your own subconscious and magic in general. I feel like that happens to a lot of people, but it’s hard for me to say because I’m one of those weirds who touches tarot cards every single day [laughs], so I think that’s why I have such an affinity with those archetypes.
BD: I love what you just said, because I think you learn a lot about yourself when you get involved with the paranormal. I know when I started doing paranormal investigations, I learned a lot of things about myself that I had never thought about before.
KW: So much! You see so much of that in the way that people talk about spirits. You see so much of their own personal biases or beliefs coming out in the way they talk about ghosts in general. So, it really does help you break down walls if you want to go deeper, as most people end up wanting to do.
BD: Can you tell me a little bit about the divination tools you use in your investigations and how they help you?
KW: I love using tarot cards in my investigations for a couple of reasons. One, because you can learn the history that is written about a place fairly easily. I like to try to use the cards to get to know the story that hasn’t been written. I feel like there are so many personal stories between people who have lived in certain places or worked in certain places. So, I will try to pull cards to learn more about their story. I kind of got that idea because the more you investigate, the more you realize how much trust is involved. It’s hard to walk into a space and just immediately get consent to be there from the ghosts who are there. So often you don’t have that. If you’re only there for one night, the pressure to gain that trust greatens.
I was on a show, so we were trying to get very specific visual evidence to show people, so trust was such a huge component. So, I found that when I would read the cards and kind of talk about the spirits’ lives and things like that in a more personal manner, the trust was gained much quicker. There is one segment where you can see a ghost pull up a card. So, I would use cards in that way, but I would also use them as a kind of trigger object because there is so much negativity in the past around tarot cards. I mostly like to do it to talk to the ghosts to kind of tell them their story back to them and see if they wanted me to learn more and see if they wanted to pull cards to that we could continue a conversation.
BD: You are a divinatrix. For anyone who might not be familiar with the term, can you talk about what it means and what is involved with being a divinatrix?
KW: I love to throw around that term because I boss my cards around [laughs]. I believe that the cards themselves are nothing without me. I am the magic. The reader is the magic. It’s not the cards themselves that are the magic. We are in control. If people come to me and they specifically want a reading geared on love, since the tarot has five suits and two of those suits have less to do with passion, lust, and emotion than others, I will just leave those suits out altogether. And we will just focus on the exact suits that talk about what you want to talk about. In those kinds of ways, I’ve found that I am in full control of the reading. So, if you want to come and ask me a certain question, if you want cards to answer yes or no questions, we can do all of that. We do not have to let the cards decide. The cards are just cards. We are the magic, and we can decide. That’s kind of where the divinatrix comes in because I’m the boss of the cards [laughs].
BD: So, the cards are just a tool. That makes so much sense to me and it’s fascinating because no one has ever explained it to me like that.
KW: Yeah, I think a lot of people love the mysticism behind the cards, but they’re just cards. I could give you just as good of a reading with a deck of playing cards as I can with a deck of tarot cards.
That’s all for this month’s DEAD Time. I’ve got some exciting guests lined up for future installments, so stay tuned to Bloody Disgusting to find out what we’ll be talking about. If you are a paranormal investigator, expert on the unexplained, or have a personal story involving otherworldly phenomena, and would like to be considered for a story on DEAD Time, please feel free to reach out!
And please remember to leave a light on for me…
Interviews
Paul Tremblay on Fighting AI with Horror in New Novel ‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’
Paul Tremblay didn’t start his writing career believing he’d be battling machines over the sanctity of his job, but like so many writers of his generation, the battle found him. In the years since Large Language Models (LLMs) and neural networks started gaining traction as an advertised shortcut to creativity, Tremblay has been active in lawsuits to prevent the use of his works in training AI models, and he’s found that, with each new project, he has to consider the possibility that some LLM, somewhere, is going to latch on to what he’s creating.
“Now I feel like I’m thinking about, ‘Man, how am I going to write things that would be really hard or impossible for an AI to replicate?’,” Tremblay told me, speaking by Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Maybe some of that is ego. I’m sure every writer thinks, ‘Oh, an AI could never write what I write.’ Yes, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the thought process.”
While that’s something Tremblay might consider with any new work at this point in his career, the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, and many other novels and short stories tackled it in a more direct way with his latest book. Inspired by Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, and the quirky humor of the Coen Brothers, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is Tremblay’s attempt at a sci-fi-horror mash-up that’s both darkly funny and existentially nightmarish. It’s also, in his own words, a screed against the movement by AI companies to supplant human artists.
“I didn’t want to make it too didactic, but no, I playfully described this book as an anti-AI screed,” he said. “This book, in particular, was driven by anger and frustration, for sure. Not every book is going to be driven that way.“
Despite the emotions that fueled it, Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep does not read like a screed. Instead, wielding offbeat humor and tech concepts that feel both lived-in and frighteningly tactile, the book lays out tandem narratives all building to the same conclusion, each of them exploring our relationship to machine learning in a different way. One of these narratives belongs to Julia, a former gaming streamer looking for a new challenge in life, who gets a call from a California tech company with an interesting offer.
Paul Tremblay in documentary series “First Word on Horror”
The company has, it seems, implanted some new technology in a brain-dead middle-aged man which will, in theory, allow them to pilot the man’s body through a rudimentary, still-developing system of controls. Julia, with her gaming background, would be the pilot, in her own way just as much a test subject as the human vegetable she’s controlling.
Julia is a Gen Z streamer with an omnivorous pop culture appetite, inspired by Tremblay’s own adult children, who riffs on The Big Lebowski constantly and calls her strange new meat puppet “Bernie” in reference to Weekend at Bernie’s. Her wide frame of reference, and her interest in art and stories far beyond video games, is in part informed by Tremblay’s own experiences with Gen Z, and in part a response to AI companies who scrape art and culture as a means of consuming it for reference without really experiencing a story.
“I know that one of the arguments that OpenAI and other tech companies are trying to make is like, ‘Hey, you writers, you artists, you take pop culture, you take your influences, and you create something. That’s just the same thing that the bots are doing.’ And it’s just not,” Tremblay said. “I wanted to have Julia have her outlook informed by all this pop culture, and I wanted to make that feel really human as a way to show how inhuman the AI is.”
The other side of the story belongs to “Bernie,” who’s addressed in his point-of-view chapters as “You.” In these chapters, the technology in Bernie’s body starts to flicker images through his seemingly dead brain, delivering half-remembered imagery and perspective in a nod to the “hallucinations” of an AI model groping for understanding it can never reach. These chapters in particular show off Tremblay’s flair for formalist shake-ups, and echo the kind of hyperstimulated writing that Dick and Ellison made so influential.
“I think it was more just the general Philip K. Dick feeling of ‘The world is so strange,'” Tremblay said. “He’s a lot funnier, I think, than maybe a lot of people credit him. That’s definitely what I was thinking of when writing the book.“
Bernie’s chapters embody the strangeness of Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, presenting imagery that’s at times puzzling, at times eerily filmic, and always unnerving. They also mirror Julia’s own journey in fascinating ways as the odd couple – the Gen Z gamer and the middle-aged vegetable – traverse the United States, and the tech in Bernie’s body wakes up to the possibilities of using his flesh for its own purposes. It’s a compelling narrative technique, but it presented some new writing challenges for Tremblay.
“I quickly realized I couldn’t write this book the same way I have in the past,” he said. “By that, I mean all my other novels I had written in the order in which it was presented, even things that are nonlinear, which is most of them. I knew I couldn’t do that in this book. It’s not a spoiler, but hopefully the readers figure out pretty early that the Bernie chapters are a little bit of a preview of the next chapter from Julia, what’s actually happening with Julia. It’s all refracted from him.”
Mary Roach’s Stiff
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep began with a simple image, inspired by Tremblay’s reading of Mary Roach‘s book chronicling the history of our treatment of corpses, Stiff. As he read, Tremblay imagined a body sitting on an airplane, remote-controlled by someone else. At the time, it was a “silly what-if” concept, filed away in his head. Years later, when he became an author suing a tech company to keep AI from scraping his work for ideas, it started to feel frighteningly plausible, taking the “silly what-if” into the territory of a high-concept horror show about what happens when we try to exploit and commodify uniquely human aspects of consciousness.
“It stuck with me,” Tremblay said of that what-if imagery. “And then a few years later, when I was a part of the case suing OpenAI on behalf of writers, that what-if suddenly didn’t seem as silly. The more I learned about how that corporation operates and without really any sort of ethical thought to anything, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to play with that. That’s actually happening.”
So, what if someone actually in favor of generative AI picks up Tremblay’s self-described “anti-AI screed?” He hopes that, at the very least, he’s made the ride enjoyable in a distinctly human way that might begin to reshape the conversation.
“I think that was another reason why I wanted to have the humor,” Tremblay said. “If people are reading this book who aren’t on the side of like, ‘Hey, LLMs taking authors’ books is bad,’ maybe if they read something that’s cut with some humor, that maybe they’ll be more easily swayed.”
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is now in bookstores everywhere.
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