Putting a hex on Halloween

The Witch’s Coven is hoping you’ll choose them for your next Halloween activity in town - and it’s for a good cause, too.

Satehoronies McComber and Carlie Diabo will be running The Witch’s Coven out of their backyard, where enthusiasts can take part in photoshoots and take in the ambiance during the month of October.

Half of the proceeds of the shoots will go towards cancer charities. The pair also grow and sell their own sage and lavender - popular herbs in modern witchcraft culture. They will be bundled together with pink string for breast cancer and purple string for pancreatic cancer, and half of the proceeds of those sales will also go towards charity.

“My mother just had breast cancer, and my auntie has breast cancer,” said Diabo. “So, I’m dedicating our first year here to them and to breast cancer awareness.”

Shoots will cost $20 for adults and $10 for children, with makeup and costumes available - including for pets. Each shoot comes with a print and 20 photos by email.

McComber and Diabo had previously been running their witchy brand of Halloween fun as part of James Day’s Haunted Woods, but decided to go their separate ways this year and try it out on their own.

“All the respect to them for giving us the chance to showcase what we have,” said McComber.

But McComber and Diabo felt like their more “mystical and fantasy” setting was not necessarily the best pairing with the high intensity, horror-centric Haunted Woods.

Their setup in the Haunted Woods used to be in an abandoned church instead of their current wooden witch house, acting as a sort of respite from the rest of the woods.

“The kids were running scared by the time they got to the church door,” said McComber. “I opened the door for them to come into the witch’s coven and they were just running right by.”

Their parents, though, were very impressed with what they had to offer, which helped in their decision to go solo.

“We just want to contribute memories towards Halloween,” said McComber. “The community is crazy about it already. We just want to continue building that spirit up.”

Diabo is the one who has “the witchy ideas” according to McComber, and she found many of the costumes and decorations they are using for the coven - things like lanterns, wooden signs, candles, goblets, and more - as well as handmaking brooms.

“I have a lot of things that are personal, but a lot were picked up, either on the side of the road or in secondhand stores. A lot of people are like, ‘hey, I know that decoration, that was mine,’” said Diabo.

“That was another part of the culture inside the Haunted Woods - if we find something on the side of the road, it gets to live forever there. It’s the same concept here,” said McComber.

Two witch houses are available for shoots, one small one for kids and a bigger one for all ages.

The bigger witch house they will be using for the shoot is a gazebo that was accidentally damaged in a fire during the summer.

“I had no time this summer to take it down, and then it just so happened, that we thought it would be perfect for the coven,” said Diabo.

“The building process was this pure accident, but it was a blessing in disguise, because now we have something that we can contribute towards Halloween,” said McComber.

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