Family I (28F) have been a practicing pagan witch for over a decade. My faith and spiritual practice are deeply personal and important to me. Over the years, I’ve created several altars for different deities I worship and work with.
Some of those altars rotate in and out of active use depending on where I’m at in my practice so I keep them neatly packed away in labeled storage boxes. My main altar, however, is always active.
It’s for the deity I spend the most time with and have the deepest relationship with, and it's in our bedroom. Each altar is made up of specific tools, crystals, candles, oils, statues, cloths, charms, handwritten letter, herbs, and other offerings.
Many of these are handmade, imported, or gifted. Some were expensive; others just deeply sentimental or spiritually charged. But every single item has meaning and purpose to me.
I live with my boyfriend (30M), and a few weeks ago, his younger sister "Kayla" (24F) got kicked out by her long-term high school boyfriend. She’d been living with him for years, but wasn’t on the lease, so when they broke up, she had nowhere to go.
She didn’t want to move back in with their parents and asked if she could stay with us temporarily while she figured things out. I wasn’t super excited about it, but I agreed, because I didn’t want to be heartless.
Before she arrived, I took the the inactive altars and stored them in our hall closet, just to make the shared spaces less cluttered. But I left my main altar, the one for the deity I work with almost daily untouched in the bedroom.
It’s my boyfriend and I's private space and I figured she’d respect that. While we were both at work one day, she decided to help out around the apartment. Except instead of just cleaning, she cleaned out.
When I got home with my boyfriend, I noticed right away that the altar in the bedroom was gone.
Turns out his sister took it upon herself to throw out everything she found that she thought was weird or looked like junk, which included the contents of three altar boxes in storage AND the main altar.
When I confronted her, she got defensive and said she thought she was doing us a favor by getting rid of the creepy stuff and that she didn’t think I’d actually want it. She also made a few comments about how witchcraft isn’t real and God wouldn’t want that in the house anyway.
I was horrified. I went straight to the trash area but the dumpster had already been emptied that morning. Everything was gone, statues, deeply personal offerings, items I’d collected for over a decade, some of which were irreplaceable. I was devastated.
I sat down that night and calculated what I could remember and reasonably estimate. The total came out to just over $900. I calmly told Kayla that I expected her to pay me back for the items she threw away.
She laughed and said there was no way she could afford that and that I was being insane for demanding so much money over some rocks and candles. I told her it didn’t matter whether she understood the value, they weren’t hers to touch, let alone throw away.
She got pissed, packed up, and left that night without saying a word. A few days later, I got a call from my boyfriend’s mom, furious.
Kayla had told her that I kicked her out for refusing to pray with me and not supporting witchcraft and that I was trying to charge her $900 in rent. I explained the actual situation, including that the $900 was to replace destroyed property, not rent.
I also made it clear that Kayla wasn’t kicked out, I simply asked her to take responsibility for what she’d done, and she chose to leave. Didn’t matter. His mom doubled down. She said Kayla was in a fragile place and I should’ve shown more compassion.
She told me I was punishing someone who was already going through enough. Even after I explained exactly what happened, she said, that maybe I shouldn't have had that stuff just lying around if I didn't want it to be thrown away.
My boyfriend is being ass itchingly neutral and just keeps saying, “I see both sides.” He hasn’t really defended me or pushed back on how his sister treated my things.
