On a Sunny October morning, the sea air around Marblehead feels thick with memory salt, fog, and stories. Inside a cozy, light-filled room not far from the harbor, Sabrina Velandry sits at her dining room table, a deck of tarot cards fanned out before her. She calls herself “Sabrina the Good Witch,” and her laugh, bright and conspiratorial, cuts through the mystique that usually surrounds psychics.
“I just wanted to bring humor back into it,” she said. “So many people see psychics as dark or righteous or overly serious. I wanted to be the one who could laugh a little,” even while talking to the dead.
Sabrina remembers the first time she realized she had “the shine.” She was only 4 years old when she found her grandmother lifeless on Christmas morning in their Marblehead home. “That was my inciting moment,” she recalled. The trauma, she believes, opened something within her, a kind of psychic radar born of survival.
“As an only child in a turbulent house, you start reading cues, nonverbal energy. You have to. That sharpens the senses in ways most people never experience.”
Not long after, the visions began. One afternoon in her teens, while skipping track practice, she saw an elderly neighbor sweeping her front steps on Prospect Street.
“She said, ‘Hi, Sabrina,’ and I said ‘hi’ back,” she remembered. “When I told my parents, they froze because she’d died four months earlier.”
That moment, she said, cemented her understanding: “Okay. I really am seeing into something else.”
Fast-forward a few decades, and Sabrina’s psychic practice has become a full-blown vocation. She reads tarot on the Mahi Mahi boats in Salem “10 cruises a week sometimes!” and channels messages from departed loved ones amid the rolling rhythm of the sea. “Being on the water is incredibly psychic,” she said. “It’s like another dimension entirely.”
Her path to professional psychic, though, wasn’t exactly planned. In 2023, a friend booked her for a 70th birthday party in Salem without asking: “I was like, ‘No! I don’t read for people. I don’t take money.’ But she said, ‘Too late. You’re booked.’”
That night, Sabrina dreamt of a house with strange, wide windows. When she arrived at the party the next evening, she froze. It was the same house from her dream, overlooking Salem Harbor.
“Later, I found out that exact spot was the site of one of the most famous UFO sightings in Salem history,” she said. “You can’t make this stuff up.”
The night became an initiation. One guest, a member of Salem’s official Fortune-Telling Licensing Board, declared Sabrina the best tarot reader she’d ever encountered and urged her to apply for a license. Within weeks, Sabrina had one, and soon after, a lease in the heart of Salem’s Derby Square.
“I wasn’t even looking for a shop,” she laughed. “It just unfolded, like I was led there.”
For two bustling Halloween seasons, Sabrina’s shop thrived. Her readings drew lines out the door; her “sandwich board” sign became a familiar sight. But the success stirred tension among neighboring businesses.
“They filed a complaint against me for having a line,” she said.
“Once that happens, you’re done.”
On Christmas Eve, she was evicted by a constable, no less.
“It was poetic in the worst way,” she sighed. “That’s exactly what happened during the witch trials: constables coming to evict women from their homes. It felt like history repeating.”
The experience, she said, revealed Salem’s “dark undercurrent,” rivalries, spiritual manipulation, and what she calls “actual spell-casting” among competing psychics. “I had been warned,” she admitted. “Other psychics told me Salem could eat you alive. I didn’t listen.”
She laughed softly: “I was naïve. But in the end, it led me here.”
Now based back in Marblehead, Sabrina reads from home, at events, and once — delightfully — at a local Staples, where she became a small-business-day favorite.
“People would come in for ink and walk out with a tarot reading,” she grinned. “It was hilarious.”
The absurdity of that moment inspired her next chapter: a television pilot titled “The Real Witches of Salem,” now in development in Los Angeles, where Sabrina is represented as a screenwriter.
“It’s a docu-style series about everything I went through: the humor, the heartbreak, the rivalry. You literally can’t script it better than real life,” she said.
Despite her proximity to Salem’s occult legacy, Sabrina insists her practice stays rooted in the light.
“I don’t do spells,” she said firmly. “They interfere with free will. I’ll do protective candle work — light, bright stuff — but never something that manipulates someone else.”
Her readings range from the mystical to the practical.
“One woman came with chronic pain from dental work. The cards pointed to healing through balance, magnesium, salt, even potassium. Sometimes the simplest remedies come from the spirit world,” she said.
She’s also known for what she calls “psychic spying” using tarot to intuit outcomes of court cases or business conflicts.
“It’s not dark,” she insisted. “It’s strategic. I just help people see the players clearly.”
Her client list spans surprising sectors: defense contractors, entertainment executives, even energy professionals.
“It’s wild,” she said. “You’d be shocked how many people in those fields believe in this stuff.”
When she’s not reading, Sabrina moonlights as a tour guide, leading visitors through Salem’s haunted history. She dreams of expanding those tours to Marblehead, highlighting figures like Wilmot Redd, one of the town’s residents executed during the Salem witch hysteria.
“Marblehead always gets left out of the story,” she said. “But it was part of that energy too.”
She also hopes to revive local legends like the “Screaming Beach” ghost, a spectral woman said to hover above the sand where pirates once roamed.
“We all saw her once while working at the Barnacle when I was a teenager,” Sabrina said. “A woman in white, floating. Everyone saw it.”
Through all of it, the spirits, the evictions, the psychic overload, Sabrina remains disarmingly grounded. She’s a mother of two daughters, a turning point she said “opened her psychic gifts to the next level.”
Between readings, she journals constantly, “just to keep all the information straight.” She prefers texting over tech.
“I’m the opposite of AI,” she joked. “People just text me, boom, you’re in the schedule.”
Her Instagram, @SabrinaTheGoodWitch__, serves as her digital coven. It’s where new clients find her, and where, she said, “the real magic happens: connection, laughter, and healing.” You can also reach her at (207) 337-0989.
As we finished talking, Sabrina shuffled her deck and pulled one card at random. The Devil. She smiled at the irony.
“People think it’s bad, but it’s really about passion,” she said. “Intensity. The pull of what binds us. For me, that’s the work, staying balanced in all that energy.”
