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‘From Darkness Into Light’: Real-Life Teen Witch Who ‘Should Be Dead’ Went From Casting Spells to Worshipping Jesus

Sarah Anne Sumpolec once found herself enraptured by incantations, Tarot cards, and casting spells —until an encounter with Jesus transformed her perspective.

Decades later, she’s now a devout Christian who shares her experience as a former real-life teenage witch to help people see God’s power to change lives and perspectives. Her harrowing story of engaging the spirit world and nearly losing her life is nothing short of deeply compelling.

The Beginnings of Witchcraft

Sumpolec recently told “The Playing With Fire Podcast” she grew up a “nomad” with her father frequently moving her family around; at moments, they faced near-homelessness.

But when she moved to a house in Delaware at age 13, something seemed different.

“My dad had said that we were going to stay, which, of course, was a big deal,” she said, recalling her hope the home would become a permanent place of residence.

The dwelling, which belonged to a former governor of the state, surprised Sumpolec, as she wondered as a child how her family could so rapidly go from financially struggling to living in such a great place.

“My dad, from the beginning of introducing us to that house … he was insinuating that this was a special house,” she said. “He hinted at it all along the way, and then when we moved there, he was like, ‘You know this house is haunted,’ and, of course, he tells me this in excitement.”

Sumpolec said her father found the prospects of a haunting “awesome.” Considering how much she looked up to him and wanted to connect with him, she said she “just went with it.”

A ‘Turning Point’

“Arriving there was very much a turning point in a lot of ways,” she recalled of the move into the home. “That was the first time he really ever introduced the supernatural or his interest in the supernatural.”

While Sumpolec’s dad was “cagey” about the details surrounding the home, the mystery and intrigue piqued her curiosity and further drew her in. Thirsting for a deeper connection with her father, she became increasingly intrigued by this otherworldly “worship.”

Then, when her dad gave her a book on witchcraft, proverbial gasoline was tossed on the fires of that rabid interest.

“My dad introduced me to it very specifically through a book that he handed me when I started asking more questions,” Sumpolec said. “It was a very old book.”

Soon Sumpolec was diving into that book and consuming other New Age texts, “voraciously reading” anything she could get her hands on. Witchcraft suddenly became the connective point she had always wanted — something that would draw her closer to her dad.

And strange events inside the home only added to that connection.

The more Sumpolec asked, the more her dad engaged, and the more he engaged, the closer she felt to him. Over time, her father told her witchcraft is “who we are as a family,” indicating it was deeply embedded in the familial fabric.

That revelation suddenly clothed Sumpolec with a newfound identity of sorts.

“I really felt like I had … like opened up this key of something that I was meant to do, and identity is huge, especially when you’re a teenager,” she said. “I had an entire altar set up in my bedroom.”

Sumpolec, who considered herself a “good witch” and practiced so-called “white magic,” would often cast spells.

“Everything in witchcraft is a truth from God, perverted,” she said. “Satan doesn’t have any new ideas; he takes truth and twists it.”

Spirit Guides and the Roots of Chaos

Over time, this apparently enrapturing experience started to evolve into something else. While it “started out great,” soon Sumpolec’s relationship with her father began to unravel, as did her family circumstances.

“There was nothing ever scary about it for a long time until it changed, and that is this is the biggest thing that I wish I could communicate on a grander scale to, especially teenagers … that the enemy is all about seduction,” she said. “He doesn’t come in with this big evil intention … it’s a slow luring in, and it’s like, ‘Oh, look at this power.’”

Over time, Sumpolec said, playing with fire birthed consequences; eventually, it all “turned on its head.”

“[There were] all these spirits that I thought I was messing with that I thought were good and that were guiding me,” she said.

But her communication with these spirits soon turned sinister, sending her on a diabolical path that could have ended her life.

‘The Most Terrible Moment of My Life’

Everything came to a head when her father, also in crisis, reportedly began using drugs. Substances suddenly clouded the bond they built — and things turned ugly.

One night, her dad — in a fit of rage, confused, and not realizing who she was — allegedly pointed a gun at her in a potentially deadly showdown.

“It was the most terrible moment of my life,” she said. “He had, like, three guns with him at the time, and my mother had left with my younger sister to take her somewhere safer but had left me there.”

Sumpolec’s father luckily never pulled the trigger, but the event changed everything and likely played a role in her suicidal inclinations that soon followed.

“[It] shattered my trust in him,” she said, noting how the incident also drove her deeper into witchcraft. “I was lost … but because I had this altar in my room and the witchcraft stuff, I was like, ‘OK, you know, I’m gonna just dig down here.’”

Bri Lamm
Bri Lamm
Bri is an outgoing introvert with a heart that beats for adventure. She lives to serve the Lord, experience the world, and eat macaroni and cheese in between capturing life’s greatest moments on one of her favorite cameras.

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