Hexe Haus, Edgewater's Witchcraft Hub for 35 Years, Is Closing Its Doors

Hexe Haus, the Edgewater shop that has spent 35 years selling candles, incense and tarot decks while also serving Chicago's pagan community as a meeting place, will close its doors by the end of July or early August.

Co-owner Dayna Garcia said the shop was never really about the merchandise.

"I would say it's a witchcraft and pagan community center disguised as a retail store," Garcia said. "The merchandise just supports the mission, but the community was always the point."

For three years, the shop has hosted a Wednesday night discussion group covering topics such as aliens and alternate dimensions. Garcia described it as "kind of like a support group for witches." Those gatherings, along with recurring Ouija board nights, drew a mix of pagans, brujas and people simply curious about spiritual practice. Many of them said the store gave them a place to belong that they hadn't found elsewhere.

Tanya R., who has shopped at Hexe Haus since 2018 and started attending the weekly gatherings last year, said losing the space means losing one of the few places in her life that wasn't home or work.

"It's a place that is not home and is not work, that you just kind of show up and develop these additional relationships with other people, almost like this extended family," she said.

Mae, a 24-year-old volunteer at the shop, met her partner Brandon Sosa at one of the store's Ouija board nights last June. Mae said she was recently expelled from her Christian church after congregation members learned she practiced witchcraft rooted in pre-colonial Filipino magic. She said the community at Hexe Haus took her in without judgment.

"I really found a family here, who, even though they're not my blood, they just accepted me for who I am," Mae said. "It wasn't just Dayna and Brandon, but it was also everyone else in this community too."

Rajja Reed, 37, a spiritual worker and tarot reader from Uptown, has shopped at the store several times a month for six years, often stocking up on candles for his own business. He said the shop's staff treated him well over the years and called the closure "very sad."

The business closing under the Hexe Haus name is actually the third version of the shop to occupy the space. Jack Armstrong opened it in 1989 as Aurum Solis Bookstore. After Armstrong died in 2004, Ken Kwilosc took over and renamed it Alchemy Arts. Kwilosc developed health issues in 2023 that made running the store unsustainable, and legal complications tied to his health prevented a direct sale of the business. Garcia, who grew up visiting the shop with her mother in Mayfair and later volunteered there as a teenager cleaning the litter box for the store's resident cat, stepped in. She became manager in 2021 and launched Hexe Haus in 2024 as a continuation of Alchemy Arts. The business and its community stayed intact under her.

Garcia said the shop's problem was never a lack of interest in witchcraft or paganism. Over the past several months she watched foot traffic drop steadily until the numbers no longer covered the cost of running a physical storefront.

"The challenge wasn't that there wasn't an interest in witchcraft or paganism or spirituality," Garcia said. "The challenge was maintaining enough consistent in-person traffic to support a brick-and-mortar location. It wasn't one bad month, it was a sustained change in customer behavior."

Garcia said the broader pagan community in Chicago is actually expanding. She pointed to witchcraft's popularity on TikTok and a shift toward online sources for metaphysical education as reasons why. A 2024 count by the Chicago Reader found 19 other metaphysical shops operating in the city. Garcia said the real difficulty now is building physical spaces sturdy enough to hold that growing interest together.

"The challenge is building sustainable places where the interest can gather," she said.

Garcia said she does not see the closure as an ending. She is shifting her focus to the International Pagan Society, a nonprofit she founded in April to run educational programs and community events without the overhead of a storefront lease.

"It's not a death, it's a transition," Garcia said. "The physical location may be closed, but the spirit is going to fully live on."

Hexe Haus is holding a liquidation sale with 50 percent off merchandise through its final weeks, with details posted on the shop's Instagram page. The Wednesday night discussion group and Ouija board nights will need a new home once the Edgewater storefront shuts its doors. Garcia said details on where the group will meet next are expected to come through the new nonprofit in the weeks ahead.