My girlfriend’s parents died in an accident earlier this year, and I spent much of the year consoling her and doing various things for her to try to help her live a normal life. As an only child of only children, Angela now had no other known living relatives.

It hadn’t been all bad. Her parents had life insurance which paid off what they owed on their house in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so I moved in with her in the otherwise empty house and we lived rent-free, just for the cost of property taxes. So I got to be with her a lot more, which was nice, but she was sad a lot, and she didn’t have a job, so I was still having to work to pay for food and other expenses.

I hadn’t intended to let her in on my secret that I liked to dress up in women’s clothes sometimes, but it happened. No, I didn’t wear any of Angela’s or her mother’s clothes; I had my own which were properly sized for me. But it was something I previously only did in private; I didn’t go walking around in public that way. After that, it became something we could do together, but that was the extent of it; I still didn’t do it in front of any other people.

One day, Angela suggested, “Terry, let’s go visit Salem for Halloween, in costume.”

“I don’t have a costume.”

“I’ll get you one.”

We planned to do it on Halloween itself, even though the crowds would be worse. I got the day off work. Friday, October 31, 1997 came, and the costume Angela got me was a witch. The costume was nothing more than a loose black dress and a pointy hat and some makeup, but it worked, and I agreed to indulge Angela in this, just one time.

In the morning, Angela helped me get ready, which included extra makeup to help hide the maleness of my face beyond what simply shaving could do. Of course, I wore my fake boobs under it; sometimes the dress was loose enough that you couldn’t see that I had them, but other times their shape did show. With her help, I mustered the courage to go out in public as female, even if it was in a witch costume. I was going where nobody would know me, I’d be mixed in a crowd of other costumed people, and, if I was lucky, most wouldn’t even realize I was actually male.

Angela stuck with the costume suggested by her name, an angel, and the two of us rode up on the train together. We were far from the only ones in costume who poured out of that train and into the Witch City that day. Indeed, there were special trains that only went from Boston to Salem and back just for the day, on top of the usual service. I assume every one of those trains was just as full of people in costume as the one we rode was.

We took in as much of Salem as we could in one day. We toured the city and bought various knickknacks. We heard the true story of what happened in the city in 1692, which was a real tragedy. Some young girls had blamed their perhaps real, perhaps fake ailments on some women from the village using witchcraft on them, and it sent the community into a frenzy. It led to several innocent people being convicted of being witches and sentenced to death, most by hanging. There were certain locations reputed to be where some of the events of 1692 happened, but nobody really knew for sure, because for a long time, Salem tried to forget such a horrible thing had ever happened in their city, and it was only in the 20th century when it became a tourist thing. That didn’t keep us from visiting those sites and taking pictures.

In the evening, we went to a party at the home of a woman Angela knew, which she admitted was the inspiration for the whole idea of this trip. Confusingly, this other woman was also named Angela, so I called her hostess Angela. We enjoyed the party for a while, but after a couple hours I was sick of it all, so as soon as my Angela gave the first hint of being ready to leave, I told her “Let’s go.” I was standing out in the yard as Angela was saying her goodbye to the hostess when it happened.

Another woman in a witch oufit, one we didn’t remember seeing there before, came from somewhere in the direction of the house. She was clearly upset as she screamed, “I’m sick of all these witches, black cats, and glowing pumpkins, and I want it all to BEGONE!”

I was in fact standing next to a large plastic illuminated pumpkin on which a black cat was sitting. Her last word was said with incredible force, and it seemingly caused the pumpkin to fly up into the air, and into me. But it didn’t just knock me over. It kept going, carrying me with it as it ascended into the sky. I went airborne for several blocks, and landed on a sidewalk somewhere and slid to a stop, with my back hitting the pole of a street sign. The pumpkin, with the cat still on it, landed in front of me and pressed me against the sign briefly before settling down between my legs.

“Did I just ride a pumpkin through the sky?” I wondered out loud.

I stood up, dusted myself off a bit, and straightened out my dress. Then I looked up at the sign I’d landed at and groaned. The street was named Witch Way. That sounded like a street from a bad witch story, but it was real. “Only in Salem,” I thought to myself.

Then I wondered how I was going to get back to the party, not sure I fully remembered exactly where it was relative to where I was now. As if in answer to my thought, the pumpkin, still glowing, rose up into the air. The cat, still riding it, let out an inquisitive meow.

“Really?” I said out loud.

I grabbed hold of it with both arms, and it went further up into the air, lifting me off the ground with it, but this time not careening across the town. It felt strange hanging there in the air like that. The pumpkin started to move down the street in the direction we’d come from, and soon I realized I could control it with my mind. I still wasn’t sure where I was going, but I remembered some sights from my unexpected trip over here, including Nichols Street, which was decorated with garland with large plastic “nickel” coins, and an ice cream shop called the Dairy Witch. We then flew over a park, and the neighborhood we were headed for next looked familiar, but wasn’t where the party was.

The cat hissed at me, and I managed to bring the pumpkin to a stop at the far corner of that park, and as we hovered a few feet off the ground, I wondered out loud, “Are we going the right way?”

To my surprise, the cat spoke back to me in a gravelly voice, “We are going the wrong way!”

“Can you show me the right way?”

The cat stood up on the pumpkin and lifted one paw to indicate a direction. Following the cat’s directions, I soon arrived back at the party, where everybody was relieved to see me.

Angela stepped up and hugged me, and hostess Angela came forward with her, exclaiming, “And you brought Missy! Thanks!”

Missy was apparently the name of the cat, who jumped into her arms, now acting like a normal cat. So we didn’t actually leave yet, but went back inside to share our stories.

When the strange woman made that outburst, most of the other people in the yard were just knocked down on the spot. I and my makeshift transportation and navigator were the only ones who flew up into the air. When they recovered from the shock, another guest at the party confronted the woman, and told her to “go to hell,” and the woman who caused the commotion abruptly burst into flames and completely vanished. At that point, people were afraid to say anything more for fear of accidentally making it true. My return broke the tension, but people were still shocked over what had happened. Nobody remembered seeing the woman at the party before that and the hostess didn’t think she was any of the invited guests. Nobody had any idea where she came from, or why this seeming burst of real magic happened.

At some point during this conversation I crossed my arms, and only then realized something else was wrong. I pulled Angela aside with me and led her into the bathroom.

“What is it, Terry?”

“I was too startled by being flung through the air to have noticed at first, but I was changed by what happened.”

“Changed how?”

I lifted one of her hands and guided it down the neckline of my dress, onto what should have been one of the fake breasts I was wearing. So she realized what I had realized, that it was flesh and blood.

“What the hell?” Angela whispered, not wanting the party guests to hear.

I stripped down in the bathroom and found that I was 100% female. Not just in the breasts and genitals, but the shape of the hips, the reduced, almost absent hair on most of my body, and every other detail we thought to look at. It was as if I’d been a woman all my life.

“I don’t know what to say, but we’ll get through this together,” Angela told me.

I dressed, and we went back to the party, but it was starting to break up, and we both said our goodbyes to the hostess, and made our way back to the train station on foot, including going past the corner where I’d stopped and gotten directions from the cat. That’s why it had looked familiar; we’d passed it on the way to the party.

We made it home pretty late, and Angela was determined to distract me from my problem by taking advantage of it, helping me learn how a woman felt in bed before whatever this was wore off. Eventually we fell asleep in bed together.

The next morning, we got up, and I was still a woman. Fortunately, I did have some women’s clothes to wear, and they fit me better than they ever had. Over breakfast, we replayed the events.

Angela said, “It seemed like everything that happened was taken literally. The interloper wanted everything gone, but had specifically named a witch, the black cat, and the glowing pumpkin, and the rest of us were just knocked down. The items she named, including you in costume, were sent flying blocks away. Then another woman told her to go to hell and she vanished in flames. And you asked the cat for directions and she gave them. What if she really made you become a witch?”

“I suppose it’s possible. But no! I can’t stay a witch. How am I going to face my friends and family, and co-workers? How am I going to explain suddenly being female? I still have to work to provide for us here. I don’t want to be a witch! I have to live my life, as Terry!”

There was a flash of light, but I was still a woman afterward, so it wasn’t immediately obvious what happened. But I figured it out later in the day. I’d changed things.

I was still Terry, but Terry was now a woman. My driver’s license showed my female gender and my more feminine face. My closet, which this morning had only my male clothes and the few female items I played dress-up in, was now full of only female clothes. There was nothing left of male Terry’s life. Angela eventually convinced me to go outside. It was Saturday, and some of my neighbors were around. A couple of them showed that they recognized me, and didn’t think it odd that I was female, even though they had never ever seen me in female clothes before.

Even my memories were changed. I remembered a guy who was a close friend of mine in college, and a girl I’d dated before I met Angela, but now they were swapped. I’d dated the guy, once, and it didn’t go well, but not so badly that we didn’t talk to each other again; we just became non-romantic friends. And the girl was the close friend I hung out with. This must have been true for my neighbors, too. In their minds, I had always been female.

Angela convinced me I must have cast a spell. I remembered I had said I wanted to be able to live my life as Terry, but instead of turning me into the Terry I was before, it made Terry female to the rest of the world to match my body. I tried to cast other spells, but nothing worked. Had my spell made me stop being a witch, too? We decided that it must have.

Angela helped me adapt to female life. It wasn’t actually all that hard, as I knew how to wear the clothes and had been a closet transvestite for years. Well, that wasn’t quite true; I knew how to wear the female clothes I had before, all of which were still present in my new wardrobe, but there was a much wider range of clothing now, and I needed help with some of it. And I laughed at some of those garments, wondering why female me would ever have bought them.

There was a big gap, though, between dressing up as a woman once in a while, and actually living as one all the time. A lot of it was stuff my mother would have taught me if I had actually grown up as a girl, and when Angela gave me those lessons, I actually remembered my mother teaching some of them to the girl Terry who had never actually existed. But the changes to my memory seemed weak compared to the changes to everyone else’s memories. I could find the altered memories only if I thought hard about them.

There was also the bit that I was now a lesbian. That wasn’t actually that hard either. I had always liked women and I still did. Angela seemed to adapt surprisingly well to it. At least she still knew that I had been a guy until Halloween ‘97, and that she had been mostly straight until then.

I went back to work Monday, where nobody thought it was odd I was female. They all also seemed to know I was committed to Angela; nobody hit on me, and one woman, who I never knew was lesbian before, started sharing secrets “just among us lesbians.” A couple times I had to correct myself and head for the women’s restroom, but fortunately I never actually entered the men’s.

A week after the party, Angela heard from the hostess that the woman who caused the whole thing had been a Halloween decoration at a neighbor’s house that somehow came to life. And hostess Angela had heard similar stories of decorations that came to life around the same moment. Most of them didn’t cause the kind of destruction that one did, though, nor make any permanent changes besides minor physical damage from colliding with things.

We went back to hostess Angela’s house in Salem the following spring, when there wasn’t a party but we wanted to check in with her and let her know we were doing fine since the event. Of course, the hostess assumed I’d been female all along, so “fine” to her meant that I didn’t have any subtle, slow-to-appear bodily injuries from the way I got flung across town. Even before I took my unexpected airborne trip, she had only ever seen me in the witch costume, so whatever the magic had done to people’s memories was much easier to accomplish with hers. And her cat never exhibited such behavior again, even when I was alone with Missy for a moment.

It was several years later before Angela and I were allowed to legally marry, but I’d already proposed to her and we’d committed to getting married for real when the laws allowed it, and we were among the first in line.