American Women Are Flying to Ireland to Talk to the Dead

A 200-year-old estate deep in the Irish countryside has become an unlikely pilgrimage site for US women seeking witchcraft retreats, spirit communion, and, organizers say, a form of grief the church never offered them.

A centuries-old Irish estate is hosting coven-style witchcraft retreats drawing attendees primarily from the United States.
Participants describe the experience as spiritual healing centered on communing with the dead and channeling anger as a ritual practice.
Organizers frame the retreats as a direct response to spiritual isolation and the historical suppression of women by church and patriarchal structures.
The Guardian reported on the retreats in June 2026, describing a growing transatlantic market for what one facilitator called grief work outside institutional religion.
The retreats have attracted attention both from women who describe transformative experiences and from critics questioning the commercialization of Celtic spiritual tradition.

The estate is 200 years old, the woods are older, and the waiting list, by several accounts, is longer than either. Somewhere in the Irish countryside, a cohort of American women are gathered in a stone-walled room, and the agenda item is anger.

The Guardian reported this week on a witchcraft retreat circuit operating out of a heritage Irish estate, drawing a clientele that is overwhelmingly female and overwhelmingly transatlantic — women flying in from the US specifically to participate in coven-style ritual, spirit communication, and what facilitators describe as emotionally unmediated grief work. The headline phrase, offered by one organizer, was: “Anger is a part of healing.”

The framing is consistent across the retreats covered: this is positioned not as occult novelty tourism but as a spiritual corrective, a deliberate step away from church structures and the particular silences those structures have historically imposed on women. Ireland, with its own fraught relationship between the institutional Catholic Church and the women it governed, is not an incidental backdrop. It is, for the organizers, something close to the point.

The format varies by retreat but tends to run along coven lines — small groups, facilitated ritual, an emphasis on ancestral connection and the speaking-to or speaking-about of the dead. Participants who have described their experiences publicly use the language of therapy as often as the language of the supernatural. The crossover is, at this point, a known market: wellness culture has been absorbing the vocabulary of witchcraft for the better part of a decade, from moon-cycle planners in Urban Outfitters to grief rituals with a four-night accommodation package in County Clare.

What distinguishes the Irish estate model, at least as reported, is the specificity of place and the insistence on anger as liturgy rather than symptom. Whether the market holds through the decade or folds back into the broader wellness churn is the question the waiting list has not yet answered.