The Witches' Voice

» see witchvox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The Witches' Voice was built for people who needed to find each other and had no local way to do it. I was never one of them, and Turkey was never on its map. What I can recognize from the outside is the shape of the problem, because it is the same shape that produced every good directory on the early web: a scattered population with no central list, and two people willing to maintain one by hand.

Wren Walker and Fritz Jung started it in early 1997, after working together on a site for the Witches' League for Public Awareness and splitting off to run their own. It was a non-profit. The whole operation stayed at roughly the size of the two of them for its entire run, which is remarkable for something that at its height was pulling numbers reported around a million visits a day.

The core of it was a section called Witches of the World, which was a listing service. You submitted a profile saying what you practiced and roughly where you were, and other people could look you up by region. Around that sat Wren's Nest for news and a run of columns from regular contributors. From 2000 there was a music section called the Bardic Circle as well. When it closed there were about eighty thousand profiles in the system.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was actually for ~

Understanding this site means understanding what the alternative was in 1997. If you were the only pagan you knew of in a small American town, your options for finding anybody else were a notice board in one specific kind of bookshop, assuming your town had one. Witchvox turned that into a search box with geography attached.

That is also why the 2002 Webby is worth mentioning. It won the People's Choice award for Spirituality without having been formally nominated, on a write-in campaign by its own users, which is a fairly precise measurement of how much the people using it cared.

~ the day it died ~

The decline was not dramatic. Traffic went from a million a day to a few dozen a day over roughly a decade, for the reason every standalone community site declined: the people who used it did not leave the internet, they moved to Facebook. The site's own community group had been running there since 2010. By the end the directory was still full of profiles that nobody was reading.

Walker and Jung announced the closure in November 2019 and retired the site on 31 December. The archive is on the Wayback Machine, and the domain now serves a small page that says the traditional web presence has been retired and points you at the Facebook group. Twenty-two years of a hand-run listing service, ending with a redirect to a company that would not have let it exist as a page in the first place.

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