This testimony includes self-harm, abortion, an abusive relationship and frightening spiritual experiences. Details are kept to a minimum here. If you are struggling, please reach out to someone you trust or a crisis line in your country today.
Laura Zachary had everything the New Age promised: a beachside apartment, money in the bank, a booked-out tarot business and a following that leapt from 3,000 to 200,000 almost overnight. “And I was so empty,” she says. Then Jesus stood at the foot of her bed, wearing a crown of thorns, and said, “I’m going to wash your feet.”
In this episode of the God’s Truth Podcast, Laura (formerly Laura Ansell) tells Abigail Smith how a sensitive girl from an English witchcraft village became a New Age influencer, and how Jesus met her right in the middle of it. What follows is her account.
An emptiness only God could fill
As a child, Laura says, she saw golden light around people and sensed she was meant for something important. She also felt a constant hollow ache in her heart. “It’s the place where God is,” she says now.
She grew up in an English village known for its witchcraft history, where almost every shop sold crystals, wands and pentagrams. At fifteen she took a job there and bought spell books, crystals and a pentagram ring without knowing what it meant. Then the nights changed. She felt something walking around her bed and pulling at her covers, and lights switched on and off. When a psychic told her mother the house was haunted by playful children, her mother welcomed them. Laura now believes that gave something real access to the family. She says things got much worse. One dawn, she saw a pale, dead-looking girl sitting against her bedroom wall. She stopped sleeping without the TV on, and in those years she began to hurt herself.
The Secret, the cards and the crowd
As she finished university, she read The Secret in a single day and began manifesting with vision boards. Things she wrote down arrived, but brought no joy. She now calls it “a perversion of the peace that Jesus brings,” “transactional,” and, frankly, spell work. A happy four-year relationship fell apart. Her boyfriend later told her, “When you read that book, you changed.”
Living in New York, California and then Australia, she discovered she could “tune in” to people through tarot. She believes it was a genuine gift of discernment being used for the wrong purpose. Her business grew to five readings a day, with an eight-month waiting list. Then came healing, coaching, yoga, moon worship and veganism. “I was talking to the moon, the sun, the waves,” she says. “I was not well.” She calls the industry “chasing the wind,” pointing to her favourite book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes (Ecclesiastes 1:14).
When no spirit guide came
A tarot reader told her that her future husband would have a chimp teddy bear on his bed. Soon after, she met a man who did. She married him during COVID, and she says he became controlling and cold. When she fell pregnant, he did not want the baby, and eventually drove her eight hours to a friend’s home and left her there. Alone in a foreign country with no money, she ended the pregnancy.
In agony that night, she begged “any spirit guide that can hear me” to help. No one came. “That was the first time I started to see cracks in my belief system,” she says. She holds no anger toward the reader or her ex-husband, both of whom, she says, were as deceived as she was.
The darkest place
Back in England, grieving and full of what she calls hatred, Laura went deeper. Her cards filled with demons and skulls, she studied hell and the dead, and she collected statues of pagan gods, including one of Baphomet. In a rented barn conversion in the Cotswolds, something followed her. She smelled burning flesh at night. Once, she felt an entity “put me on like a suit.” For about ten days she felt dragged downward. “This isn’t oppression,” she says. “This was possession.” At 33, she woke at 2am to see a huge horned figure step out of the corner of the room. Even then, she felt sorry for it, thinking it might be “misunderstood.”
A vicar, a Bible and a man on the beach
Slowly, Jesus began to call. She thought about adding a cross to her collection of statues, the way you would add another ascended master. A man she dated told her he could not date a witch. Then she decided to move back to Australia, sold most of her belongings and left her tarot cards behind. Two days before she flew, an elderly vicar approached her in a coffee shop and gave her a Bible the next day. She still has it.
On an Australian beach, reading every day, she felt love coming to her through the water, and in her mind’s eye she saw a man in a white robe sitting beside her. This is Jesus. She asked if He was her spirit guide. He said nothing. He just smiled. She walked away thinking her “vibration” wasn’t high enough. But, she says, “You cannot be in the presence of Jesus for a millisecond and walk the same walk ever again.”
Over the next months the breathwork, the moon worship and the yoga stopped making sense. Then came the temptations. Her Instagram went viral, from 3,000 to 200,000 followers, including about 50,000 in one day while she slept. Her TikTok exploded too. She was offered a dream role co-hosting a retreat in Bali. She turned it down and refunded every ticket. “It’s not who I am anymore.”
“I’m going to wash your feet”
Back in England, Laura bought a tiny cross necklace and found a church. She threw away thousands of pounds’ worth of crystals, burned her tarot cards, and, when God asked her to, deleted her website and every social media account. When people later asked why she had not used her following for Jesus, she said: “He didn’t ask me to. He asked me to delete it. It was an idol.” She was left with no income.
At her second communion she thought, this is the living God. I don’t deserve to eat this bread. Then one night, weeping to the worship song “Way Maker”, she felt love enter her bedroom. “I know my Shepherd’s voice,” she says (John 10:27). In her mind’s eye, Jesus stood at the foot of her bed, wearing the crown of thorns, His face streaked with mud and blood, His hands still bleeding from the nails.
“I’m going to wash your feet,” He said. “God, please don’t,” she begged. “I am not worthy to even be looked at by You.” He would not let her kneel. He touched her feet with “soft, liquidy love,” then told her to hold out her hands, palms up, and laid His hands on hers. She saw His blood flow into her arms, her heart, her forehead and her womb. “I knew I was forgiven,” she says, “even for that.”
Her hands grew impossibly heavy. “Why are my hands so heavy?” she asked. “That is the weight of the cross,” He said (Luke 9:23). He opened a great golden book and said, “Come closer, child.” Her full name was written there. “Do you know who I am?” she asked. “You’re Mine,” He said. “You are Mine” (Isaiah 43:1). Then, glorified and golden, He anointed her again with shining oil and marked a cross on her forehead. “That,” she says, “was my resurrection.” Only later did she find each detail in Scripture: the blood that cleanses (1 John 1:7), the name written in the book of life (Revelation 3:5) and the seal on the forehead (Revelation 7:3). “He has done something and then He has backed it up with Scripture,” she says. “It’s never the other way around.”
Signed, sealed, delivered
Soon afterwards, Jesus told her: “Why are you forsaking Me? You need to go and tell people what I’ve done.” During Lent, God asked her to fast to one meal a day for 48 days, and asked, “Are you willing to give Me your life?” “Yes,” she said. “You can have everything.” Through months of deliverance she was set free from witchcraft, curses and the spirits she had invited in through years of yoga and spiritual practice. She surrendered her idols, including marriage, fame and even her attachment to her own suffering. She wrote it all down in obedience, in a book.
Laura has since remarried, and her heart is for people still searching in the New Age. Many of them, she believes, are genuinely gifted and sincerely seeking, “but if they don’t have Christ, Satan will take them.” Her prayer is for the lost sheep to come home (Luke 15:4–7).
Connect with Laura Zachary
- Book: Signed, Sealed, Delivered, published under her maiden name, Laura Ansell
- TikTok and YouTube: @13.8Movement
- Instagram: @mrslaurazachary
Scriptures in this episode
- Ecclesiastes 1:14, vanity and vexation of spirit
- 2 Corinthians 11:14, an angel of light
- Ezekiel 36:26, a heart of flesh
- John 13:5–8, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet
- John 10:27, My sheep hear My voice
- Luke 9:23, take up his cross daily
- Isaiah 43:1, thou art Mine
- 1 John 1:7, the blood of Jesus cleanseth us
- Revelation 3:5, the book of life
- Revelation 7:3, sealed in their foreheads
- Mark 7:27, the children’s bread
- Luke 15:4–7, the lost sheep
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