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Many cleansing traditions include something smoky: burning sage, rosemary or mugwort, for example.

If something in your home is feeling off, cleansers may be able to help.

Your dog won’t stop barking. Your cat refuses to go into the basement. You’re hearing odd noises. You toss and turn, restless, all night. Your things aren’t where you left them.

Or maybe you can’t even
point to specific evidence, but something in your home just feels … off. Stuck. Heavy.

“I like to think of it as a spiritual spring cleaning,” says Ariel Willow, a spiritual practitioner in Upstate New York. “We all have times in our lives where you notice that there’s a lot of dust in your house or your family’s been sick and the air in the house just feels gross, you know? And that’s kind of how it feels energetically when you’re in a space that isn’t cleansed.”

The practice can sound a little, well, woo-woo to sceptics, and it often gets overly dramatised as a battle against evil spirits in Hollywood portrayals. But some versions of its tenets exist in many religions and spiritual practices. For cleansers, the relieved responses from their clients serve as affirmation that the process makes a difference.

“People share: ‘Oh, my friends come over, my family comes over, and they tell me how good energy I have in my space,’” says Etecia Burrell, founder of LetThemFlourish in Oakland, California, and a priest in the Lucumi spiritual tradition. “Hearing that feedback is affirming every time, even though I’ve been doing it for years.”

The conversation doesn’t always start that way. The demonic depictions in films such as Poltergeist are misleading and might even cause anxiety about connecting with spirits, Burrell says.

I like to think of it as a spiritual spring cleaning.