When I was growing up in my village in Ghana, some people in the community claimed to have magical powers. They were mostly men, and were referred to as “medicine men.” They professed they could heal all kinds of illnesses, help people attain success in whatever endeavors they were pursuing, or cause the demise of those who didn’t obey their commands.

            The death threats naturally frightened people. Because the medicine men were embedded in the village’s highly superstitious culture, they were guaranteed a steady flow of clients.

Typically, folks seeking assistance for whatever issues they were dealing with in their lives would visit medicine men in their homes. A medicine man would perform some strange rituals and then demand some form of payment from the client to be used to pacify some “gods.”

The “fee” was always either a significant amount of money or some expensive gift. Live chickens and goats were favorite asks (meat was a luxury item for most people in the village). Someone who hadn’t been able to afford meat for years would run out and find the money somehow, often through borrowing, to buy the goat or chicken. Everyone in the village knew that the medicine men secretly slaughtered the animals and consumed the meat themselves.

As I grew older, I started to find the whole thing completely absurd. The people with the so-called superpowers looked just like the rest of us. They often walked around wearing tattered clothing. It made zero sense to me that such individuals, who claimed to have the ability to bring success to others, couldn’t help themselves. And, I never thought anyone would deliberately choose to stay as poor as they looked.

In the decades since I left the village, most of the medicine men I knew have passed away—validating my view that they were mere mortals after all. Unfortunately, there have been replacements. When I call to speak with friends in Ghana these days and I am informed of the passing of someone I knew, sometimes the person relaying the information will add that the death was caused by some present-day medicine man in the village. It is always either that the medicine man himself had been unhappy with something the deceased did, or that someone else requested the killing.

The latter reason is invoked more frequently. In some cases where two people have a bitter dispute, one party supposedly visits a medicine man and asks for the other person to be eliminated from the face of the earth. Quite often, close relatives or neighbors of disputants who know about ongoing squabbles link those feuds to the deaths. No supporting evidence is ever provided. Culturally, there is no expectation that such proof is required.

As we have learned with conspiracy theorists here in the West, it is totally impossible to disabuse some people of their deeply held beliefs. Whenever my friends tell me about someone having been “eliminated” by a medicine man, I simply nod and move on to other topics.

Just recently, it occurred to me that I should perhaps subject those medicine men to a test. If they truly have the power to kill other human beings by spiritual means, then I would think using that capability to predict stock markets should be a no-brainer.

I have some exposure to the stock market. The AI mania, which has driven the markets to sky-high levels lately, has been making me quite nervous. My feeling is that things have gotten a little too bubbly, and that something might burst soon. Despite that apparent risk, I don’t want to cash out too early and miss out if the market keeps going up. This is where I think the medicine men in my village might be helpful.

I just found a reason to plan a trip to Ghana.

Could the medicine men be the real deal? I am genuinely curious to find out. They could either turn out to be the best financial advisers on the planet, or the worst crackpots. The latter is what I really think they are, but I am willing to suspend judgment until I see how their stock market calls pan out.