The thing about Beacon's Main Street is that it tells you what the town is.
Walk it from one end to the other and you pass an independent bookstore (Binnacle, 321), a Chihuly-trained glass studio (Hudson Beach Glass, 162), a long-running indie record shop, a half-dozen galleries, two metaphysical shops, a dance studio, and the kind of places that don't survive in towns where the rent goes up the second a chain notices. Dia:Beacon is at one end. The Hudson is on the other. And the seven blocks in between are an argument — running for two decades now — that an art town can hold its line against being flattened.
Witch Please is on that line. It is at 498 Main Street. It used to be at 493.
That is the story.
The shop
In 2020, three Reiki Master Teachers — Steven Gray, Chad Wagner, and Manu Del Prete — opened Witch Please. It was the founding storefront of their parent brand, Les Loups de la Lune ("Wolves of the Moon"), which they describe as having been "created in 2020 from a desire to heal the world during these unpredictable and turbulent times."
The timing was not coincidence. The first months of the pandemic were a moment in which a great many people, given a sudden surplus of unstructured time and an acute case of existential weather, started looking for ritual. Witch Please opened into that. It is what the founders are credentialed to make.
It is also a shop. Specifically: it is a metaphysical shop — not a witch supply, which would imply hardcore practitioner, and not a new age boutique, which would imply something more diffuse than what is actually here. Tarot decks. Oracle decks. Crystals, curated. Occult and reference books. Incense. Handmade fine sterling silver jewelry, reiki-charged. Handmade teacups. Runes. Spell supplies, for those who keep them. And the candles.
The candles
The candles are the spine of the business.
There are two lines. The first, Witch Please manifestation candles, are hand-poured only on new moons, full moons, and lunar or solar eclipses. They are coconut-soy wax, blended with high-end fragrance and essential oils, and each vessel contains a real quartz crystal formation embedded in the bottom. Each candle is then reiki-charged through what the shop calls a "ritual circle" of fire, intention, and meditation — done by the founders themselves. When the candle finishes, the crystal stays.
The second line, IMPRINT, is the same lineage made for daily use — handmade by the same Reiki masters, in the same small batches, at higher fragrance loads, but not charged. Lifestyle, in other words, instead of ritual.
The distinction matters. It is the most legible thing about the brand. They built a luxury tier for ritual, and a luxury tier for the absence of it, and they sell both at the same address.
The move
The building Witch Please opened in, at 493 Main Street, sits on the south side of Beacon's main commercial strip. The shop ran there for about five years. By the early 2020s it was visibly outgrowing its space — the candles were a small line, then a bigger one, then the defining one; the services schedule (readings, Reiki sessions, astrology, aura photography) needed dedicated rooms instead of a curtained corner; the inventory had to live somewhere.
In the late winter and spring of 2025, Witch Please moved across the street. The new address — 498 Main, on the north side — is meaningfully larger. The shop's own announcement, posted to social, read: "Witch Please is officially conjuring its way into its new space." Their old storefront is now becoming a new healing center under different ownership, which is the kind of plot line a Main Street produces only when the original tenant is doing well enough to leave a vacancy that other practitioners want.
A shop opening in 2020 and outgrowing its first space by 2025 is, by every reasonable measure of small retail in a small town, a success story. Witch Please is a success story dressed in moon phases.
The owners
The deepest published profile of any of the three founders is on Manu Del Prete, who is Italian-born, has been doing energy work for 30+ years, and has been teaching Reiki for ten. She is also a Master Instructor of Integrated Energy Therapy, a Feng Shui practitioner, and a past-life regression facilitator. She teaches Reiki Level II certifications at Beacon's Valley Spirit Wellness Center — meaning the shop is woven into the town's broader wellness ecosystem, not a closed loop.
Her own description of how she practices is the most useful way into understanding what Witch Please is selling:
"I break away from the hierarchical model in which most of us learned spiritual and metaphysical arts, while still preserving and respecting the lineage of the ancient teachings."
That sentence is the whole shop in one paragraph. Accessible, but not diluted. Welcoming, but not gatekept. Practitioner-credentialed, but consumer-facing.
The trio operates as a collective and tends to speak in the brand's voice rather than personally — which is itself a positioning choice. Witch Please is not the cult of any one of them. It is the three of them, the candles, and the ritual.
It is also LGBTQ+-owned, listed in the regional directories as such. That has not historically been a secondary detail in Beacon, which is one of the most demonstrably welcoming Hudson Valley towns for queer-owned independent business — and it is part of how the shop reads.
The reader
If you go to Witch Please and you are even tarot-curious, the recommendation is specific: find a session with Francesca DeCapita.
Francesca reads at Witch Please regularly. (Bookings flow through the shop's own appointments page.) She is a psychic medium and intuitive — not a strictly Rider-Waite traditionalist; her toolkit is tarot plus oracle plus astrology plus practical coaching, and her sessions run an hour. Her own description of what she does is worth quoting in full because it is the inverse of the cliché:
"I don't predict your future. I help uncover your truth."
That is the right framing for the room she is reading in. Witch Please is not a fortune-teller's parlor. It is a wellness practice with merchandise.
What's around it
Beacon's Main Street is the relevant context. Witch Please sits inside the working ecosystem of an art town that has been quietly compounding for two decades since Dia opened. Binnacle Books at 321 Main. Hudson Beach Glass at 162 Main, where the blowers were Chihuly-trained. Notions-N-Potions at 175 Main, an adjacent metaphysical shop with a different tone. The galleries. The dance studio. The independent record shop. The half-dozen restaurants and coffee bars that are themselves operating institutions, not pop-ups.
This is the part that is hard to write without losing the actual point: every named business in that paragraph is doing the same thing as Witch Please, on its own terms. They are independent. They are practitioner-led. They are still on Main Street years after they opened, in many cases years after a chain would have taken the address. Beacon's Main is what it is because each of those storefronts is succeeding individually, and the cumulative effect is the strip itself.
A new Witch Please that opened in a generic strip mall would be a candle line with a tarot reader. A Witch Please that opened on Beacon's Main Street, at 493, in 2020, and moved across to 498 by 2025, is something else. It is a piece of the strip's argument.
Go, then come back
Witch Please is at 498 Main Street, Beacon. Walk in. The candles smell like what they are. Pick one — for a new moon, a full moon, an eclipse, or just because you like the scent. (The crystal stays after. That is the whole thing.) If you are even tarot-curious, book a session with Francesca DeCapita through the shop. If you are wellness-curious in the broader sense, ask about Manu Del Prete's Reiki II certifications at Valley Spirit. Then walk Main, and see what else is on the line.
That is the case for Witch Please. And, quietly, it is the case for everywhere on Beacon's Main Street that has stayed itself long enough to compound.
— The Editors
