ORANGE, Calif. — Yvonne Conway sees dead people, so tombstones were a no-brainer.

Conway is the national spokesperson for the Berkley, Calif.-based witchcraft organization Covenant of the Goddess.

She may also be Orange County's most prominent witch.

The 37-year-old Huntington Beach native organizes three Meetup.com social networking groups for Orange County witches, pagans and ghost enthusiasts.

She belongs to a coven of eight, believes in magic and says that ghosts routinely flutter through her Orange County home.

In 2008, she will help co-host a four-day national conference on witchcraft near Yucaipa, Calif.

As a fully "out-of-the-broom-closet" witch, Conway says her job is to put a public face on Wicca, the pagan faith she estimates up to 1,000 Orange County residents practice.

Tombstones seemed the perfect way to do just that.

This past spring, a coalition of Wiccan organizations including Covenant of the Goddess, won the right to have the symbol of their faith — a pentacle — inscribed on government-issued tombstones and grave markers.

The decision by the Veteran's Department to include the pentacle as one of 39 official faith emblems came after nearly a decade of repeated requests and three lawsuits by Wiccan groups.

This summer, the Veterans Department issued the first pentacle tomb marker for Arlington National Cemetery.

For Conway, pentacle-bedecked graves are an overdue recognition of a long maligned religion.

"We're showing we're not the monsters people have been led to believe we are," Conway says.

The battle for identity is one that Conway knows well.

Born to a homeless woman at St. Joseph's hospital in Orange, Conway says she was given up for adoption to a family from Huntington Beach.

Her new family were Catholics and Conway says she was attracted from an early age to the mystery and ritual of her adopted parent's faith.

"I wanted to be a nun," Conway recalls. "That was the closest thing I could think of to women who could dedicate themselves to God and their community."

She was troubled however by the idea of original sin — the Christian notion that humans are born sinful — and she had a less spiritual attraction to "cheesy horror movies — Elvira and so forth." That attraction led her to a bookstore in the Westminster mall and a $5 book about witchcraft.

It was a child's fascination with magic as viewed through a television screen. But Conway soon found out "witchcraft is not like 'Bewitched' — although that would be awesome," she says. "My house would be so much cleaner."

Instead, Conway discovered what she describes as a nature religion in which both masculine and feminine divinities are worshipped, love is emphasized over sin, magic is possible and 'spells' take the form of "just real focused prayers," Conway says. "You're sending your will out in hope of a specific outcome."

Conway always believed in the supernatural — she says she used to see objects moving in her house growing up — "but at 12 years old you don't necessarily have the vocabulary or the comprehension to understand it."

She did note that her strongly felt wishes tended to come true.

Conway recounts the time she wished for a friend to appear among the throng of people during a trip to Disneyland. A half an hour later, he did.

"That was interesting," she says.

Later in life she says her faith made her sensitive to ghosts, who would walk through her yard or turn on lights in her house.

"It got to the point when my blender would turn on when it was unplugged," Conway says. "Magic — I believe in it."

Her beliefs led her to tarot cards, astrology, crystals, as well as to Wiccan organizations like Covenant of the Goddess, one of several prominent Wicca and pagan groups that advocated repeatedly for federal recognition of the pentacle emblem with the Department of Veteran Affairs.

Conway says that each application by Covenant of the Goddess for recognition of the pentacle foundered upon new and shifting rules issued by department staff.

"They were giving us the runaround," Conway says. "I'm not going to go off on conspiracy theories but it does seem a little strange."

In the meantime, arguably more obscure religious emblems — such as the circular "EK" of Eckankar, a faith founded in 1965 that espouses, among other things, "soul travel" — were approved.

"It was religious prejudice that prevented putting it on the list," says Selena Fox, the senior minister of Circle Sanctuary, a Wicca church that settled a successful lawsuit against the Veterans Department this past April. "None of the other symbols took a decade and three lawsuits to get this done."

Circle Sanctuary's lawsuit — a continuation of a previous effort by Covenant of the Goddess and other groups — was not the only driver of what Fox calls "the pentacle quest."

"Our soldiers were coming home and they weren't able to have the pentacle put up as a religious symbol on their tombstone," Conway says. "They served their time for their country — they should be allowed to have that freedom of religion they fought for."

One such soldier was Army Reserve Sgt. Patrick Stewart, a Wiccan from Nevada who died in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2005. In late 2006, officials in the state of Nevada lost patience with the federal government's unwillingness to issue a pentacle tombstone to one of their fallen citizens. In December, the state of Nevada issued their own.

Conway says the fight for recognition of their identity has united Wiccans — often reluctant to take a public stand about their controversial faith — around a cause.

"It's tough for (Wiccans) to find a way to work together," Conway says. "But this was about prejudice and being treated like second class citizens or less because of our religious beliefs. There was absolutely no controversy."

The article above was found on Google and was published originally on Times Argus