FREEPORT — Melissa Ellsworth opened Leapin’ Lizards 10 years ago, guided by tarot cards and tired of the corporate grind.

It’s part metaphysical shop, part classroom and maybe the only store in Maine with a psychic reader and a healer on duty every day, taking walk-ins. At a time when personal budgets might seem to leave less room for candles, chimes and $900 rose-quartz alchemy bowls, her mantra the past few years has been: “I refuse to participate in the recession. I have found if we stay upbeat, people are drawn to us.”

It has worked.

“Psychic readings have been through the roof,” Ellsworth said. “People are unsure. They’re stressed. They’re looking for guidance.”

She’s looking to open a third location.

During the winter of 2001, Ellsworth, 44, originally from New York and working for Hannaford at the time, had a friend invite her to a tarot card class.

“It’s a really long Maine winter,” Ellsworth said. She figured, why not?

“I was pretty open-minded to see what happened,” she said. “Every time I pulled a card on my old job I kept getting it was time to leave.”

She liked the idea of a shop that blended retail, services including tarot reading and massage and class space, and she began researching the market. She left her job that June and opened the first Leapin’ Lizards on Main Street in Brunswick in August 2001. A second store followed in Portland two years later. In 2006, the Brunswick location moved to Freeport, where there’s room for 45 people to gather above the shop.

Ellsworth also created an advisory board, including her first tarot-card teacher, to give advice on products she ought to stock. In the beginning, board members shared their network of practitioner friends. Now, most potential teachers, readers and healers reach out to her. The Freeport and Portland stores’ event calendars list at least two, if not more, specialists or events every day.

“Everybody has to give me a reading or a massage,” Ellsworth said. “Anything they want to do at the store, they have to do with me first.”

She added, “The universe is good to me.” Some people, on their way to meet with her, have gotten flat tires or have run out of gas. “It just means maybe they’re not meant to be with us.”

Ellsworth has OK’d a range of practitioners, including angel readers, numerology, star healing and community acupuncture.

“We definitely have had some stuff that’s been out there,” she said. “Fire walking — that was a little too out there. It takes a lot to shock me now. We offer a full range and I let my customers decide.”

Ellsworth, who lives in Topsham, has filled store shelves with crystals, Tibetan singing bowls, smudges, Wicca accessories, herbs, oracle cards and tarot cards. She screens everything, down to the greeting cards, for positive messages.

In a nod to the economy, she added a used-book section that has been popular.

Classes — “Healing Power of Shamanic Alchemy,” “Hello from Heaven,” “Elemental Breathwork” — tend to attract women, many of them repeat customers, in their 30s and older. Costs range from $5 to $200. (Some are single workshops; some are a series that go on for weeks.)

“I still use the (tarot) cards to help pick event dates,” Ellsworth said. “I’ve been looking at locations for a third store; I pull cards for that, as well.”

She has readers in Freeport and Portland from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. every day. Costs start at $25 for 15 minutes. Most customers are walk-ins.

Deb Levensailor of Harpswell has read several days a month at both locations for the past year and a half.

“Some people are freaked by (a) reading,” she said. “What do they mean? I simply share information. . . . I like people to become aware: Who are you?”

Seated upstairs at a small, round table with crystals, a candle, feathers and several decks of tarot cards, Levensailor said the top three questions she fields are about relationships, careers and the future.

“Awesome people walk through that door every day,” she said.

Weird, Wicked Weird is a monthly feature on the strange, unexplained and intriguing in Maine. Send ideas, photos and positive vibes to [email protected].