"Kinda? They stick on in the astral, the spirit realm, not the material. They don't grab your body, they grab your, like, essence or soul."

The "soul" is not a spiritual concept for her, it's a very material one; in her world's magic, a person's essential self has is containable and manipulable to some extent, which leads to some problems. This is one of them.

"So you need magic to counter or uproot them. People can walk around under control of those things for ages, if they don't run into anyone who knows what to look for or how to see it. An' since they get their claws into your essence, it's real tricky gettin' 'em out again."