Me and Ouija.

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Mandatory Credit: Photo by Jon Santa Cruz / Rex Features (582062k) Ouija board with pointer VARIOUS - 2006

Mandatory Credit: Photo by Jon Santa Cruz / Rex Features (582062k)
Ouija board with pointer
VARIOUS – 2006

I just read a post by Linda Lee on her blog, in which she talks about a bad experience she had with a Ouija board at the age of 14. That brought back a memory of my own bad experience with one when I was 16.

I don’t like to mess around with the occult. I’m not particularly superstitious, but I err on the side of caution, and my religion frowns on dabbling in the occult anyway. I make a slight exception for astrology; although I don’t really believe in it, it’s a great deal of fun and I don’t take it seriously, so I don’t see a problem with reading my horoscope, even if just so I can laugh at its inaccuracy later on, or how it’s so general it could apply to all of the other 11 zodiac signs.

Crystal balls, tarot cards, tea leaves, numerology–these things don’t creep me out, but they don’t interest me either, and most of it just seems rather absurd to me.

But Ouija boards are another matter. When my daughter was 16 a friend gave her a Ouija board (this seems almost like some rite of passage for teens) and I wouldn’t allow the thing into my house. She snuck it in anyway, and when I found it I tossed it in the trash–down the street. Marketed as a “game” by the Parker Brothers game company, Ouija boards give me the heebie jeebies. I don’t even want to look at one. There’s a reason for my discomfort with this “toy.”

When I was 16 (the same age my daughter was when she tried to bring one into the house), my boyfriend and I spent hours in his room consulting Ouija. We used to ask it about our future as a couple, how many kids we were going to have, where we would live, etc. (We broke up less than a year later. He’s currently program director of a well known New York area radio station and has 3 sons with his attorney wife, while I’m divorced and take care of my 2 cats on a housekeeper’s income. How our lives have diverged).

Anyway, back when I was 16 and my boyfriend was 17, we’d rush home after school to find out what Oiuja had to say. It was very addictive, and soon I found myself playing with it by myself, alone in my room. Several years earlier, the movie The Exorcist had come out. You may remember it was about a girl who became possessed by a demon after playing with a Ouija board alone, just like I was doing. I paid that no mind, even though the movie did scare me when I’d seen it. With the fearlessness of the young, I continued to ask it questions. I’d rest my fingers lightly on the white plastic planchette, and slowly the thing would begin to slide across the lettered and numbered wooden board, resting on “Yes,” “No,” or sometimes even spelling out a word, a name, or a number.

ouija2

I thought this was all pretty cool, until one day when I was thinking hard about a question (which I can’t remember), and had not yet placed my fingers on the planchette. I looked down at the board and incredibly, the thing was moving all by itself! I watched with a mixture of fascination and horror as it spelled out the answer, all by itself.

I was afraid to touch it. I just watched, my eyes growing wider every second. I began to shake and felt the blood drain from my face. I had a strong feeling someone–or something–was in the room with me. The lights in the room flickered.

At that point, I picked up the entire board and the cardboard box that housed it, and ran with it to the incinerator down the hall (my mother and I were living in an apartment in a high rise). Without a second thought, I shoved it down the chute and slammed the metal door shut.

As I ran back to our apartment, I thought I heard someone calling my name. I ran inside, locked the door, and put on all the lights. I immediately took a shower because I felt contaminated from having touched the thing.

From that day forward, I never went near another Ouija board. I’m convinced those things are NOT something to be messed around with. I’ve known a lot of people who’ve described similar experiences using them.

32 thoughts on “Me and Ouija.”

  1. I had similar experiences with the Ouija Board… only I was very stupid. Unlike you, I did not stop, I took it as far as you can go.

    The year was 1967, long before The Exorcist came out. I did not know the HELL I was getting myself into.

    Liked by 3 people

    • I want to read about what happened! You didn’t talk about it much in your article. Maybe it’s going to be in the book and you don’t want to give away too much though.

      Liked by 1 person

      • Yes, the full story will be in my book. But the reason I didn’t say much about it in my post is because… this is very hard for me to talk or write about. I have never written about it before. Never really told the whole story before, to anyone. It was a horrible experience.

        My post today was my first baby step toward writing about it.

        Liked by 2 people

          • Your ability to be super honest and write about deeply personal and intensely painful things is helping me find the courage to write my real-life horror story.

            Liked by 2 people

            • Yes, really. You see, I first tried to write this story in 1975. Forty years ago. I have tried countless times since then. But now I am actually writing it. Your inspiring blog is a big part of why I am finally able to do this.

              The thing is, until now, I was going to leave out the occult stuff. I was going to just gloss over it and make it be all about trauma and Complex PTSD. I thought if I wrote in depth about how the Ouija Board, seances, and autonomic handwriting led to my downfall, people wouldn’t believe it. They would think I was just crazy.

              But thanks to you, I am learning not to care so much about what people think or whether they believe me or not. I am telling my story. All of my story.

              So help me God. 🙂

              Liked by 1 person

  2. The Exorcist was the only horror film that really scared me. The idea of being alone in the dark and stalked by some thing that was making rapping sounds really haunted me. My best friend gave me a gift of a Ouija board. Since seeing the movie, I had read about a lot of creepy and terrible things. I wanted nothing to do with it but my friend wore me down and I consented to play with it with her. My heart wasn’t in it and nothing interesting happened. After she left, the Ouija board when to the top of my closet never to be used again. When you destroyed yours, didn’t you pray? I know you believe in God (unlike me). God would be a good defense against the occult and things that go bump in the night. BTW, have you ever noticed how many horror films show people trying to get help from the Christian god and it not working? Are they just trying to make it scarier or are they undermining religion? Anyway, glad you didn’t get possessed (although possession is nine-tenths of the law).

    Liked by 1 person

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  4. I think that many of us have tried this board. We were just not awake enough to know the powers, as we played with then. This board is not a toy and should never be used like that.
    I hope that you gave your daughter a good explanation for your reaction.

    Liked by 2 people

  5. I use to play with this all the time when I was little. Both my nieces and I had a bad experience with the Ouja board.

    Years ago I met Carlos Santana in person. He wanted to talk to me, but I rejected the conversation because my friend at the time pulled me away from him. I also found something both mysterious and frightening about him. My guess is he is probably has a Narcissistic Personality Disorder,..considering he thinks he’s a direct link to God higher than others just because he is an amazing guitarist. And also because after I refused to talk to him he shock his head,..grabbed his guitar and walked out of the place angry. I think I gave Mr. Rock star a Narcissistic injury.

    Anyway around 7 years after meeting Santana I had this weird dreams for an entire summer. The dream would start at the place where I met Santana at the boardwalk Tiki bar. He’d be standing in front of me. Instead of rejecting him,..we would walk down the boardwalk and we would have a conversation. As the dream continued we would walk on the beach and he no longer spoke in English. He was speaking to me in an entirely different language and he was no longer Santana. He was from another time period. A time period BC. He was someone that I was separated from in the dream and who I was only allowed to have a final conversation with,..because if I was seen with this man we would be killed.

    Anyway this dream went on for an entire summer. Night after night until the end of the sunmer.

    When the dreams stopped I began to meet people who had be affiliated with Santana. I met a women who met him as a little girl. A photographer who met him. A bunch of people. I even met Lauren Hill and Dianne Warwick in the mall I worked at. Also the song Smooth was released. Later I’d read that all the musicians involved in the making of that Santana come back Album had connecting dreams. They all dreamt about each other.

    So then one day my nieces and I were playing with the Ouja board. The one niece started pleading with us to stop playing. But then we asked the question. “Why do I keep meeting all these people who know Carlos Santana and why did I meet him, reject him and have all the strange dreams 7 years later?” The Ouja board spelled a name. We wrote the name down. My other niece started screaming and crying. She flipped out.

    We put the name into the search engine on the internet. We found that the person who’s name was on the paper died from a drug overdose. He was a musician, and a heroine addick from the Sunset Blvd. area in California. My nieces and I were freaked out.

    The dreams stopped, and I never did piece all of it…but I always believed that one day I’d end of face to face with Santana again.

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    • Oh…the weirdest part of the dreams is that the language the man in the dream spoke in … Which I believe was latin… I understood perfectly in my sleep. The only language I know is English. So these dreams were very bizarre and detailed. I recall camels…desert. Some kind of a stone structured building.

      Very bizarre retitive dreams I had. I never made sense out of them.

      Liked by 1 person

  6. Yikes! That was a very scary experience! I never had anything like that happen to me with a Ouija board (I only messed around with one once, and nothing even mildly interesting happened) — but I have had experience with people who were demon possessed. If that doesn’t scare you straight, nothing will.

    I do have a funny story about astrology, though, which I heard from a psychology professor many many years ago. He conducted an experiment on a group of (unwitting) students, where he gave them all a “personality test,” and then a few days later distributed the “results” of the test to them. What he had actually done was to take a bunch of stuff verbatim from horoscopes, mush it all together, and then had it typed up multiple times with the paragraphs in a different order each time (so they wouldn’t look identical when he handed them out). This was in the days before personal computers and copy/pasting, so his poor secretary had to actually type all of those “test results” on a manual typewriter, dozens of times, to produce what looked like an individual assessment for each student — all of them exactly the same except for the order of the paragraphs. Well, he passed them out to his students in class, gave them all a few minutes to read them over, then asked if they thought the results were accurate. Nearly all the students agreed that yes, the personality test had yielded accurate results. Then he asked if anyone would like to read his/her results out loud to the class, and of course as soon as one of them did, the jig was up. I doubt any of those students ever trusted him again after that, but I think he proved his point about horoscopes. 😉

    Liked by 2 people

    • That’s a funny story. Yes, the descriptions of the signs and horoscopes are so general they could really apply to anyone. But you read them and think, “OMG! That applies to me!” I think that’s how fortune tellers operate too. They’re trained to make you think what they tell you applies to your life situation, but they are just educated guesses based on body language, what little they do know, etc. and the rest is guesses and generalizations. Fifty dollars for that, please!

      Liked by 2 people

        • Most of them are a bunch of financially desperate women or women who don’t speak such good English (usually it’s a second language) who are looking to make an easy buck but are probably unemployable elsewhere. Or they just want to work from home. A lot of them seem to have a bunch of kids running around.

          Liked by 1 person

      • Yep, that sounds about right. There seems to be something — a desperate longing for meaning, or for things to make sense — that sometimes causes people to see causation where there is really only coincidence. When I was in my twenties, someone told me about an old superstition that if you found a bird’s nest in your Christmas tree, then you were going to have a baby the following year. Weirdly, the only time I have ever found a bird’s nest in my Christmas tree was the Christmas before my son was born. (Never found a nest the Christmases prior to the births of my three girls, so I guess it only works for boy babies.) Also, just for laughs, I read my horoscope in the newspaper on my 30th birthday. It said that my opportunities for creativity would increase in April of the following year. The following April was when my son was born. Once again, no omens for the girls. Are superstitions sexist or something? 😉

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