A Ouija Board is Not a Game

Originally posted July 17, 2011

Updating this June 18, 2017 because the 9-year-old neighbor got a Ouija board for his birthday and thinks my 7-year-old is "scared" to use it but the truth is I told him not to touch it and I told him this story. I am going to need to let the parents know that I am not okay with my son ever "playing" with that "game" in our out of their home and it's not because I'm Catholic but because I had a weird experience once.

I’m trying to get used to not having a mouse on my new laptop. It’s weird only having a little patch of silver to move my finger around on. Sometimes I’ll be moving my finger one way on the pad and the arrow goes another way on the screen, and this reminds me of an experience with a Ouija Board I had once. 

My friend Ambre (who was like my sister, really) and I were probably around 12 and were hanging out in my bedroom. My parents and I had just moved in to the house recently, and had heard that a baby or kid or something had died there. It was a Cape Cod house with two large bedrooms upstairs (built in 1950, which was interesting since both my parents were born in 1950 and both are the oldest of four of the same sex of kids). 

My room had a wall put up to turn it into two rooms … something about twins were expected or lived there and one died. Anyway, one night Ambre and I were doing the Ouija Board … which made a comeback in the 80s. (update: I found out today, June 18, 2017, Ambre's birthday, that there were two girls who lived there and their twin baby sisters died at one day old ... newspapers.com).

We were asking the usual questions like what’s your name and how did you die? We’d done the Ouija Board before and it usually “worked” … which meant we weren’t sure if the other one was moving it or what. This time was different. 

This time I can’t remember exactly what happened (maybe I wrote it in my diary … I’ll have to dig around to find out), but the thing you put your hands on (lightly is the idea) was moving faster and faster to spell something and we couldn’t keep up and were accusing the other of moving it. 

We both got pissed because accusing the other of moving it and we both took our fingers off of the cursor-like thing. 

It started moving around by itself. It moved OFF THE BOARD and onto the dang hardwood floor and kept moving around. 

We freaked out. One of us picked it up and threw it back in the box and then put the board on top of it. I don’t think I’ve touched a Ouija Board since. I get chills just writing about it. 

Look, I’m all for good spirits and all that. I believe the dead can communicate with us. But doesn’t that mean that bad spirits are also around? I don’t know what we were dealing with that day, but it didn’t feel right. 

I saw a Ouija Board “game” in my aunt’s garage recently. The boys wanted to get it out. It still creeps me out and I said no.