On the midnight of my 13th birthday my friends and I were sitting on my bedroom floor. The only light came from several cheap, tapered white candles arranged around us in a circle. We were concentrating furiously on a burned and painted board suspended between our laps.
We had lovingly handcrafted our Ouija board. Although there are versions put out commercially by companies like Milton Bradley, one of the girls, Kallie, told us that only properly tooled handmade boards would be effective in communicating with the dead. Although she was a notorious liar, we followed her instructions anyway. At thirteen (and even now), I firmly and illogically believed that hand made things were always superior to store bought ones. Kallie had a way of tapping into our core beliefs when she lied, so we believed her even when we didn't. And so, we burned the upper left corner of the scavenged board and painted a sun in it. On the upper right corner we painted a moon. Then, in the best archaic and spooky characters our preteen hands could draw, we painted the alphabet, the numbers 1-10 hello, goodbye, no, and yes.
My slumber party, like most of my Jr. High life, didn't go according to plan. The other girl, Krissie, arrived at my house and immediately told us that her grandfather just died. Predictably, when we all placed our index and middle fingers on the pointer (the lens of magnifying class suspended between two index cards), it spelled out P-A-P-A, the pet name she called her grandfather. She burst into tears and accused both of us of trying to make her cry. This destroyed the ambiance and make us both feel pretty lousy so we decided to call it a night. I hadn't known that she called her grandfather papa, I had never heard her talk about him. I wonder if Kallie knew. We never played with the Ouiji board again.
The board sat abandoned in a drawer for six years. It has been branded in my mind a tool to allow preteen girls to manipulate each other. Then, inspired by a post on an internet forum, I decided to break it out again, solo. I didn't really expect anything to happen, but the poster of this thread was having so much fun using her board to answer questions, I thought the process would relieve my boredom for at least a few minutes. I suppose a part of me was hoping that it would definitively prove that one of my friends had done the deed. I had read theories that we subconsciously move the pointer ourselves to spell out our deepest desires. I wanted to know if Krissie subconsciously moved the pointer herself in order to create a a badly desired connection with her grandfather.
To my surprise, the pointer didn't stand still. It didn't spell out my deepest, subconscious desires. It did something that I never could have predicted. "Hello" I said out loud, feeling foolish. The slider slid slowly to A, and then to K, and then back to A, and then to K. The speed was unnatural, slow like molasses. Startled, I moved the pointer to goodbye. "Hello", I said again, feeling less foolish and more intrigued. It did the same thing. I tried over and over again. Sometimes, for a change of scenery, the pointer would travel repeatedly between A and Z, sometimes it would trick me. When I said "what year did you die?" and the pointer would move towards one, and then 9, and suddenly it would change its course and move towards k, repeating the same, baffling pattern. Nothing I did could break the cycle. When I decided to wait and see how long the loop would continue, the pointer would travel the familiar path but slowly gain momentum. I became convinced that it wouldn't stop until I forced it to, so I moved the pointed to goodbye. After forty five minutes of these games I was throughly weirded out, so I put the game board away and went to bed. I never did pick it up again.
I have been reluctant to tell this story. I can count on one hand the number of people I've relayed it to because I'm worried they will think that I'm either crazy or looking for attention. I really only told it to others because I was looking for some sort of affirmation, some shared experience. Since then, i've grown less self conscious about the experience, perhaps because I have grown comfortable with its truth. I haven't found anybody with a similar story, however, and I'm not ready to join the crazy internet super-naturalists.
I don't believe that Ouija boards work, but I can't deny that the pointer moved without a conscious effort on my part. Neither the rational nor the irrational explanations seem very plausible to me. I'm not convinced my subconscious had anything to do with the event, If my subconscious could to communicate with me through the board, I wonder why it didn't have anything more interesting to tell me. Following such a bizarre, meaningless pattern seems like an odd thing for me me to conjure from the secret depths of my mind. Likewise, the supernatural idea that the dead would communicate through a Victorian parlour game seems suspect. If I was a ghost I'd be more inclined to hijack a text document and write an essay than spend hours spelling out a single sentence on a piece of wood. I also wonder how the dead can form sentences at all with their brains locked away in their bodies.
I have shrugged my shoulders and claimed defeat. There are few experience that have left me as baffled as this one. I don't a strong desire to understand what happened. I supposed I feel sort of privileged to have had an experience that cannot be understood within my world view. A mystery is an exciting thing, and since I have so few of them, I think I should cherish this one.
