A Ouija Story
I read one of your articles about the Ouija board and I thought I'd share
a few experiences from the other night.
Four friends and I decided that we would bring the Ouija board to a grave yard
for fun. This is the second time we'd done this, the first time much less
extensive.
Our use of the board was not to find answers about our own lives, but more to
satisfy or dismiss our wavering and skeptical views on if ghosts are
real, and possibly to get a good laugh
by asking questions about religion, being that we are all atheists.
We sat down and three of us used the board at a time. After a few times
of asking "if there are any spirits present, please give us a sign" the
planchette began to move a little. We asked for the speaker's name, and her name
was Cassandra. My friend Maria, being a polite and accommodating person by
nature, immediately informed Cassandra that we were not hear to harm or bother
her, we were just curious visitors, and that if she wanted to leave at any time
that we would not bother her further. We spoke with Cassandra for 45 minutes or
so and she was very mild-natured and polite. According to her, she had chosen to
stay in the plane she is in, and those in her plane have not gained the
knowledge of if there is a god, or if any religion can be verified, and never
will, and she is perfectly content with that and her current state. This is a
similar response to the first time we used the board a month earlier, except
that last time the entity we spoke with, "Pete", claimed that there was no god,
but a heaven and hell do exist. We asked Cassandra questions about her life and
she happily answered in a comprehensive manner. We mentioned some technology
advances and major political events that had happened since her death in the
early 1940s, and asked if she was aware of them. She told us that she saw
everything the way it was, not how it is now. We asked if we could come back and
visit her sometime, and she said that she roamed and would not stay there.
After speaking with her, we moved to the other side of the grave yard and tried again. This time we immediately got a response. The planchette spelled out the word "run". There was about two seconds between the time the word was spelled out and the time we ran straight out of the grave yard.
When we got to my car, as a half-joke, the three people sitting in the back
seat decided to check and see if anyone had followed us, so they used the board
again. It immediately and violently spelled out "you must know you are not
wanted here". Freaked out, we gave up on that area and drove to another grave
yard a couple miles away.
We looked for a distant relative of my friend in this yard and sat down at the grave. The response we got, though I don't remember the name of the entity, did not claim to be my friend's relative. In fact, it apologized for not being who we were looking for. Again my friend Maria politely informed the entity that we just wanted a conversation, and he was free to leave at any given time. We spoke with this ghost for well over an hour. It spelled out short sentences and sometimes got ahead of itself and spelled things out too fast for us to comprehend. The way the conversation went totally dismissed my fear of the planchette's movements being due to automatism. It was impossible. Three of us went at a time, and even the two that weren't moving the planchette had the questions they asked responded to. The answers we got were at times completely unexpected answers, and sometimes questions, even. Not only did it disprove automatism to me, but it also disproved the theory of an entity using one's hands to move the planchette by entering one's body. I say this because, we were curious if the ghost really knew how it was communicating, so first of all, we asked if it could see our physical bodies (which I forgot to mention, we asked Cassandra, and got the same answer prior) and it said no, but it could feel us. To get this answer from two different entities sort of verified that for me. We went on further to ask how it moved the planchette, which we referred to as "plastic with a window", and it apparently had no knowledge of there being a "board" or a "plastic". It was quite curious about what the board was and what it looked like, and it was endearing, because when we told him the name of it was the Ouija board, it dragged the planchette over to the word "Ouija" as if to prove it was getting the point. When we asked how it managed to communicate its answers, then, it basically said that it was too complicated to explain in detail, and then gave us the answer, "I think, then you repeat". This ambiguous answer is mystifying but still explains a lot, I think. I feel like the best way to really find out how the board works is to ask the spirits themselves. If everyone got the same answers, we could turn a theory into a fact.
Before the conversation with this spirit I didn't really believe in "souls".
But the detailed answers we got really made me believe in the cliche definition
of a soul. We asked if there were malicious spirits, and the entity said yes. We
asked if spirits could physically hurt live humans, and the entity said that
indeed they could. We asked what made a malicious spirit, and it responded "bad
souls". We asked this spirit about religion and god, and it, like Cassandra and
Pete, admitted that it had chosen to stay on the plane it was in and did not and
would not know the answers. It referred to the place it was in as "my dream",
meaning its own dream world. It said it was happy and pretty much got what it
wanted in the dream, and when we asked if it wanted to know about what went on
in today's world it said, "no. my dream is peaceful". We asked if you joined
family and friends after death, and it said "some do", and asked if anyone was
bound to a place after death, and it said "some are". When we asked if any
souls could be reincarnated, it responded "some can". We asked if it hurt to
die, and it said "no". Apparently the spirit had died from "health" at age 57
around the time of the Vietnam war, and when we asked if it remembered much from
life it mentioned that it had friends die in the war. The funniest part was when
we asked what he missed most about being alive. He said "food. taste" and when
we inquired further he told us that in his dream, he had no requirement for a
physical body and therefore no requirement to eat. We asked plants, animals, and
inanimate objects carried energy similar to a soul, and it said just animals,
and that there are no differences between an animal and human soul.
I learned a lot, and truly believe what I was told. I am now an atheist that
believes in ghosts, souls, and possibly reincarnation.
When we got back to the car, we tried the board one last time, just for fun.
This is the part that really freaks me out: The planchette made increasingly
large and violent circles around the board, over and over and over, and it was
really frightening so I told my friends to stop, but they wouldn't. They found
it amusing. They asked if the spirit wanted to speak, and the planchette
violently swung to the word "no", and they asked if they should leave, and it
violently swung to the word "yes". I don't know if it was the same spirit that
showed signs of being unfriendly earlier, or if it is malicious or just grumpy.
I'm a little frightened about getting haunted, none the less.
-Ali from New York
