Ouija Means Company

Ouija boards are the epitome of every teenagers dark phase. Usually a passing fad for most or a slightly scary thing to do at a party or a friend's house. For my family it was the go to board game for at least a couple of months.

I was around 16 years old when my first Ouija board came home or as I like to call it by its true name the "yes yes" board. My eldest sister was the one to bring it into the house she bought it at Toys r' Us funnily enough and wanted it to speak to one person in particular. Although as most believers in the occult agree it may be very often the case that when you speak to the dead you speak to all who are willing and wanting to talk, not just who you want to talk to. At this time my middle sister had already began her long lasting phase of being a "witch" so she spurred my older sister on and they brought it out that first night after my parents fell asleep. 

The first question of course was, "Is there any one out there who wants to talk to us?" It seemed light hearted and silly as I watched and felt excited to  jump in a few minutes later only to feel the moving piece gliding lightly underneath my fingertips. I couldn't stop questioning this at first. While both of my sisters claimed they weren’t moving the planchette, convinced it was moving on its own. It was difficult to keep my stubbornness about me, (Was someone really talking to us?) According to the board we were, it first glided over to the yes at the top of the board. The next question was, "Who are we talking to?" and it spelled out steadily X a v i e r,  Xavier he would soon become a house hold name for us. 

We laughed at the things he said and my sisters “talked” to him for about an hour every day each session getting longer, my sisters becoming more and more reliant on the things “he” said. Asking him about the future and asking him to find certain dead people we wanted to talk to. Although he was usually wrong about most things his excuse was always that time was different there.

 It became addicting and if there is a light bulb in your brain for when you are thinking about ghosts and the paranormal then ours were shining brightly and I always imagine our house lit up  like a lamp post on a moonless night, seen from miles around.  I say this because I was always taught that there is a power in thinking, a weird unspoken law of attraction, we had been warned about as children. You don't know who will notice the light is on.

 This game I feel may not have been completely real but it was addictive and the more we played and thought about ghosts and brought our tarot cards home to tuck under our pillows  like we were told, the more strange things would happen. Even if we weren't talking to a spirit we were calling them out to come to us almost every night and I can't even say it was just at night. I still remember playing with my mother at the dinner table as she took a small break from cooking dinner to see who was there. The more we played the more things in our regular world seemed to break apart.

 It got to the point where we would let my sister cast a spell before each conversation to “lock all evil spirits from the board”. Then some of the spirits, which may have been Xavier specifically, would tell us they were upset or angry if we should ever skip a day leaving us staring at the board uncomfortably. 


We were calling them forward, inviting them in, even if it was just for a silly board game and things weren’t  right anymore. To what extent, I would soon find out. 

Fast-forward to a few weeks later when my parents were going away for the night, my sisters were both gone for some reason as well and I had a boyfriend.  Being a teenager all I saw was the perfect opportunity to make out with him and have fun. 

Now before anyone calls out slut at their screen I married him, so slow down and lets be real, a little kissing never hurt anyone. 

He came over and I had my favorite Bollywood movie playing and we sat down on the couch in the living room  that had a mirror behind it. This mirror was special with a story of its own but basically the rules in our house were to stay away from it especially at night. He came in, sat down and immediately went in for a kiss but it seemed to fall flat almost instantly, then slowly we let go of each other and faced the TV. I was trying to force conversation but the room was starting to feel incredibly stuffy all of a sudden, the air feeling thick and heavy. My head started to ache and I couldn’t think straight when I realized at least 10 minutes had passed and I hadn’t said anything, then I realized I couldn’t stop glancing at the hallway and then back at a tent that had been left up for my niece to play in.

It seemed overly dark in both places I remembered my boyfriend was there next to me again and slowly asked while trying to breathe, "Whats happening?" I felt as if I had been drugged, he didn’t look back at me, he was glancing from the hallway to the tent, back and forth, back and forth, without him knowing that I was looking there too. It felt as if time were skipping moments and I looked again at the hallway and the tent over and over as if there was a person in each staring at me. I looked back to check on him again, telling myself to look out for him and found that somehow without moving he had moved away from me and was leaning in to the mirror. I kept mumbling in a whisper, "No don’t get too close, stop scooting away from me."

 "I'm not," he said wearily slightly quiet his eyes looking like a cats following a pendulum back and forth. My head was splitting, I couldn't take it anymore, I told him I needed fresh air. So he followed me out and instantly my headache alleviated and we both came to our senses.

Speaking to each other at a normal volume again, "I told him its probably in our heads," I was trying to be sensible because it was obvious to me that we were both fine and it seemed silly. He agreed and we went back inside and it all started again. My head ached our eyes gravitated to the same spots in the house and I told him again, "I really feel  like the air is too heavy to breathe in here." With that said he got down on his knees slowly and said, "I remember a prayer from catholic school when I was little."  I thought he was joking and forced out a small laugh as if he was being really weird.

 I just remember as he started to pray it felt like there was a little cloud of air that had formed around him for just a moment.  This frightened me more than the room. We both stared at each other wordlessly for just a moment. Fear slowly crossing both of our faces as  he stood up looked at both spots again and asked for us to go back outside. It was still early the sun hadn't even set.

 I wonder now if his memory about catholic school and the prayer he said had reminded him to fear for his soul. Which I don't think he had ever seriously thought about until that moment. He looked at the outside of my house nervously as if the walls might grab him and told me his mom was probably worried about him, so he was going to call her and go home. 

I knew he was lying but once you get so worried about a situation that you get on your knees and pray, there really is no romantic come back from that. The night we had planned was over.

 We waited out front and he left very quickly into his mom's car without regret. I went back inside only to instantly feel sick, now the atmosphere had become unbearable I couldn’t stay in the living room. I wanted to go into my room which was right next to the hallway but I heard strange shuffling noises coming from inside. I stepped back and walked to the kitchen while watching my bedroom door, when I heard a man's voice humming loudly in my room.

 The fear struck deeper than usual, what had we done, who was here? Was it a real man waiting in my room or the ghost of one. Was this Xavier? All I knew was that I wanted out of this house.
 I called my best friend in a panic and told her what was happening in my room she came to pick me up her mom waiting outside with the car on like a getaway driver. She knew what my sisters and I had been up too and didn't really question it. 

When she arrived I asked her to come with me to get clothes from my room. We held hands and walked in together and of course the light switch didn't work. I could see from the faint light of the doorway that somehow my lamp had become unplugged from the wall. She grabbed the door (my door had a history of slamming shut on its own) while I went in to plug the lamp back in. Once the light was on we realized that my window had been left wide open and she went to close it while I grabbed my clothes. As she was closing it there was suddenly a loud bang as we saw the glass bow out slightly from the inside as if some one had hit it hard in anger, it slid all the way back open from the force. We both startled and looked at each other and that's when I said something strange. "He doesn't like the windows to be closed."

With that we both ran out the door and couldn't be more glad to be in the safety of her mother's car.

A few days later my boyfriend would come back after school only to retrieve and destroy both Ouija boards that we owned. Then later after that my parents would reach out to our local church to tell them what was happening. The church seemed to believe our distress and they came and blessed the house.

We all felt that whatever was in the house that night was something or someone we had called forward, likely just waiting for its turn to speak.

Thanks for reading, have you ever fiddled with a Ouija board?
Feel free to comment, no story is unbelievable here.

Love and Voodoo Dolls.

This last week I couldn't help but reflect on love and in the process remembered this little gem of a memory. How far would you go to get someone else's love and attention? Everyone does strange things sometimes but for my sister the want for someones love and attention made her do something extraordinarily odd.

Everyday my mother would pick my two sisters and I up from school in an old little blue ford sedan. My sisters were both older than me and in high school while I was barely reaching the end of elementary but the back of my mother's car was where all the gossip was told. They would take turns while my mom took the winding neighborhood roads back home telling my mother everything at a mile a minute as she juggled her facial expressions between a look of amusement and concern. Having my sisters let it all out there in her little old car so that it might never make its way to the ears of my father.

On this day as my eldest sister climbed into the car she seemed upset and without little prompting from anyone started telling my mother and other sister that a boy at school didn't want to date her. I guess she went out of her way to talk to this boy because she had become kind of popular at the time and he didn't notice or care for any of her efforts at all. She felt jilted and more than a little irritated because according to her he was weird and not even cool. In her own words from the 90's "The kind of guy that writes porn during lunch with his friends", and yes, she actually said that last part. Everything she told us about him was unlikable but she was still angry about the fact that he wasn't pining away after her or striving to bask in her popular glow.

 They all talked about these things as I sat there half listening. I always wondered if they just assumed my ears were auto deleting the overly grown up parts I wasn't supposed to hear. Although it didn't matter much because what little I did take into my brain I would forget about with coming week since none of it held any importance in my world. Either way as the little car pushed forward I placed my face near the window and watched the trees sway wondering if magic was real.
After this I can't recall exactly how it happened while I was going about my business being a kid, I noticed my recently jilted sister spending more time with my father.
(My father, the man who I worry knows more than he will ever say.)

Within the next couple of days I remember him telling her things, things that I remember made me feel like we were in a ghost story. It was all hard to make out but it was something about needing to sew it herself and she was going to need a large jar. Then later I saw them in the kitchen sewing what looked like a creepy lumpy doll out of all white fabric. It was hard to hear what they were saying I can't remember if they were whispering or not anymore but every word seemed to be spoken in a way that gave you the feeling the speaker wished their words had never been said.

  Then the next day after school they buried it in the backyard.

Whatever it was, voodoo or other wise that white lumpy doll went in the jar and was buried underground. I saw them from the back of the kitchen and stayed out of the way, out of sight although I don't think it would have mattered if they had seen me.
I didn't ask any questions, this was not the strangest thing I had seen in my house and Power Rangers were probably on the t.v. After that I just remember, this high school boy came out of nowhere and my sister instantly had a boyfriend. This usually would have been unnoticed if it wasn't for his odd behavior, he was just all over her. When they were together we would see him gazing at her intensely for long periods of time buying her flowers, trinkets and stuffed animals. Later I would realize it was him, he was the same boy who didn't like my sister and now he had flipped like a switch, it had worked. It seemed unreal to me as I watched from the sidelines. He seemed so intense that even my mother became worried, so much in fact that she made me chaperone one of their dates.

 (Which I hated at the time but I totally understand now because side note: my super power is killing the sexual tension in any room, any where, any time.)

Anyways soon they were in "love" and he was calling our house incessantly when they were not together. This went on for what I think was 2 weeks or so.

Then early one morning out of the blue he called my sister and said very blatantly that he wanted to break up. I still remember her panicking angrily on the phone while yelling, "So what you just woke up this morning and didn't love me anymore!"

To which I am a one hundred percent sure his answer was simply "yes." The phone call ended pretty quickly since he didn't seem to want to talk much to her about it and she grabbed some of the things he gave her and broke them belligerently while crying. When after running out of things to tear apart or break it seemed to occur to her that she had forgotten something important. She immediately went outside and started digging in the soft recently overturned soil of the backyard. My father went out there a few minutes later and told her to stop digging. To which she replied, "Where is it?," Then he told her that he had already dug it out the night before. She was even more livid and asked again where it was. My father told her he had thrown it away and looking solemn told her something like, "Honey its time." Telling her that he had let this go on for too long and that now she knows if he really loves her or not.

I remember thinking to myself, this is real magic not dainty fairies and pixie dust but crudely sewn dolls that can make you feel things that are untrue to yourself. It was disheartening to think that someone could make you feel lies and there would never be a rescue because who would think to look for freshly turned soil when you were acting strange. That and something about that doll never seemed right as it sat in that stuffy noiseless jar underground. I am glad its gone and that boy can go back to not liking my sister.

I will end the memory there since this is kind of a weird story on its own.

So there it is, love. Love makes you do crazy things.