For a few reasons, Ouija boards are one of my favorite things in the world. I wanted to use the word "favorite toy," but there are some out there who wouldn't like the usage, or at the least disagree with it. Calling them a "decoration" is entirely too reductive, yet straight up proclaiming them as supernatural objects is too incendiary. It may even be something I might not even feel is accurate.
The confusion and uncertainty that it is presenting me in trying to even write about it sort of paints the feeling of why they are so interesting to me and why I love them so much in the first place. They're spiritual talking boards to some, toys to others, portals to hell for the more-excitable religious types, and some combination of that whole mess to people like me.
At entirely too early of an age, my parents allowed my brother and I to watch horror movies. If we were curious, they'd humor us. Some of it was probably, "if you insist," and our fear teaching us some vague lesson, but at the end of the day, I think they were both closeted horror superfans that never had the words for it. They're not so into the genre these days in retirement, but we'd talk about the horror movies they watched as kids all the time when we were all picking out movies at Blockbuster. My dad was a big fan of the Phantasm movies. Or they scared him enough that he told us about them decades later, at least. My mom, of course, told us about the Exorcist. Rewatching with us enticed her to bring home a Ouija board of our own, of course. Not sure what the takeaway is there… but it left a profound impact on me.
Now, most of my experiences with the board, the most terrifying of them, were only somewhat dramatized in my short story Amney written so many years ago. While I am disappointed with some of the characterization choices and the structure of the overall plot (the bitterness of the main character, the lack of tact introducing deaths, etc.) - I do still enjoy the jaunt and none of the experiences with the Ouija board itself are fictional. These all occurred. Some excerpts:
From Amney:
This led to my brother and I spending countless afternoons in the basement, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the dark, peering into the softly glowing, barely visible face of the Ouija board.
My skepticism had never left me and [my brother] was never particularly deft in the craft of manufacturing a storyline and characters of a fictional persona. So, when we began “meeting” otherworldly beings and dead humans through this board game, I was a little bit more than pleased and likewise worried with our findings. Whenever we would ask their names, we would get a handful of random letters that only loosely resembled realistic names. But their backstories would always be spelt with the utmost of tact and grammar. While their names were gibberish, their explanations were perfect. It was a tad unsettling, sitting as the elder in the room.
With all of this apparent fright, let it be known that I was never upset with my younger brother. I did not receive these paranormal readings as malcontent on his part. It just surprised me, at times in pride, at others in fear, that he could move the dial on the Ouija board and spell out entire life stories of people who had lived in the 14th, 18th, and 19th century. How did he, a public school student living in 21st century America, know the politics of Luxemburg? How did he know that women in historical China would have their feet bound? How would he, a boy who had barely begun to pick up the guitar, know what a mandolin was? I could not tell if it was my practical joking getting the best of him and I concurrently or if otherworldly forces were at play. Could this ridiculous board game actually channel… something else? Of course not. I refused to believe it. It must have been something about our subconscious or some other psychological phenomena that I could not explain…
[Later] …But I had not kept tabs on my younger brother. As where I had grown tired of playing with the Ouija board, [he] kept at it with his friends and even, at times, by himself. In the days that we had played with the device, we had “met” an entity known as Xenon. It was a completely ridiculous and unbelievable name, but she was supposedly an Asian immigrant of the Luxemburg storyline that I had previously alluded to. She was a servant of a household in the European micro-nation. She had also played the sitar. How my brother had created these characters, I have no idea. My imagination was certainly not at play and I, even as a younger teenager, truly did not try to disenfranchise the results of the board by creating my own metaphysical stories to frighten my brother.
An important follow-up to this dramatized part of the story, that didn’t fit into the narrative, involves my family going away on vacation. When we had returned, my parents anxiously called my brother and I into the backyard, into the “Florida room” attached to the back of the house. The whole house had been locked down due to our departure and this included the sunroom. It must be noted that there was no way anyone could have gotten into the house, much less a wandering child. My dad, the craftsman, had built the room around a hot tub we had in the backyard for years, so now the jacuzzi was built into the floor of the sunroom. It was a little piece of beach-themed heaven, with one corner of the room featuring a large, leather square on the floor. This was the cover of the hot tub, and when you wanted to get in, you would remove the cover and step down into the floor and into the water.
But when we got home from our trip, and dust had settled in and around the house, and this leather cover wore said dust most prominently. Recall cars in parking lots with the dire pleas of “wash me” etched into their rear windshields. Atop this leather cover were numerous little footsteps, marks and tracings in the dust, as if a toddler had found her way into the room, danced over the platform, and left without opening a door or window (or collapsing into the tub). We had no explanation. But a terrible echo of a thought struck me: how did he know that women in historical China would have their feet bound?
We still talk about that experience today.
With all that said and with all of that terrifying shit out of the way... today, I now collect Ouija boards. They're one of the few things I'll allow myself to hoard and collect in this over-consuming world.
It must be said though, drawing back to my opening words and not knowing exactly how to define what the spirit boards actually are: as with all things paranormal, I want to believe. I just don't know exactly what that looks like.
Nonetheless, I abide by one rule: never use the boards. Ever.
I had gotten that out of my system years ago, and while I cannot really describe or explain what "ghosts" are, or if demons are real, I know that my brother and I made the new-construction house that my family grew up in, haunted. If that's just energy, or actual spirits, or group-psychosis and hysteria, I don’t know... whatever it is, our interactions with these silly things caused it, affecting either my family or the property, or both.
So now, I'll appreciate them for what they are: mass-produced toys and pieces of paranormal history that I'll never interact with... but still keep them safe and admire their artistry.
And the weird energy that they invoke.
