Why Ouija Boards Are A BAD Idea

I was sort of joking about this when I said it was the 'next post' a few days ago, but what the heck. :)

We all know what a Ouija board is, right? Aside from the general prohibition laid down on Christians to not have dealings with dead spirits, I know from experience that ouija boards are dangerous. You hear all sorts of stories of people who play with them and then they have 'something' in their house. People who get possessed, etc. And I tend to believe them.

Even when I was pagan I wouldn't touch the things. The basic problem is this: there is no way to control who comes through. Mediums and people who have that talent/training can seek a specific spirit. It's still a really bad idea but there's control involved. Ouija boards are giant open channels where any wandering spirit can come up and claim to be anyone it wants. In spite of my admittedly unorthodox opinions on the origin and purpose of the devil I have no doubts about the existence of demons and other evil spirits (whatever their origins) who go about masquerading as human ghosts and then wreaking havoc.

Anyway. I did, once, use a ouija board. And it scared the living crap out of me to the point where it was never a possibility for me to touch one again. I'm uncomfortable being in a house where I know one is. So here's my brief story:

I was probably around 9 or 10 years old. My best friend at the time lived near the harbor and when I stayed over at her house on weekends we could do pretty much whatever we wanted. One of the things we did was run around on the beach. Houses that are near the harbor are nice and expensive. Many of them have huge walls, etc. to keep people out. They're all up on stilts because of floods.

Well, there was this one house that was along those lines. Right on the harbor and very much abandoned. People in this area don't just *abandon* houses. They may be snow birds and not there for half the year, but this was just 'get up and leave everything behind' abandoned. Weird. The story amongst us kids was that there'd been a murder there. I don't know whether or not that was true but that was what we all believed. So of course one weekend a group of us decided that we needed to get into the house.

We did, and we explored. It was a normal enough looking house, but creepy because of what we thought had happened there and, like I said, it looked like the people had just gotten up and left and not even bothered to lock the doors. After a while someone thought that we should try and talk to the ghosts that we assumed were there. So we ran back to my friends house and borrowed her older sister's ouija board.

It was still the middle of the day but we sat down on the floor in the living room area and tried to contact the spirits. For a while nothing happened and then someone started answering our questions. He claimed to have been a trader from back in the colonial times. I mean, we were kids so we didn't really care about 'back in the day'. but it was neat that we had a ghost talking to us! So we kept asking him questions. Eventually one of the boys with us got bored and told the spirit that he was stupid and to go away. The rest of us were sort of horrified, I mean, how often do you get a ghost to talk to you? We demanded that the boy apologize. Out ghost wouldn't respond any more no matter what we asked so we assumed that he had been upset by the insult.

The boy eventually did apologize in that half-hearted, 'I don't really mean it' way that kids have. And then we tried another question. And the planchet started scooting around the board so fast that we almost couldn't keep hold of it and it, I swear to God, spelled out 'I hate you' and then the boy who had been rude got knocked ass over teakettle! One second we were all sitting there and the next he went skidding back on the floor, almost all the way to the wall! And we were all sitting crosslegged, and we could all see everything because like I said we were on the floor and he didn't push himself or anything. He just went *wham*, back, like he'd been shoved. Which is about the time that we all decided this wasn't fun anymore and ran for the freaking hills.

Of course my friends sister was pissed when she found out we'd borrowed her ouija board and made us go back for it. But we were in and out *real fast* and never touched the damn thing again.