Author’s note: After last week’s story of a Ouija board encounter gone wrong, a “From the Shadows” reader contacted me with a story of his own.
Kindred walked into his older sister’s house one weekend night in January 1979, his senior year in high school, to find his sister, her boyfriend, and a few cousins around the kitchen table, some sitting, others standing.
He had no idea what the night would bring.
“All (cousins) were female, all in their early and late teens,” he said. “No real significance, although I now wonder if an overwhelming female presence influenced events that followed.”
Kindred’s cousin Dianne waved him toward the table.
“Check this out,” she said.
As Kindred stepped to the table, he saw something that sent fear through him.
“I was taken a little aback,” he said. “Coming from a Christian background we were all told not to mess with Ouija boards.”
But they were, and Kindred joined the game.
“Are you dead or alive,” someone asked, the plastic, triangular planchette skittering across the board. The group asked the question again and again as the planchette indicated a different spirit had joined the conversation.
“It would go to each letter, stop at each letter, and spell out ‘dead’ or ‘alive,’” Kindred said.
Cousin accused cousin of moving the planchette, but everyone denied it. The group would soon find no one in the room – no one living – had moved the triangle.
“A whimsical remark angered whatever was there and one leg of the widget caught on the end of the board,” Kindred said. “Everyone lifted their fingers off the widget and (it) quickly moved across the table top.”
Although frightened, no one wanted to stop the session.
“Curiosity had gotten the best of us all that night,” Kindred said.
Simple yes or no questions made way for more complex queries, like “what are you?”
“We would get answers back such as rabbits, cows, snakes and people we knew that said they were asleep but communicating with us,” he said.
Then whatever communicated with them began to get too close.
“One upsetting moment when going through the list of questions, it said it was by the cliff,” a landmark on the property, Kindred said. “Then by our corrals, then crossing the creek. The procession was towards us – and fast. Finally it said it was outside in the yard, wanting to come in.”
As the group hovered over the board wondering what to do, someone stood, peeled back the kitchen curtain and looked outside. A dog stood in the yard, staring at the house. It was Kindred’s parent’s dog Choco, who would have had to cross those landmarks to reach the house.
“That was pretty freaky,” Kindred said.
Fueled by tension, imagination and adrenaline, the group continued to work the board – then something happened.
“These routine sessions of questions and answers were suddenly broken,” Kindred said.
The board randomly spelled out “purple,” which confused everyone in the room. But when the board spelled “Newtown ND” and “Samantha,” Kindred realized the board targeted him. An ex-girlfriend named Samantha he’d always associated with the color purple lived in Newtown, N.D.
“It was all very startling to me,” Kindred said. “It was as if this universal conscience or entity somehow focused on me and brought up knowledge only I knew, and these were things that were not on my mind at all, at the time.”
The most disturbing event while the group sat in that kitchen, watching the plastic planchette skitter from letter to letter by its own power, didn’t occur in that house.
“While we used the board, my cousin’s mother kept getting phone calls from a little boy claiming he was her abandoned son,” Kindred said.
The voice told her he was calling from a pay phone from nearby Lander, Wyo., and wanted her to pick him up at the 7-11 there.
“Of course, she was clueless and took it as prank calls,” Kindred said. “She would know if she had a baby and had abandoned it anywhere.”
As soon as she hung up the telephone, the little boy would call back – then the “prank” turned into horror.
“The most terrifying thing for her was on the last of these several calls when the little boy’s voice morphed into a man’s voice as he was talking to her,” Kindred said. “Very, very, creepy.”
Although the telephone calls stopped after that, and the group put up the board and everyone went home for the night, the Ouija board experience has stayed with Kindred for 32 years.
“I do not encourage any one to experiment with a Ouija board,” Kindred said. “That night was the only and last night any of us ever engaged in (one).”
Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”
Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
The Ouija Board Spelled 'Join Me in Hell'
The night of terror began with a few drinks.
“It was just another night out with our group of friends,” Toni said. “We had all been drinking so we decided to go to our friend Brittny’s house.”
The idea of using a Ouija board had picked at Toni’s mind for the past three days so, as the group of friends sat at Brittny’s house, she brought it up.
“I had been wanting to play around with a Ouija board just for the hell of it,” she said. “Since we were all drunk and my older brother knew how to make a pretty nifty homemade Ouija board, we all thought it was a great idea.”
The friends soon discovered it was not.
After an opening prayer, the friends began their Ouija session.
“We started off with me and my brother’s hands on the triangle (planchette) we had cut out,” Toni said. “We warmed it up by spinning it in a circle for about 40 seconds.”
Once they stopped spinning the planchette, Toni’s brother asked the first question.
“Is there any spirit with us now?”
Tense moments past and nothing happened. Toni’s friend Taylor shouted something sarcastic and the planchette shot to the word “yes” on the top corner of the board.
“At first, I truly believed it was my older brother,” Toni said. “I was wrong.”
Very wrong.
Toni and her brother took turns with others in the room, and eventually the messages grew dark.
“We switched people maybe about eight times before it really started getting frightening,” she said. “All together, we had let nine spirits into the room.”
Messages from the board claimed the spirits of six women and three men were in the room. Then the questions began to flow, like, “Did any of you kill yourselves?”
They did.
“It answered with a ‘three,’” Toni said. “We then asked them how. G for gunshot, H for hanging.”
For the first answer, the planchette moved to X, but the next rested on H. Then something happened that pulled a blanket of fear over the group.
“We heard soft banging as if someone had just hung themselves and their feet were gently hitting the wall,” Toni said. “We asked the spirit who had made the banging noise to speak. We asked him why he killed himself and he spelled out ‘wife.’”
Had his wife been murdered?
“No.”
How did she die?
“Devil.”
“We asked if the devil made him do it and the triangle moved to ‘Yes,’” Toni said. “We asked if he hated women and he spelt out ‘all of them.’”
The room grew silently tense as the planchette skittered across the homemade board, broken only by heavy breaths and the occasional brave question.
“We asked if he wanted to harm any of the girls in the room and the triangle moved to ‘yes,’” Toni said. “We asked how and he spelt out ‘fire.’”
Then the planchette quickly moved from letter to letter, repeatedly spelling “maim.”
“Then one of the candles we had fell to the floor and hot wax got on my leg,” Toni said. “Or at least I thought it was hot wax. It turned out to be a pretty deep cut. I don’t know where it came from.”
Despite the injury, the friends kept playing.
“There were a few people in the room who were scared,” Toni said. When asked, the Ouija board identified each one.
The last people to use the board were Toni’s brother and Brittny. Facing each other, the two spun the planchette and began asking questions.
“I wasn’t scared until the last session with the board,” Toni said. “This time, we were dealing with a demonic spirit; an angry demonic spirit.”
Toni’s brother asked, “are you evil or good?”
The board signified evil.
“We all laughed and my brother began asking more questions,” Toni said.
Taylor screamed, “We needed to put it away and stop (messing) around with it.”
The group, focused on the spinning planchette, ignored him.
“We asked the demonic spirit if it wanted to hurt anyone in the room,” Toni said, and the planchette spelled “HAT.” Taylor was the only one wearing a hat.
“My brother asked him to point the triangle at who he wanted to hurt and it went straight to Taylor,” Toni said.
Taylor shot from his seat and screamed an expletive; then he moved to another part of the room. The point of the planchette followed him. The board spelled that Taylor was cursed.
“We asked more questions but the answers were too confusing for us to understand,” Toni said.
The next few answers weren’t.
“The Ouija board spelt out my father’s name,” Toni said. “This part made my heart stop because my dad truly is a (messed) up being.”
Toni’s brother asked why the board was interested in their father.
“It slowly spelt out ‘deal with devil,’” Toni said. “My brother asked to be more specific and it spelt out ‘no work.’”
Their father is technically disabled and “gets free meds and money from the government.”
Then the planchette started spinning, resting briefly on the board’s roughly written letters.
J. O. I. N. M. E. I. N. H. E. L. L. P. A. D. …
“My brother flipped the board before it could finish spelling our last name,” Toni said.
Toni’s brother and Brittny released the board, and destroyed it, along with the paper they used to write the messages. Then they burned the remains.
“After that night, I will not touch a Ouija board,” Toni said. “I now know how serious the Ouija board is.”
Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”
Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.
“It was just another night out with our group of friends,” Toni said. “We had all been drinking so we decided to go to our friend Brittny’s house.”
The idea of using a Ouija board had picked at Toni’s mind for the past three days so, as the group of friends sat at Brittny’s house, she brought it up.
“I had been wanting to play around with a Ouija board just for the hell of it,” she said. “Since we were all drunk and my older brother knew how to make a pretty nifty homemade Ouija board, we all thought it was a great idea.”
The friends soon discovered it was not.
After an opening prayer, the friends began their Ouija session.
“We started off with me and my brother’s hands on the triangle (planchette) we had cut out,” Toni said. “We warmed it up by spinning it in a circle for about 40 seconds.”
Once they stopped spinning the planchette, Toni’s brother asked the first question.
“Is there any spirit with us now?”
Tense moments past and nothing happened. Toni’s friend Taylor shouted something sarcastic and the planchette shot to the word “yes” on the top corner of the board.
“At first, I truly believed it was my older brother,” Toni said. “I was wrong.”
Very wrong.
Toni and her brother took turns with others in the room, and eventually the messages grew dark.
“We switched people maybe about eight times before it really started getting frightening,” she said. “All together, we had let nine spirits into the room.”
Messages from the board claimed the spirits of six women and three men were in the room. Then the questions began to flow, like, “Did any of you kill yourselves?”
They did.
“It answered with a ‘three,’” Toni said. “We then asked them how. G for gunshot, H for hanging.”
For the first answer, the planchette moved to X, but the next rested on H. Then something happened that pulled a blanket of fear over the group.
“We heard soft banging as if someone had just hung themselves and their feet were gently hitting the wall,” Toni said. “We asked the spirit who had made the banging noise to speak. We asked him why he killed himself and he spelled out ‘wife.’”
Had his wife been murdered?
“No.”
How did she die?
“Devil.”
“We asked if the devil made him do it and the triangle moved to ‘Yes,’” Toni said. “We asked if he hated women and he spelt out ‘all of them.’”
The room grew silently tense as the planchette skittered across the homemade board, broken only by heavy breaths and the occasional brave question.
“We asked if he wanted to harm any of the girls in the room and the triangle moved to ‘yes,’” Toni said. “We asked how and he spelt out ‘fire.’”
Then the planchette quickly moved from letter to letter, repeatedly spelling “maim.”
“Then one of the candles we had fell to the floor and hot wax got on my leg,” Toni said. “Or at least I thought it was hot wax. It turned out to be a pretty deep cut. I don’t know where it came from.”
Despite the injury, the friends kept playing.
“There were a few people in the room who were scared,” Toni said. When asked, the Ouija board identified each one.
The last people to use the board were Toni’s brother and Brittny. Facing each other, the two spun the planchette and began asking questions.
“I wasn’t scared until the last session with the board,” Toni said. “This time, we were dealing with a demonic spirit; an angry demonic spirit.”
Toni’s brother asked, “are you evil or good?”
The board signified evil.
“We all laughed and my brother began asking more questions,” Toni said.
Taylor screamed, “We needed to put it away and stop (messing) around with it.”
The group, focused on the spinning planchette, ignored him.
“We asked the demonic spirit if it wanted to hurt anyone in the room,” Toni said, and the planchette spelled “HAT.” Taylor was the only one wearing a hat.
“My brother asked him to point the triangle at who he wanted to hurt and it went straight to Taylor,” Toni said.
Taylor shot from his seat and screamed an expletive; then he moved to another part of the room. The point of the planchette followed him. The board spelled that Taylor was cursed.
“We asked more questions but the answers were too confusing for us to understand,” Toni said.
The next few answers weren’t.
“The Ouija board spelt out my father’s name,” Toni said. “This part made my heart stop because my dad truly is a (messed) up being.”
Toni’s brother asked why the board was interested in their father.
“It slowly spelt out ‘deal with devil,’” Toni said. “My brother asked to be more specific and it spelt out ‘no work.’”
Their father is technically disabled and “gets free meds and money from the government.”
Then the planchette started spinning, resting briefly on the board’s roughly written letters.
J. O. I. N. M. E. I. N. H. E. L. L. P. A. D. …
“My brother flipped the board before it could finish spelling our last name,” Toni said.
Toni’s brother and Brittny released the board, and destroyed it, along with the paper they used to write the messages. Then they burned the remains.
“After that night, I will not touch a Ouija board,” Toni said. “I now know how serious the Ouija board is.”
Got a scary story? Ever played with a Ouija board, heard voices, seen a ghost, UFO or a creature you couldn’t identify? Let Jason know about it: Jason Offutt, P.O. Box 501, Maryville, Mo., 64468, or jasonoffutt@hotmail.com. Your story might make an upcoming installment of “From the Shadows.”
Jason’s newest book on the paranormal, “Paranormal Missouri: Show Me Your Monsters,” is available at Jason’s blog, from-the-shadows.blogspot.com.
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