As a 12-year-old I used to dabble in Ouija sessions with a friend. Those were the days of the Waddingtons board with its smooth suface and cream plastic indicator with felt sliders. I don't remember any particular sessions or messages, though we did freak each other out regularly. We were well aware of the controversy surrounding these boards - the tabloids were full of condemnations by the clergy and stories of dabbling teens who had conjured up demons they could not later banish. I think the campaign resulted in the boards being taken out of the toy departments at stores such as Boots.
I was keen on the idea of communication with spirits and borrowed a lot of books on the subject; the Raudive book Breakthrough about electronic voice phenomena certainly had an impact but my favourite by far was Harry Price's The End of Borley Rectory. I wolfed it down uncritically, wrapped around in its pre-war world of leisured ghost hobbyists when the other side seemed a lot closer than the other half.
Much of the book is taken up by lengthy transcripts of planchette and ouija sessions. I read these at the time with bated breath as a drama seemed to unfold in odd fragments. There was an unhappy nun called Marie Lairre, who may have been walled up or otherwise murdered by one of the Waldegraves. She demanded Light, Masses, Prayers for her soul. The mysterious Fadenoch, who may have been a Father Enoch. The elements of the story may have involved religious persecution, pregnancy, a tunnel between a convent and a priory. These unhappy spirits would give instructions about where to dig for their bones so that a Christian burial would let them finally rest in peace.
The End of Borely Rectory is actually available free online complete but the OCR is uncorrected and the italics of the ouija sessions do not read properly. Finding a hardback copy of the book recently enabled me to revisit those old pages again. The old magic - perhaps predictably - had evaporated. The silly story was so obviously a conflation of every imaginable cliché from gothic fiction that it was hard to believe adults were devoting hours to it. I suppose it made a change from contract bridge.
There was said to be one prediction made during one of these sessions: a Roman soldier spirit with the unlikely name of Sunex Amures promised he would burn down the rectory on a certain date. The rectory was indeed gutted by fire after the prophecy had been published. Given however the screeds of transcriptions - and the existence of others which remained unpublished - it would be surprising if the spirits didn't get something right!
Its evil evil i tell ya!! 
