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Experiences With The Ouija Board (IHTM)

Mark, I really do get the point you are making but I can only speak personally, the four of us are agreed that we had no 'conscious' knowledge of E of A. Now, I imagine that masses and masses of info is picked up on a subliminal level, so may be you are right. But I repeat, had there been a big money prize to the information that was given (whether correct or not) none of us could have 'pulled on' that information. We could have hazard a guess but even then having discussed it in great detail, none of our guesses would have been anywhere near.
 
Well I spoke to my friend John yesterday about his experience when he was younger and his approach to the incident has changed completely. He said that in his opinion there was nothing strange going on - he said that there was certainly one person moving the glass and probably more. When I asked him to explain how it carried on moving when everyone else had dropped out he said that it never happened. He said that when they got down to the last 2 people nothing else happened and then he left and went home. His version is totally different to the one I was given by a girl who was present. When the actual incident took place he told me that something was moving the glass other than him and that was all he would say. I don't know how to explain the change in his story - maybe he just changed it in his mind as a defence mechanism. Maybe the girl I spoke to was bullshitting and nothing really happened - perhaps I have gotten myself confused and really John told me that nothing paranormal actually happened? I don't know. I must say I was disappointed at his response - I was hoping for something more substantial.
 
There is a thread here somewhere were false memories are discussed. Would have a look but am at work again and haven't got enough time. Where people remember how something happened and they are 100% sure, just to find that others have either changed their mind or remember the whole thing differently.
It could be that because you are more interested in this, you remembered it the way it was, whereas the friend has meanwhile changed his memory to fit in more with his opinion. He might not have done this deliberately but subconsciously so that he thinks he was "rational" all along, whilst you remember that he wasn't!
 
Dingo667 said:
There is a thread here somewhere were false memories are discussed. Would have a look but am at work again and haven't got enough time. Where people remember how something happened and they are 100% sure, just to find that others have either changed their mind or remember the whole thing differently.
It could be that because you are more interested in this, you remembered it the way it was, whereas the friend has meanwhile changed his memory to fit in more with his opinion. He might not have done this deliberately but subconsciously so that he thinks he was "rational" all along, whilst you remember that he wasn't!

I know what you are saying regarding false memories. I have one that I still find it difficult to believe is not real. I have two older brothers and I have heard them both tell a story of an incident that happened when we were kids so many times that I have convinced myself that I was there. In my minds eye I can see exactly what happened and even see the faces of two strangers that were involved in the incident. Yet my two brothers assure me that I was not there when it happened. They are so adamant that I was not there that I have to believe them. But I still have the memory as clear as day.
 
TommyK13 said:
...He said that in his opinion there was nothing strange going on - he said that there was certainly one person moving the glass and probably more.
Not to decry what the original poster is describing, but the only occasion I was involved in an Ouija session, even though I was there in ernest the other two other particpants were moving the glass. It was fairly crummy of them but that was what they were like.

However, there followed (not during the session, but immediately after) a paranormal encounter that I experienced and they did not, which, when the time is right, Ill recount here.

I cant help but think that there is artifice at the heart of most Ouija sessions, but having said that, I feel from my experiences that ghosts, spirits, whatever, hauntings, do happen.
 
GAH! people DONT play about with them boards PLEASE,
what you can unleash is nasty nasty nasty :evil:
 
BIg_Slim said:
GAH! people DONT play about with them boards PLEASE,
what you can unleash is nasty nasty nasty :evil:
In your humble opinion surely?

The Ouija board was once a popular and widely sold parlour game.

Any danger IMHO stems from the susceptibility of users.
 
True, Arthur, but only people who are susceptible are likely to use them! ;)

We had a lot of fun with them years ago but I don't think our little group was actually contacting the dead. Something much more dark and complicated was going on. I wouldn't do it again.
 
When some friends and I mucked about with a board years ago, I was totally moving the glass (nope I never confessed). At the same time, I don't know where half the stuff I was spelling out came from, and there were enough weird bangs and knocks in my bedroom afterwards to teach me a lesson (even if it was only my susceptible guilty conscience manifesting ;))
 
escargot1 said:
True, Arthur, but only people who are susceptible are likely to use them!
Glad you added that little winking smilie, I mean you might as well have added gullible too :lol: I am neither susceptible or gullible and to be quite honest just find the whole thing fascinating, whatever is actually going on.

As already said ArthurASCII is right it does depend on susceptibility and vulnerability of the people using the board. I being totally unphased and of sound mind will continue in my endeavours to find out what is going on when we use 'the board' :shock:
 
Last year in another Ouija thread on here, I mentioned how myself, family, and friends have gotten the Ouija board out from time time and had some unexplainable messages comes through, but also lots of nonsense too.

Also, last year, I did a blindfold test to see what happens when the users can't see the letters on the board. Not one coherent word was spelled out...it was all gibberish. While I am not saying the Ouija board does or does not contact the dead ( I can't say for sure) I can tell you that it will not spell understandable words if you cannot actually see the letters. Try it.
 
Erm...

Not really sure of what I'm saying here, but the entities being contacted seem to need a physical connection to the glass through the participating members fingers in order to move the glass. Perhaps they also need to see the board through the participants eyes to know which letters to move to?

Maybe?

:?
 
I used one years ago with some friends from school. We were in my bedroom and had set up a temporary one using scrabble letters and a wine glass. The usual stuff happened initially until we got something that moved the glass extremely slowly. We asked it to speed up a bit and the glass suddenly shot across the board and shattered.

Everybody left after that and we didn't touch it again.
 
I only ever tried it once but wouldn't again. It was when I was much younger and pregnant with my first. I went next door with 3 of the other neighbours and didn't really believe in it, but wondered if I could concentrate and make it spell Gavin as that's what we had chosen if I had a boy.
There was just a classic board with letters and yes and no and we used a glass. I could feel like an electric shock when we all touched it and the siamese cat began wailing and running around the room .
I really tried to influence it but I couldn't and then it spelled out Karen which we had chosen if it was a girl. After that it was just gibberish.
That night I woke to feel like something was pressing on my chest and that was enough to decide not to try it again.
The neighbours apparently continued with it but had some very negative experiences so I heard later. Don't know if it had anything to do with it but all their marriages later broke up.
 
I should have one around here somewhere. In elementary and middle school I played with the ouija many times without any repercussions. Mostly we got gibberish, which the mother of a friend of mine could make into some kind of sense using anagrams, but even at 11 I thought that was pushing it.

The only time it upset me was the time I was working it with my brother and he asked "Who does Peni 'like'?" and it spelled out the name of the boy who bullied me. Sort of; it spelled the last name wrong. My brother wouldn't cop to consciously pushing it, but did confess to mentally repeating the name constantly during the process. I believed him partly because it was the sort of thing he did and partly because my brother couldn't spell worth a dang. And partly because I really, really hated this guy (with good reason). Possibly one reason I never got spooked by it was that I had this early experience to assure me that, however it worked, it was reacting to the people at the board, not to invisible entities.

As I got older people would tell me their spooky stories and warn me that ouija was "of the devil." But then, I did live in the land of the Fundamentalist Calvinist! And their arguments always had glaring logic flaws. Like, the kid who told me the ouija told his big sister she'd be in a car crash, and then she was, blamed the ouija for the car crash instead of crediting it with foresight, and thought I was an idiot for suggesting that a benevolent desire to warn her so she wouldn't have the crash was also a logical possibility.
 
Anyho ... my experience of ouija.

Well, Me, me wiffee of the moment, and a mate were chatting one night, as it happens, in and about the house I thought was haunted, but had just suffered an earthquake, as retold on the 'it never happened to me' thread. (or some where similar) We had established that there were no spooky going ons in the house by then, but we had watched some freaky horror film, that featured a Ouija. Can't remember the film, sorry. We were chatting about trying a Ouija, and if it was in the mind or, dum, dum, dum, something else. My ex suggested that if there was anything in it, we should be able to make our own Ouija as, obviously, someone had made the first one ever for themselves.

So we used the back of a dart board.

Well, we did all the spooky things you could think of to set the atmosphere, whilst XXX wrote the alphabet on the board, we had candles, incense, a pair of black cats (real ones!), bit of Portishead in the background.

We called the spirits. Something along the lines of 'Oh spirits, please hear us, we implore your council'. Then the cats started to spit. The glass we were using on the board started to jerk. A candle fluttered out.

Well, we should have made sure that the tea lights were all newish. And the back of the dart board was made of very chippy wood. And the cats hated each other.

But...at the time, it freaked the hell out of my mate. She was supposed to stay the night, but we had to spark her the cab fair home. (One side of Leeds to the other was a twenty five quid fair in those days, hate to think what it would be now!) Me n XXX tried to calm her down, mostly as coughing up the cab fair was an issue for all of us. But she never visited us in that house again, and is still reluctant to talk about it. It could be down to shame for being a wuss.
 
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When I was little 2 couples (about the same age as my parents) in our road got together over an ouija board - this was the late 60's. My Mum has only said a few things about this that I know about, and she was not there. Of the 2 couples who were there both went on to divorce, the daughter of one couple developed epilepsy soon after. A son and the daughter of the other couple have both had serious mental health issues all their adult lives. There was one other person there, a teenage boy who'se parents were not there. Apparently he was thrown by some unseen force from one room (presumably the room where it was taking place) into another. He was killed in a car crash the same year.
So although the fortean & unknown interest & fascinate me, I have grown up with the thought that Ouija = bad and would never have a go myself or encourage anyone else to.
I do realise of couse that divorce is common and so is mental health problems.
But if it is true about the lad being thrown like that , it is enough to put me off :shock:
 
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I'm very much another "nothing interesting ever happens" person, despite a long interest in these things.

I had a go with a ouija board once when I was a teenager, though my recollection of the experience is somewhat fuzzy. There were four of us, and I remember the glass moved a bit, though I don't think it made much sense. I'm certain I didn't move it as I was almost too drunk to actually put my finger on the glass in the first place, but I don't know whether anyone else was in a better state and was messing with the rest of us. I have a hazy recollection of us all getting a bit spooked, and then just going off to drink more, so I don't think anything much came of the experience.
 
I played with a Ouija board maybe 2 dozen times when I was 10 or 12. It "gave answers" but never let any demons through from the other side or anything (well, wait...maybe that would explain some things about my little sister....). I agree it seems to be a tool to focus or toy with one's unconcious, for what its worth I think they're harmless & wouldnt be afraid to try one again.

I like the idea that toying with such things might open one to "influences" or "aspects of universal mind" or whatever. I believe there is something out there but don't know of any credible evidence that it's ever harmed anyone.
 
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! :roll:
 
Thanks James, I'm currently on holiday so have downloaded the book to read in the warm Cornish evenings....the wife thinks I've gone cuckoo!
 
A friend and I messed around with a home-made one back in the 80s when we were teenagers. It got a bit addictive, which I found interesting. I totally made up all the messages we received but then it got to a point that I couldn't say quite where the messages I was making up was coming from.

Cue a few odd knocks in my bedroom where nothing could've knocked and my friend and i ended up with an awful case of paranoia for a few weeks (to the point where, embarrassingly, we actually asked a local evangelical church leader to pray for us :oops:).

We then got an awful lecture from a slightly older friend who swore blind playing with a ouija board caused some freaky shit to happen to him and his girlfriend: haunting himself, things flying off shelves. He seemed very earnest and was very cross with us.

I am now at the point where I find even the look of them sh*t scary.
 
AsamiYamazaki said:
A friend and I messed around with a home-made one back in the 80s when we were teenagers. It got a bit addictive, which I found interesting. I totally made up all the messages we received but then it got to a point that I couldn't say quite where the messages I was making up was coming from.

Cue a few odd knocks in my bedroom where nothing could've knocked and my friend and i ended up with an awful case of paranoia for a few weeks (to the point where, embarrassingly, we actually asked a local evangelical church leader to pray for us :oops:).

We then got an awful lecture from a slightly older friend who swore blind playing with a ouija board caused some freaky shit to happen to him and his girlfriend: haunting himself, things flying off shelves. He seemed very earnest and was very cross with us.

I am now at the point where I find even the look of them sh*t scary.


You had a VERY lucky escape, I hope you know that. You would have been so vulnerable, you'd have been doomed forever. I mean, one minute the local church leader is praying for you and the next you are travelling round the country devoid of any free-will in the Jesus Army's bus. It's how these things happen, beware!
 
We tried using a ouija board at Flamingoland a few years ago and came to the odd realisation the thing talking to us was using 'txt spk', taking out vowels and stuff. The spirit felt very dim, unfocussed. But at one point the glass was moving with my hand alone - I swear on my life it was pulling away from my finger.
 
tonylovell said:
using 'txt spk'
The spirit felt very dim
moving with my hand alone

The clue is in the question ;)
 
I think he's gently joshing you. Saying it was you and that you're not the brightest bulb in the room.
 
We need some fresh ouija board stories! Hasn't anyone had the living daylights scared out of them this year, fer gawd's sake? :D
 
We did home-made one at school. A chair across scraped along the floor. You've never known 4-5 teenage girls to shriek so loud or scarper so fast.
 
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