Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

My senior year of high school in 199-, I used to spend almost half my day in the basement art rooms – the art teacher was extremely easy going, and my friends and I had three class periods in a row we could stay down there: crafts, study hall, and lunch.  Our favorite activity at this time was the Ouija board.  We used to make them of paper and use a tape roll as a planchette.  They were extremely effective and powerful.  During this period, I never used one outside of the school, or frankly, outside of those rooms in the school, so I’m still not sure to this day if it was the place or the people that was so attractive to spirits of all kinds.

I have a lot of stories from this period – especially about our experiences with the sad female ghost in the theatre of the school, but the incident that I’m going to share this time was the breaking point for me with the Ouija board, and may be a cautionary tale for others.

Generally there were four of us on the board, but we used it in all possible combination of those four people, and with other friends, and had equal success.  At the time, I was totally fascinated with the Lizzie Borden story- I had a theory about the murder, and was writing a play about it, based on an earlier monologue I’d won some awards for in junior high.

One day, I was sitting by my friends doing some stupid math homework while they were on the board.  They didn’t want to speak with anyone specific that particular day (we had several spirits we spoke to very often) and so they asked if there was anyone there who wanted to speak with us.  They got a yes.

LET ME TALK TO THE RED ONE, the board said.   I’m a red-head, but so was my other friend. Since I was not touching the board, she assumed it was her.  NOT YOU.  THE OTHER ONE. BITCH. And then it spelled my name.

Um, yeah. No thanks. It actually wasn’t too unusual for the board to acknowledge the absence of someone not actively touching it, asking after friends who were sick or gone.  But I was not about to touch the board with an introduction like that.  I refused, and the planchette became agitated, spiraling all over the board. I asked who it was, and it said, YOU KNOW ME.  BITCH.

I denied it, and it spelled out EMMA B.

OK.  I started to get a sinking, excited feeling in my stomach.  I don’t remember at this point what it said next, or how it let me know that it really was representing to be Emma Borden, Lizzie’s older sister, but that’s who this entity was claiming to be.

What you have to understand is that in the piece I was writing, I had turned the original story around and Emma was the person who actually murdered their parents.  (I still do believe that she was at least a co-conspirator- but that’s beside the point.)  From the stream of profanity and abuse that she spewed at me, I gather she was not cool with my version of events.  My friends on the board were totally confused by this whole conversation; none of them knew I was writing anything or had ever seen any of it.  I actually kind of got excited and started asking questions, sort of ignoring her hostility.

LIAR. I LIKE BEING DEAD.

And this is when I started to really freak out. This statement was directly in response to something I’d written. She started quoting to me from the play. I didn’t know what to think.  Nobody’d ever seen it, I’d never even talked about it.

I WILL LIVE THROUGH YOU She says to me, and I’m so dumb that I think maybe she’s talking about the words I’d written.   Until: YOU ARE WEAK.  I WILL BECOME YOU.

So, now I’m begging them to stop this conversation, but she manages to say this a couple more times, insinuating that she’s going to take over my body.  They finally manage to get control enough to firmly say Goodbye and properly close down the board. Spirits had threatened to kill us before (a dumb, empty threat- really, don’t believe them) but never take one of us over; we were all shaken. We never used it again- if I recall, I soaked it in water in the paint sink until the paper turned pulpy.

For the next few days, I was nervous and paranoid.  Was I weak? What would happen? I was kicking myself up and down – I mean, I really should have known better than to get myself involved in the Ouija. I was explicitly forbidden by my parents.  The irony this time was that I wasn’t even USING the board!

I was really lucky, it proved to be an empty threat. It was toying with me.  But holy cow, did I learn my lesson.  I was really lucky to escape that period without serious repercussion. I think I wasn’t as vulnerable as some people – I was scared, but I didn’t give into it; I got mentally vigilant instead. I wasn’t depressed or imbalanced, and  My childhood home rejects negative energy- I grew up in a place that I do not think evil could tolerate. It radiates welcome. One hundred and twenty years of love and hospitality have soaked the walls; people walk in for the first time, raid the fridge and lie down on the couch. More people than those who grew up there call it home.  I knew I was protected there.

And here are my parting thoughts on this story: I’m not telling you that I really talked to Emma Borden- who knows what that entity really was?  They can tell you anything, represent themselves as anybody.  It might have been a chaotic spirit that was never human at all.  You cannot believe them.  What scares me to this day about it is that somehow, it tapped into my thoughts and knew such strange things about me.  I knew at this point that the spirits were capable of affecting things on a physical level- we’d often watched a spirit follow through on a promise to “make something happen.”   But I had not fully realized the extent to which they were capable. On the other hand, I’m not going to say that every entity I communicated with was evil, either.  But I don’t recommend it.

As you can imagine, I never did finish that play.

Sent in by “Honeychurch”, Copyright 2009 TrueGhostTales.com