I had some earlier experiences that may have been supernatural in nature, but far from conclusively so, so the first time it started to become real to me and something that became a significant part of my life was when my friend and I started playing the Ouija board fairly obsessively for a year or two or three in late middle/early high school. We, of course, didn’t intend for it to become such a big thing, but quickly got hooked on it by how uncannily accurate and relevant the responses were that we didn’t have the knowledge to come up with on our own at the time we received them. At first we mainly asked trite questions about our love lives (at the time non-existent outside of fantasies) and the like, but as the answers started to earn the board more and more credibility, we started to dig more into what was on ‘the other side’ and into more serious topics (though, of course, never took the others out of the rotation, we just expanded it). We also dug into the identity of our new ‘friend’ and what their backstory was, and thus, we were formally introduced to F*** P*** W****, who shared among other things, that he had been an American solider who lost his life in the Vietnam War in 1969.

Below are the most validating things, of varying degrees of significance, to happen while we developed this new relationship:

• He shared he had played football in high school and that he had been his team’s running back. My friend and I both visibly deflated at this response out of a shared ignorance that this was a real position. We really only knew of quarterbacks and wide receivers, but even still, it sounded like a made up name to us. It felt like a disappointing hit on its credibility so we put the board away. I learned we were wrong from my father that same night after telling him the story, so I called my friend in flustered excitement and we were back at it the next day. 
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  At some point, we pulled out a deck of cards as a way to test him further. Everything we had tried up until then were things that one of us would have had at least a pretty good guess for the answer, so this was our first idea that eliminated that factor. We drew a card with our eyes closed, then put it face-down and asked him to name it. We hoped for a correct response, but we weren’t truly expecting one. Yet without hesitation he spelled out “two of spades” and then with a lot of hesitation we turned the card over and revealed that he had in fact aced the test. Granted, there is a 1/52 chance that this was a coincidence. There is also theoretically the chance that my friend “cheated” on F***’s behalf, but she has more integrity than anyone I have ever met, so I’d put the odds of this as close to zero as is mathematically possible. I, of course, am fully confident that I did not. Also, there is no faking the level of fear evident both in our eyes and in our immediate screams of bloody murder that were so loud my mom came running into the room out of her own fear we actually were being bloodily murdered. It was nice that she cared enough to come, but she was insultingly mad when she found out we were physically fine. Rude. As a skeptic-ish, she was fine with our potentially communing with demons. At least for the time being.
  
• On another day there was a break from the norm of the board providing at least potentially accurate answers, even if they still always fit the question. Every one given was, or somehow incorporated, either “George” or “Georgia” depending on what best theoretically worked. But even though some of the true answers wouldn’t be known until some point in the future, we did know in these instances that the ones being given to us weren’t then and wouldn’t prove later to be right. For example, while we didn’t know yet where we would end up going to college, there was no chance that either of us would end up at the University of Georgia. So we stopped playing out of frustration and moved on to something else. However, we’d shortly come to view this differently. To spill too much family tea, my dad had recently left my mom with no warning and had refused to provide an explanation for why. 😐 So she was, understandably, distraught being left in the dark and her father went so far as to hire a private investigator so she could come out of it. And a week after this experience with the board, the PI came back with the intel that my dad had left her for a woman named… Georgia. The board might have been more straightforward about it all, but I am inclined to believe this was not a coincidental overlap. 
  
• But the most compelling thing happened after my mom’s frustration reached her breaking point with how scared I had started to be all the time when home, though I still continued to fuel it by continuing to use the board incessantly. Since we lived in Maryland at the time and were conveniently close to D.C., she dragged me there one day specifically to prove it was all nonsense by forcing me to see the absence of his name on the Vietnam Memorial. But the questionably funny joke was on her, as we did find his name in the directory- first, middle, and last- and then undeniably etched for eternity on the beautiful granite wall. And the year of death also checked out. From then on, though she still encouraged us to stop, my mom dropped the argument of it all being of our own manifestation. It is safe to say she had regrets over this field trip.
  • As a tag on note to this, the internet wasn’t a thing back when this was all unfolding, but I have since occasionally googled his name over the years “just to see”. It took a long time to get a hit, but at some point, a high school student had taken on the massive project of creating a website dedicated to memorializing all of the fallen Vietnam soldiers, with each having their own page, complete with a bio and photos. So I found myself staring into the eyes of the man who at least shared the name and fate claimed by the entity we had formed a rather close relationship with maybe 15 years earlier. It feels disrespectful to his family to name him here and/or definitively declare him and the entity to be one and the same (particularly so given the dark turn the entity’s energy would soon take and since there is no way to ever know for sure that it wasn’t a case of identity theft). That said, there was a powerful and piercing quality to his gaze that was unnerving and made me feel it possible, if not probable, that he was who I had “met” long ago. And it illogically felt like he was seeing me as much as I was seeing him. Perhaps more. But perhaps (likely) this was all in my head. 

It was actually immediately after the trip to D.C. that things took a dark turn. I was already in my constantly scared state in my house, but mainly over other things that had happened/were happening outside of the time spent with the board. But though I felt they were potentially, even likely, related, up until then the tone of our direct exchanges with the entity had been very positive and he had reassured us regularly that he was “good”. However, we had early into this journey asked if we could look him up and he had replied with a succinct ‘no’. And there was a dramatic shift in tone as soon as I breached this boundary. Within a week of the D.C. expedition, our now more validated fear finally outweighed the intrigue of it all and we put the board away for good. What tipped the scales was our asking again, out of increasing doubt, if he was good or bad, and instead of the usual “good”, he instead spelled out “define bad”. Which was somehow even creepier to us than if he had directly said ‘bad’. So with that we were finally done. 

As I mentioned, during our run with the Ouija board, I did start to experience other things around the house that blossomed the seed of fear that even our rather positive exchanges with the entity had planted. Even if he was adamant he was good, his existence opened up all sorts of possibilities as more plausible, including his being deceptive on this point, which we never ruled out. I can’t say with 100% positivity that some of these occurrences weren’t products of my imagination or didn’t have other explanations. And if real, I don’t know if the same entity was behind any or all them or if I had simply opened the door and issued an open invite to any who may want to take up residence. These occurrences continued long after we put the board aside so whoever it was had settled in and made themselves comfortable.

The scariest incident, yet likeliest to have a non-supernatural explanation that I just don’t know enough to work out, happened when I happened to be home alone during a rather intense thunderstorm after dark. I usually love these but with everything else going on at the time, on top of being alone, it only added to the ominous atmosphere I already felt in my home. I was trying to suppress my fear for being irrational and focus instead on the TV, but a few things happened near simultaneously that made me lose this battle. First a deep blaring sound- kind of like a low-intensity foghorn- came out of nowhere from an unidentifiable source seemingly from inside the house and I still can’t come up with even a possible theory for what might have made it. It was pretty loud and lasted for maybe 5-10 seconds, and even though I can’t truthfully say it had a ghostly sound to it, I had never heard it before (or after), which automatically made it creepy to me. But to pile on to the moment, it was immediately followed by our power going out for thankfully just the longest 2 seconds of my life, but un-thankfully coinciding with my seeing something dark move across our deck through our glass door. The porch lights of my neighbor’s house that were otherwise in my line of sight remained on, but a dark mass moved past them, temporarily blocking the lamps from view as it did. Their light illuminated the shape from behind it though and it was roughly the height of a shorter-than-average person, but had greater width and a far less defined shape. This was my breaking point and I tore out of my house and down to my best friend’s, thankfully just down the street. And thankfully, my aggressive pounding on her door didn’t scare her off from opening it to me and allowing me entry- it was a sanctuary I was reluctant to leave even after my mom returned home. 

Beyond this, there were two nights that I lay in my twin bed with my back uncharacteristically turned towards the door. I almost always slept in the other direction, so I could keep at least one eye open, until I couldn’t anymore, to watch out for potential threats coming at me from that direction. So I must have been feeling unusually brave on these two nights. But on both, just as I was starting to drift off to sleep, I felt the edge of my bed depress and the presence of someone leaning over me as if to see if I was awake or not. I assumed my mom had decided to check on me for whatever reason and was using the bed as support so she could lean over far enough to see my face and that to do so required that she get more than close enough for me to feel her energy. My body started to naturally roll down along with the new slope of the mattress, but I also intentionally turned my face up as it did to greet my mom. But as is likely easy to guess by now, the only thing I could see was empty space and I could then feel the presence quickly dissipating as my bed returned to flat. It actually had had a maternal feel to it, which was part of why I was so sure I’d see my mom there (not to mention she was the only living possibility in our house at the time). But it was definitely not a negative energy, so it somehow didn’t scare me enough to keep me from sleeping those nights- eventually anyway. But I don’t think I fully processed the experience until a bit later. I can be slow to do so at times. 

But though not as immediately scary as the night of the thunderstorm, what has stuck with me the most since this period happened on a few occasions and always late at night. I am by nature a night person and, during the summer, was consistently up doing my own thing until very late (or very early depending on perspective). I often would sit at our dining room table until 3am, or maybe even 5am on extreme nights, working on whatever project had my attention at the time. Incidentally, this was where my compulsive need to always sit (or sleep) with my back to a wall, whenever possible, originated. I still have this today even when in completely non-scary environments. I never saw anything, but it started to feel like a real possibility that I might, and I wanted as much warning as possible if anything did attempt to get up close and personal. Though I’m not sure what my escape plan was If my fear did come to pass- it’s not like I had a readily accessible priest or a vial of holy water in my pocket to throw at them. 

What I did experience though was hearing voices call my name over and over. They were just faint/distant enough for me to be just unsure enough if it was only my imagination feeding my paranoia to just hold onto enough of my sanity. It often sounded like a chorus of at least two voices, but potentially more, calling my name. The voices were all feminine, with maybe one exception on one night, with one often starting my name before the other had finished. Though sometimes it was just one at a time and I am not sure if it was the same voice over and over or if there were multiple just taking turns. They had a rather sing-song way of saying my name that really emphasized and stretched out its two syllables. Pretty much how a friendly someone might yell for someone else’s attention in a playful way- or like a mom might when standing on a porch calling a child in from down the street when it starts to get dark. 

But then came the one night where I heard one voice start to repeatedly call my name in the same sing-song manner, but this time loudly enough for me to not question the “realness” of it. It sounded close enough to my mom’s voice to again assume it was her. I figured that she had woken up and either was going to lecture me to go to sleep or to ask me to bring her something. So I yelled a “yeah?” back in response but she just continued to call my name as if she hadn’t heard me and thought I hadn’t yet heard her. So I responded each time with increasing volume and frustration that she wasn’t acknowledging me acknowledging her. And after the ~fourth time this happened, I, fully annoyed, ran upstairs and burst into her room with a loud “I’ve been responding to you, what (the f***) do you want?” (with “the f***” part communicated silently only- I have some survival instincts). But then I saw from the rhythm of her breathing that she was sound asleep and could not have been who I had been communicating, albeit poorly, with for the past few minutes. I abandoned my work downstairs and retreated to my room despite being mortified at the prospect of my mom reading in the morning whatever cheesy thing I had left fully displayed on the table. I didn’t feel that much better in my room, but slightly so for the ability to be actually pressed against a wall, entirely blocking off one possible route to me (with the hopeful, but not entirely safe assumption they wouldn’t float through the wall from the outside).

It wasn’t long after this incident that I left for college and fortunately, my invisible “friends” were less interested in higher education and stayed behind. I hope they moved out of the house though for the sake of the next living family who moved in. I’ve never asked them, but I at least haven’t seen the house show up on any of the ghost reenactment documentaries. My fascination with ghosts remains so I’ve seen enough of those to feel a reasonable degree of reassurance over this.  

But though I do still love a good ghost story, I don’t want to star in more than a short one. And I certainly don’t want where I live to be the setting for any. So while I have heard of more extreme ones, I’m still intrigued by all that came out of our Ouija board experience and like telling our stories, but I feel I also learned the hard way that these boards are best left alone. And so I have (mostly).