At The Skeleton Key: Ghostwriter

LOVED this entry over at K.O.'s blog.

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House Of Nightmares

By nynekats.

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Ouija

Businessman Elijah Bond had the idea to patent a planchette sold with a board on which the alphabet was printed, much like the previously existing talking boards. The patentees filed on May 28, 1890 for patent protection and thus are credited with the invention of the Ouija board. Issue date on the patent was February 10, 1891. They received U.S. Patent 446,054.  Ghosts and the Devil quickly learned the Ouija board opened easy-to-pass-through portals.

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I'd Play With That

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Spirit Board

This isn’t really anything scary. It’s just something that kind of shocked me when it happened. A few months ago, I decided to ask my friends if anyone wanted to do a Ouija board session with me. They were hesitant at first, and some of them outright refused, but a few of them agreed. The first few sessions we did were pretty tame. We got answers, but nothing really got weird. One night, we’re sitting in my dorm room on our college campus playing with the Ouija board. People say that Ouija boards are really just your subconcious giving you answers or that someone in the group is just moving the planchette. I decided to test this, so I asked a question in my head. I didn’t vocalize the question at all or give any indication of what I was asking. After I asked the question in my mind, the planchette moved and spelled out, “time stops.” I immediately took my hand off the planchette and kind of just sat there, a bit shocked because that hadn’t been the answer I was expecting to my question. I was expecting something like “hot” or “cold”. My friends stared at me in confusion and wanted to know what my question was. I had asked, “What’s it like in hell?”



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Vintage Seance

Great animated short by PumpkinKidFilm.
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Ouija

Susy Smith in Confessions of a Psychic (1971) claims that using a Ouija board caused her to become mentally disturbed. In Thirty Years Among the Dead (1924), American psychiatrist Dr. Carl Wickland claims that using the Ouija board "resulted in such wild insanity that commitment to asylums was necessitated."

We owned a Ouija board back when I was in grade school. And I discovered today my family has been mispronouncing the word for decades as WEEE JEEE (supposed to be 'wE-ja'). Though my family is notorious for butchering the obvious.

My sister was usually present at these sessions, so I never fully trusted the board's answers to our spirit-world questions. But watching the planchette float around under our fingers was fun - the tiny needle (a gold nail) answering yes and no questions, and even spelling out names of ghosts in the room.

Us: "Are there any ghosts in the room with us now?"
Milton Bradley Board Game: ".....yes"
Us: "Are you a good ghost or a bad ghost?"
Milton Bradley Board Game: ".....yes"
Us: "IT'S THE DEVIL!"

Enter Satan. So somewhere around 8th grade, my brother and I and a good friend decided to test the evil rumors we always heard about the Ouija board. We had the board and our friend had a camera and a 100 year old bible from his great grandmother. Logic suggested that the two MUST be brought together and photographed, so the photos could be analyzed later (back in the day you had to take your rolls of film to a fotomat and WAIT a week to have them developed).

Our friend kneeled in front of the board and slowly lowered the bible onto the planchette. I snapped wildly capturing every second of the event. And nothing happened - but that's what the spent roll of film was for! And off it went.

Flipping through the envelope of photographs a couple of weeks later was a bust. Nothing. Just our friend lowering an old bible onto a stupid board game. No strange glares or blurs or shadows. Nothing.



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