Then they wouldnt have been able to give any answers at all - but they did. So the spirit, in spite of being blind to the actual board, apparently decided to memorize the board on the spot and answer that way, without mentioning the handicap - very obliging of the notoriously cranky Frawley
Like I’m saying, there was no Frawley spirit trying to communicate. But I think there were better ways to prove it than the way Penn & Teller went about it.
Um, yeah, hallucinations are indeed a part of life. Is there any question about that?
What is it about a Ouija board that attracts demons? Does any method of randomly generating letters also attract demons? Rolling dice with letters on them? Drawing cards from a shuffled deck? Opening a random page from a book and picking the first letter on the page? I need to know so I don’t accidentally attract demons when I’m just trying to play Scrabble.
Fair enough. It’s sensible when testing clsims like this to explicitly ask the people being tested if there is any impediment to success, so they can’t invent ad hoc excuses later. If they assure P&T that Frawley says the blindfolds are not a problem, then the reversal of the board shouldn’t have been a problem either.
Maybe they happen a lot where you live, I’ve never known it to happen to anyone, even those dosing on LSD.
You can’t convince someone of something they refuse to believe.
They apparently knew enough Yiddish to recognize Yiddish words.
No, the woman who recognized that there were Yiddish words was the woman who was writing down the letters as they were called out, not one of the two women working the planchette. She wrote the letters as one long single stream, then saw they were several Yiddish words.
Are you seriously arguing that hallucinations don’t exist? Why do we even have the word?
This study of 466 people found that 84.8% of them reported experiencing visual hallucinations. That’s similar to other studies I’ve seen.
I assure you there are hallucinations. Not mental or drug induced.
Seizures give me massive hallucinations. It’s not a mental problem, more mechanical in nature.
(Of course I’m nuts too, but never mind that)
But most people agree that birds exist. I’ve seen photographs of birds.
Agreed. I don’t believe we can communicate with the dead, but if we could, I don’t see why a ouija board, whether or not you call it a “toy,” would be a particularly implausible way of doing so.
Did they ever attempt to find a translation for the supposed Yiddish words? I realize it happened in those dark, primitive days BI (Before Internet) so it’s not like they could just bring up Google Translate on their phone- something like that would have taken some research back in the day.
I believe @SuntanLotion is a religious person.
Demons are mentioned in the Bible, but demon possession is not. The Bible says they can inhabit a person or animal (eeek). They can’t own you.
I can’t find whether an object can be ‘demonic’.
The Bible also says if you’re firm in your discipleship demons won’t inhabit you.
I don’t believe a game could cause it. I just don’t.
I was told as a child playing Dungeons and Dragons or watching the Exorcist would put demons in you. I was also told Rock n Roll would turn my brain into mush.
These things have to be taken with a grain of salt (which also chases out demons, btw).
You’re ok @SuntanLotion , you believe how you want.
I was a little kid, so my knowledge is from overhearing it occur, then hearing my mom telling her friends about the experience.
The Yiddish words were just three or four random words. They didn’t mean anything to anyone present, but the two women working the planchette swore they knew no Yiddish. Obviously that’s incorrect and one of them knew a few words.
ETA: given that my mom is gone and it is likely so are the other three women present that day, I’m the sole survivor of a creepy event. Woooooooooooo!
Hallucinations are definitely a part of life. Humans see or hear things that aren’t there – or don’t see/hear things that are there – all the time. Some of them are so common that we don’t notice them – we look down a road and don’t see a car that is there, or see a mailbox with something hanging on it and think it’s a person, or something of the sort. Optical illusions are a sort of hallucination.
All sorts of medical issues can also cause them; including the more drastic versions that you’re probably thinking of.
Having said that: Ouija boards were a fad when I was in college. Some people thought they were just a game, some took them seriously, some were somewhere inbetween. I played them as a game for a while, and then stopped: because I decided there were two possibilities: Either they were just a game, in which case I thought they were kind of a silly game; and while I wasn’t (and am not) opposed to doing silly things in general, I didn’t want to do silly things along with people taking them seriously. Or else something real was going on, whether supernatural or from our collective subconsiousnesses – in which case this was really scary and I didn’t understand enough about it to want to play it as a game.
(I will also give you, for what it’s worth, another game that was going around at the time. One person lies down flat on the floor. Several others sit or kneel around them, and each of the surrounding people puts one finger of each hand – just the finger, not the whole hand – under particular parts of the person on the floor. Simultaneously, everyone tries to lift the person on the floor. I can’t remember whether we chanted something.
I was one of the people lifting. We tried, over and over, to lift the person on the floor by this method. Didn’t work; while there were enough of us to have lifted them if we’d taken hold with our entire hands, we absolutely couldn’t lift them using only two fingers each. Too heavy.
Finally we gave up, in a burst of giggles, and lifted one last time, expecting absolutely that it would not work. Person on the floor went right up as if they were weightless.
We never played that game again; so I certainly can’t claim it was replicable.
Oh, okay. Didn’t catch that from the story
I’ve never understood this mystique that Ouija has, that other similar games don’t. No one thinks that the Magic 8 Ball is communicating with spirits or demons, or that those paper cootie catchers that kids make are anything but play. But for some reason some people take Ouija seriously.
I am not religious. I’m a christian. Jesus was known to have cast out demons.
I know I’m okay, I don’t need to be agreed with on message boards, people will always have differing opinions which Should be freely stated.
I’m not one to get butthurt if Dopers knock my beliefs or pick on me. Anyone that sensitive shouldn’t be posting.
If we all agreed, it would be boring.
As far as anyone can tell just from experiencing it, it just happens without anyone consciously guiding it. As I child, I could not explain it and as an adult, I can only explain it with ideas like ideomotor effect that I understand intellectually but is not something I actually feel.
That doesn’t mean I have any concern that Ouija is supernatural but I do understand the difficulty people have believing it’s not.
the Ouija attracts demons, because …IT’S FUN!!!
Why would you buy the game if it isn’t fun to play?
Magic 8 Ball and the cootie catchers only have 8 (or 16?) possible answers, all of which are known in advance. The only fun is anticipating which of those 8 will be chosen.
But Ouija has the whole alphabet, and infinite possibilities for fun.
I remember enjoying playing with Ouija boards with friends when I was about 12.
But usually it spelled out random letters that didn’t make words.
So we would start over. And over. And over, And over.
And then, just when we were getting bored and about to quit, somehow, we’d get an actual word.
So we’d try again. And again. And again.
Till we got bored again.
But we’d remember the incident when the one-word answer “worked”, and we would talk about it among ourselves the next day.