The spirits are guiding me to this classic
I’m an atheist and a skeptic. I don’t believe in anything supernatural.
But I’m afraid to play with a Ouja board.
Scare stories from my mother as a kid, plus being scared shitless by “The Exorcist” has traumatized me against ever trying one. Cowardly? Illogical? Perhaps so.
I just wanted to say that I wouldn’t try one. My feeling is that I’m better safe than sorry.
My husband used one once in high school, somebody told him that you were never supposed to ask a Ouiji Board for a sign. So that’s what he did.
It was already storming outside, but when he asked for the sign a really loud THUNDER hit, and a picture fell off the wall. He and his buddies put the thing away.
(btw, what’s the proper way to say that thunder sentence that I said? haha I’m sure some one will point out that I said it wrong)
I heard a story where someone got freaked out by a Ouija, threw it in the fireplace, and when it burned the person freaked out more because it burned with strange colors. Of course, all varnished wood burns with strange colors…
Ghosts ate my link 
I’m a cynical person with zero belief in the paranormal. However, a couple of incidents in my life puzzle me. One would be my experience with a Ouija.
The Ouija never moved for me, except with one friend, Brenda. Then it talked. It did not convey any very useful or startling information to us, but the Ouija seemed much more clever than Brenda (leading me to doubt that she was pushing it). It answered questions that she didn’t know the answer to, but the answers were sort of half-assed. Examples:
Question from Brenda’s brother: Should I ask a date to the school dance?
Ouija: You must to be cool.
Question from Brenda’s brother: How many pairs of underwear do I have?
Ouija: Lots.
Brenda swore she wasn’t pushing it. Years later, I saw her at a class reunion and asked if she’d been pushing. She didn’t remember anything about us using a Ouija. Surely a true encounter with a non-human intelligence would’ve made a permanent impression on her! But then she really wasn’t very bright.
To give credit where credit is due, the column linked by Garfield226 was written by David B, not Cecil.
And no, Ouija boards are no more supernatural than Trivial Pursuit.
Hey, why is my Trivial Pursuit game floating above the table? Ohmygod, it’s coming at me! AAAAIIIIYYYEEEE!!!
Um, if the pointer is moved by spirits, why do you even have to touch it at all?
And this crap about “involuntary muscle movements”. Bah. Someone is pushing the pointer. No matter what they tell you.
Well, poo. That’s what I get for trying to be quick!
Sorry, David B.
I’ve posted this story before, but here goes again:
True story.
Went to a party in Jr. College and this one woman (I’ll call her Betty) could not get anyone to use the Ouija board with her, so to humor her, I volunteered.
She asked all the questions.
“Will I marry John?”
The Ouija moved to Yes
“How many children will we have?”
The Ouija moved to 30
Betty asked again, “How many children will we have?”
The Ouija moved to 30
Fast forward 20 years. Hadn’t seen any of the old gang in a long time and bumped into a couple of friends from back then.
So how’s so and so and blah blah and, Oh, how is Betty?
“She’s fine. She married John.”
“They have any kids?”
“No…she had three miscarriages and they stopped trying.”
30…three…zero…
I got chills when I heard the story as I remembered the last time I saw her was when we had used the Ouija board.
Take the story for whatever you want…but it is true.
And although I think for the most part it is just a stupid board game, that was one odd coincidence.
I’ve already told this story:
While I don’t have any grandiose theories about Ouija boards and the supernatural, I do have a few good stories, one of which is as follows:
A friend and I were using a Ouija board in his basement. Rather than asking it dumb questions, we were just kind of letting it talk, which it did. As we were doing this, my friend’s parents were upstairs watching TV. They were far enough away that you could just hear the noise of the television without being able to make out what was being said. After getting a bunch of typical gibberish from the board, we finally said, “prove to us that you are intelligent.” The Ouija planchette slowly spelled out the word “bang”. Just after it hit the “g” and paused, a loud burst of machine gun fire was heard from the television show upstairs.
Both of us jumped about five feet vertically when that happened!
-Andrew L
Put me in the camp that doesn’t have much belief in paranormal but still won’t touch things like Ouija boards. In my case, I have had a few very freaky dreams about devils trying to take my soul and stuff like that, which freaked me out enough that I moved over to the “better safe than sorry” group.
I see a lot of people saying “I don’t believe in the paranormal, but… better to be safe than sorry”. But if you don’t believe anything will happen, then what have you to be afraid of? I’ve been questioning my own beliefs in this area, and I’ve come to the conclusion that you cannot possibly rule anything out, until you have proof to the contrary. I’m fairly open minded anyway, and I’m prepared to believe the people who say that ouija boards can be dangerous, or at least give them the benifit of the doubt.
Some people have suggested that you can create a home made ouija board. If you think about it, there is no reason why a home made one would work any different to an “official” one that you buy in a shop. I think the point that the believers would make, is that it is the energy and belief of the people using the board that matters, not so much where the board came from. I’m willing to give this theory a little credit, as it’s hard to discredit something which you know next to nothing about.
The more I think about this, the more curious I become. If you google around a bit, you can find horror stories, and stories about the ouija board being a con, in equal measure. I guess the only way to settle the issue in my own mind, would be to buy or create one and try it for myself.
Anyway, if I start a MPSIMS thread in a week or two, titled “How my hair turned white”, then you’ll know something has gone cataclysmically wrong!
My new friend Captain Howdy says that they’re good, clean fun.
snicker Hehehe…good one.
I can see how people wouldn’t want to use one, if you tend to be very suggestible.
The girl having nightmares while the board was in her room-could just have been the power of suggestion.
Hey, I know horror movies aren’t real-but there are still ones I won’t watch ever because they scare the crap out of me. It’s sort of the same thing, I think.
samarm-
“I’ve been questioning my own beliefs in this area, and I’ve come to the conclusion that you cannot possibly rule anything out, until you have proof to the contrary.”
I don’t want to drag this discussion too far off topic, but I’d just like to point out that this is precisely my philosophy regarding the genre of things that I refer to as “weird stuff”. I have been interested in unexplained phenomena as long as I can remember, and I have always been frustrated by the head-butting between “believers” and “debunkers”. I find both groups to be excessively close-minded – they both tend to think they know the truth, and trying to debate with people in either camp can be like beating one’s head against the wall.
I simply think that unexplained phenomena are interesting. I enjoy researching and theorizing about them, but the fact is that the nature of these things is such that there is rarely sufficient evidence to draw a solid conclusion on a particular case.
People seem to have a need to have a concrete system of beliefs regarding what does and does not happen in our universe. Some people become staunchly religious and use that as their baseline, while others appeal to existing scientific dogma. Both of these, in my opinion, tend to lead to an inflexible and frustrating attitude.
I don’t see what’s so hard, for a lot of people, about admitting that we may not really understand how everything works.
By the way, I don’t want to appear as though I’m bashing the scientific method. I do believe that, by definition of what science is, there is no such thing as “the supernatural”, because there must be some explanation for everything, which, when discovered, will become part of science. I just don’t think that we should try to cram every observation into an existing scientific framework when we really don’t have enough evidence to make a compelling explanation of what happened. It’s good to have some “x-files” lying around. Science is an ever-growing and ever-changing body of knowledge, and that is the spirit in which we should use it.
-Andrew L
Wow. I’m really quite shocked that such a high percentage of SDMB regulars are scared of a child’s game.
This is how Ouija boards work.
Evidently, it’s a VERY good game, because it’s sure fooled a lot of people.
I’ve played with Ouija boards. I’ve played with Ouija boards ALL BY MYSELF (while onlooking friends urged me to BE CAREFUL)
They are plastic and wood pulp in various stages. nyah. Can’t hurt me 
Just wanted to say that was a great post, Andrew. Quite thought provoking.