My most interesting Ouija story: I was playing with some people and we asked it to tell us the birthday of my friend’s mother (a friend who wasn’t playing). Everyone who was touching it claimed not to know the date, and yet the board told us the date. Spooky? I guess.
Oh, and one time it said it didn’t like another friend because he was Mormon. Actually, it just said “MO” but that’s what we guessed it meant.
I posted earlier about the Ouija “talking” when I played it with a particular friend of mine, who later didn’t remember the experience. Another thing I remember is that whenever the Ouija referred to itself, instead of going to the letter “I” in the alphabet, it always went to the letter “I” in the middle of the word OUIJA at the top of the board. It was kind of spooky, and really really really my friend was not that clever.
What’s your address? Captain Howdy would really like to meet you…
I don’t know about ouija boards, but js_africanus is starting to scare me now. Begone back to GD with you man, where you belong! 
I’m always very hesitant to say I know anything for sure, especially when it comes to the unknown. Do you know for an absolute fact that there has never been a case of true paranormal activity associated with Ouija boards, Rick? Because I can’t see how you could possibly know that.
njufoic, you are my kind of person – an open-minded skeptic!
I do not believe in Ouija boards as a source of supernatural information – not yet, anyway. But I do have a couple of coincidences that have stuck in my mind throught the years.
Forty-three years ago, the first time I had ever seen a Ouija board, a friend and I were trying it out. We asked who my “guardian angel” was. It spelled out J-A-M-E-L. I lived in the rural South and had never heard of the name. (We didn’t even have any Catholics or Jews in our town and I knew nothing of even common Arab names. The next time I used a Ouija board was seven years later and 175 miles away. I was watching a group using the board. Someone asked the name of the “guide.” It spelled out J-A-M-E-L-L-E. I was a little flabbergasted, but this English-teacher-in-training was more interested in why the spellings weren’t exactly the same.
In about 1980, my first husband and I were using a Ouija board. My husband, a very honest and decent person, swore that he was not making it move. I was seated at an angle where I could not read the letters and I knew that I was not moving it. It answered lots of questions. But the only thing that I remember was that the “guide” claimed to be an American Indian who had lived where our apartment was. Years later it was discovered that the land that our apartment overlooked was a Indian burial ground. No one knew until excavation for a site began.
I think that these were just slightly weird coincidences – or perhaps something quite natural, but not yet understood yet. I’m still holding out for a scientific explaination.
Let me see if I got the story in the OP correct.
A guy plays with the board.
The board scares the crap out of him.
He puts the scary board in his daughter’s room?
What kind of parent is that?
I’ve never played with one but I have always wanted to play with one. Of course if you turn to your HS friends and say “lets play with a Ouija board” and they dont’ want to play, you are pretty much labled a freak. In my case it just increased the freakieness factor.
But they didn’t want to play with one because they were scared to do it. Most of them thought it would release deamons. I guess that’s a bad thing.
Ok, just have to post!!
When I was in the sixth grade (so around 11, and I am still pretty naive, so bear in mind my shock!), one of my classmates had a birthday. Probably ten 11 and 12 year old girls, crowded around a Ouiji board. We asked a lot of questions, and “it” answered, but the one that sticks out in my mind is this:
Q: Who is Chad Wehrman’s [6th grade stud] best friend?
A: his right hand.
Someone was evidentally much more precocious than I!
It’s a piece of wood. You house is full of pieces of wood. Why would one piece of wood have supernatural powers and another not? Is it because it has letters printed on it? Did the piece of wood become demonic when the letters printed on there? If so, does every piece of wood with letters on it have supernatural powers, or only the ones that are designated as ouija boards? Do they have some kind of satanic priest do incantations at the ouija board factory to make the boards work, or do they in fact just print letters on boards and ship them out? Ouija boards have to be THE silliest thing for an adult to be afraid of.
My big brother and I occasionally played Ouija when we were kids. For the most part, it offered up messages along the lines of “Randy smells like ripe old cheese.”, or “If brains were dynamite, Kris wouldn’t have enough to blow her nose”.
Go figure.
While I’m a skeptic when it comes to humans and their motivations, I’m fairly opened minded when it comes to the “paranormal”. I do believe in ghosts, in so far as people are seeing something if not a conscious spirit; I believe that cryptozoologists will eventually bring new animals, like bigfoot, to light; I believe that life exists on other planets though the aliens probably don’t kidnap drunks and experiment on them.
But I think that Ouiji boards are a crock. If you want to test the theory, here’s how to: Get someone you know is mature enough not to try to trick you to play with one with you. You and the other person should vow not to move it, and really honor the promise. Play. Guess what happens? Nothing! You sit there with your knees touching, and the board on your lap while the thing stays utterly still since you both promised not to move it. It’s boring if you don’t move it…
My siblings and I used to play with one all the time when we were kids. Nothing odd ever happened, other than dumb kid stuff.
Per my lengthy posts in the thread linked by Tapioca Dextrin, I firmly believe ouija boards operate by a quirky feedback of human motor control linked with faulty perception, and any claims for paranormal power are B.S.
In that thread, I proposed an experiment to demonstrate that the planchette (pointer) is being moved by the participants. It’s very simple: Blindfold the people whose hands are on it, and have a silent observer note which letters are indicated. The result will be gibberish. I promise.
Similar related experiments to prove the same thing:
Encode the board. In other words, establish by agreement among the participants that the letters on the board now correspond to other letters via a simple substitution code: A = B, B = C, and so on. If the board spells TZUZO, it means SATAN. Result? Gibberish, again, as the people pushing the planchette get (subconsciously) confused about which letters they’re really trying to get to.
*Secretly encode the board. Do the same as above, but don’t reveal the substitution to the participants; seal the key in an envelope. Note the random letters indicated by the planchette. Then open the envelope, and reveal that the key page says, “The letters are exactly the same.” Embarrassment all around.
Use a different alphabet. Find someone who speaks Russian (for example), and get (or make) a ouija board with Cyrillic characters. Have the Russian speaker attempt to make contact with a Russian spirit — but only English speakers can touch the planchette. Result? Zippo.
Inescapable conclusion: If the participants driving the planchette are unable to immediately understand the message being “spoken” by the board, the message disintegrates. What the hell sort of spirit conduit is it if it’s limited to what the participants can see and read?
It’s a piece of cardboard with letters on it. Chill, everybody.
But that doesn’t prove that the ouija board doesn’t “work”, IMO. Hypothetically, isn’t it possible that the board works by channeling energy through the people touching the panchette. The participants are unknowingly being used as a medium for physically moving the planchette around the board.
If you think about it, this makes sense. The players have to be able to see the letters, so that the spirits can use their body to move to the correct letters. That was a bit rambling, but can you see my point?
If spirits can take over bodies of people and channel energy through them, woudln’t it just be a lot easier to just channel the energy right to the little pointer without having to take over a body at all?
OK, all just my opinion / theory:
The board and the planchette are just made of wood and cardboard, or whatever. I agree about that. This is why some people can make their own ouija boards. There’s nothing special about the ouija board itself.
The spirits (or ghosts, or the dead, or whatever) are unable or unwilling to just move the planchette around by itself. It wouldn’t make sense, and it probably wouldn’t be possible.
Humans all have a certain part of their brain associated with things which science can’t explain. I belive that to a certain extent we are all a little psychic. I won’t go into too much detail here, as it’s a whole other debate, but I cite things like deja-vu as evidence of this.
The spirits which want to communicate used to be people just like you and me, they just died is all. Whatever energy (for want of a better word) they use to get their message to us, find the path of least resistance through other people. We are the channel that they use to communicate with our world. Psychics who communicate with the dead do this without the use of a ouija board, adding more weight to the theory that the ouija boad is only a conveniant tool.
As channels for this energy, we need to be able to see the letters on the board. When the planchette moves, yes it is being physically moved by the people touching it, but it’s just possible that the signals from the brain that tell us where to move it are coming from a source from somewhere that we can’t explain.
In short, the ouija board is an item of convenience for the less psychically enabled, to convey simple messages from spirits. In order for it to work, I think you have to have a belief that it can work, and you need to be prepared to open your mind and let the spirits guide you.
This is all just theory, and there is no way to prove it. However, I have yet to see someone disprove it.
Sorry about the grammar / typos… I rambled on a bit and didn’t preview very well!
Why not just write out a bunch of letters on a piece of paper and have the spirits guide your finger to them?
Hell, why not just have a keyboard in front of you and have the spirits guide your typing?
Ever try using it by yourself?
Every time I did, it never worked.