Marby Noffki

Ouija boards

May 2, 2008 |  25 comments
Image Credit: Wikipedia We must have gone through ten Ouija boards when we were kids. If my grandmother happened to find it, she would throw it away, calling it all sorts of barely translatable things in Spanish. Occasionally, my aunt would decide that it was no good to have it in the house and get rid of it, only to buy another when my mother, who would stand up to the devil himself and likely win, told her off for it. I can recall many a summer night that my cousins, and later my sister and I would try and contact the spirit world through the Ouija board, only to have the sessions end with accusations of so and so moving the planchette. Occasionally, we would end up brawling over these accusations.

Once in a while, something did come through, and though we were spooked, I don’t remember ever being so spooked that we swore off of playing.

The stories were always floating around, however. A friend of a friend of a friend knew someone that played with the Ouija board and invited the minions of hell into their home, or a spirit that pretended to be someone else in order to wreak havoc. Hollywood has used this concept in horror movies from that classic, The Exorcist to horrible B-movies like Witchboard. Yet, with all the playing we did with it, we managed to avoid possession, evil spirits, and all the horrific things that are attached to the Parker Brothers made parlour game.Does the Ouija board deserve this sinister reputation? I don’t think so. While a few personal experiences convince me that using it can enable us to contact the spirit world, I cannot think of a single documented case outside of the case The Exorcist was based on to show that evil things happen when one uses the Ouija. Because I question the reality of spirit possession, and because this kid had bigger problems at the outset, even that case does little to convince me. I have heard a few first hand accounts from people over the years of their negative experiences with the Ouija board, but the fact is, most of them came from unreliable sources, and it was obvious that there was no lasting damage.

It is said that one should never just throw a Ouija board away, or it will either come back to you or somehow call angry spirits into your home. The proper way to dispose of one is to burn it. This too, falls into the realm of myth as far as I am concerned because I am sure that my cousins and I would have been grounded for life had we started burning things, and considering all the boards my grandmother and aunt threw away, I would have had Beelzebub himself sitting on my desk dictating this article. And, no, I don’t. I can assure the reader that the only male entities in this house are a husband, a Rhodesian Ridgeback puppy, and a parakeet. While the puppy sometimes acts like a demon from hell, I promise he isn’t.

There are so many myths and urban legends surrounding this simple tool for communicating with the dead that it would be impossible to fit them into a short article. It would be pointless to include them anyway because they are completely unsubstantiated. Furthermore, if one thinks on the matter logically, there is no reason a toy company would continue to produce and sell these things in toy stores if there were any true and documented cases of a Ouija board being responsible for some sort of harm. The only physical harm I ever suffered was a punch in the gut from my cousin, Mark after yelling at him to stop moving the planchette and being stupid. Quite frankly (love ya, Mark!), most of the board games we played as children ended this way.

Would I recommend using the Ouija board as a tool to communicate with the dead? It is a good bit of fun, and sometimes you do get something extraordinary, but most of the time you just end up sitting around, bored for hours, fingers trembling as they barely touch an unmoving planchette. So, no, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you cannot figure out a better way to spend a rainy Saturday night. Comments (25)

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