Mommy Always Told Me not to Talk to Strangers

My mother always asked me not to play with Ouija Boards. I am going to mention a couple of different experiences with Ouija Boards throughout my lifetime, as there are really only four that really stand out in my memory. The last two being the most terrifying/exciting.

1. I was probably about 6 or 7, my best friend (at the time) and I were hanging out with her older sister and her buddy. They had the Ouija Board out, I distinctly remember something strange happening and the older sister freaking out a bit. She broke the board in half, and asked the two of us to take it to the trash. So, we did. The next morning, us two younger ones ran to the closet to grab the game of Trouble (we loved this game) and to our surprise there was another Ouija Board sitting right on top of our board game. I figured maybe they just had two boards, but my friend was startled. She called over her sister. Her sister grabbed the box, tore it open - and low and behold the Ouija Board (the exact same one, it had her name in big red letters on the back and everything) was in perfect condition. Not snapped in half, nothing. No sign of any damage that had occurred to it the night before. Her sister started crying, and we never spoke of the incident again until recently when we just got back in touch. She remembers it just as well as I do.

2. I was about 13 or 14, I was at my girlfriend's house and hadn't touched a Ouija board since the very first incident (as having something completely put itself back together, or whatever it was that happened, wasn't exactly something that comforted me). I stumbled upon her Ouija Board while I was rummaging through her closet for something she asked me to find and got pretty excited about it. I asked her if she wanted to try it. She seemed pretty bored by it, she told me she wasn't interested as the thing never works. I asked her if it would work if I used it on my own. She told me that you need more than one person to operate it, and off she went into her sister's room onto the computer to chat with some boy she liked. She was just in the other room, and I told her I was going to try it on my own - thinking I'd end up staring at a motionless board and become disinterested within minutes. I was sitting on her bed, this was the second time I had ever been over to her home - so I didn't know much about her or much about her place. The cursor started to move, and it startled me. I figured it was just my fingers shaking until the cursor started to move rapidly without my pushing it along (other than touching it with the tip of my finger) and proceeded to spell out "H-e-l-l-o".

Me: "Uh, Lana? Are you sure this thing doesn't work by yourself?"

She sat there and continued to type and said "Yeah I'm pretty sure, why?"

Me: "Uh, I'll tell you in a second..." So I started to whisper my questions. I asked for the name - and at this point I can't remember the name, but it was a man's name - and he gave me his full name. I wrote it down. I asked him if he was related to anyone in the house, and he said Yes. I asked who, and all I got was this response:

"A-D-P-L-J-P" I was confused. Those are a lot of initials for one name. So, I got up and wandered over to Lana and asked her if anyone in her family had those initials. She looked at me, laughed and said No - so I started on my way back to her room and then she asked me to wait.

Her sister: (A)my (D)awn (P)rocter, and herself: (L)ana (J)olene (P)rocter

I was totally freaked and excited as I did not know Lana's middle name, nor did I even know her sister's full name - I didn't even know her sister's first name at this point. I asked her if she knew of the name that I had written down and she said no, but the last name rung a bell. She came back into her room and grabbed a key from a drawer and opened the chest that she used as her night stand (something I also had no idea about or that there was anything in it). She pulled out a family album of her mother's that she had given to her years ago. And right smack in the first page was his name, it was her mother's Grandfather.

The Ouija board stopped working after that. I couldn't get over it. I thought that was amazing. But it totally freaked me out and I didn't touch one again until a few years later.

3. My mother always told me not to play with Ouija Boards as she had a bad experience playing "Ghost in a glass" where the Glass had actually exploded once her and her girlfriends touched it - and she never tried anything like that afterwards. She hated the idea of it, it scared her. My mother passed away when I was 18 years old (I'm 22 now), and a few weeks later I bought a board. She had asked me not to try and contact her, just in case. But I missed her so much, I went into her bedroom and laid on the carpet next to the bed where she passed away and begged for her to respond to me on this stupid thing. It took my crying and wailing for almost an hour, my friend Adam found me on the floor mumbling to myself and he tried to pray me away from it - but the cursor moved. By itself.

I was just watching it. He missed it, but I begged him to stay with me and just help - even watch. It may not have been her, but I desperately wanted to believe it was - Adam put his fingers on the cursor - and this is something he never would have known (I wasn't touching it), the cursor started moving in a certain pattern of circles and drawings that my mother used to draw on my back the *exact* same way every night for years and years (and still did once in a while to wake me up in the mornings) all over the board. I burst into tears I was so happy, I said thank you - and then it stopped abruptly but I didn't care. And the presence we both felt was gone. The room was incredibly hot when he walked in, he told me. And it stayed warm for about 3 days, my father complained about how warm it was in there - the rest of the house was air conditioned and fine, but his bedroom was just overly heated, he stayed on the couch for a few nights. It was unreal.

I apologized numerous times as I knew she was angry. But she did it. She let me know she was there, and I couldn't have asked for anything more wonderful. But this sparked something in me that I don't necessarily regret, but lead to my next experience which was thrilling, scary, and exciting all at the same time. And I should never have done it, and I already know my mother's put a stop to my trying.

4. I was 19, my girlfriend had just moved in to an apartment on her own in a historical building downtown Calgary. We had another friend we hung out with a lot, his name was Bob. I mentioned one evening that I was interested in ghosts and what not, and we all started to tell one another of our strange experiences. We decided to go get Bob's Ouija Board - in which he refused to use. He hated the thing due to a bad experience they all had when he used it last, which had been a few years prior. But he didn't mind watching.

Kyla and I jumped on this thing right away, and we started getting mixed up messages, garbled mumbo jumbo - pretty much a load of crap up until finally someone started to make sense. This person did not like us at first, it kept saying "M-A-M-A" as soon as it started to get frustrated with us and it seemed to move on as someone else stepped in and started talking to us. I can't necessarily remember all of the details of the conversation, but this spirit stuck with us for almost 2 weeks. It got to the point where Kyla (my girlfriend whom was living in the apartment) was so scared she was sleeping with a knife under her pillow, she started to lose sleep as she would start to see lights above one tile in the kitchen - tiny dim flashes.

She was terrified, so one day Bob and I (not entirely believing all of it - just figured she was making a big deal) went over there to comfort her and help her believe we were coming to rid of this spirit. I grabbed a few of my mother's things, my favorite things, I wanted to create a circle of love - something that would ward off anything bad. The spirit then began to tell us just simply that he was lonely, he really liked Kyla and he just wanted her to pay attention to him. She was terrified by this. But I could see why, she was very susceptible to him, he could connect with her almost immediately without using a board. It was scaring her so much, I had to figure out a way to comfort her so that this spirit would stop insisting so much. He just wanted her to like him, he did not want her to be scared of him.

We never got a real name out of this guy, so we started to call him something else - and he didn't mind. Kind of like a nickname, but at one point he even told us that he could not remember his name. I decided to spend the night with my girlfriend at this point, and Bob went home. This is when things started to get interesting. It started to become quite fun, this spirit just wanted a friend, and he was very excited and playful. We ended up trusting him a little too much, and I was incredibly weary, but Kyla started to get so excited all she wanted to do all of the time was talk to him. She was no longer scared, so I went with it. It got to the point where her and I were holding the very very tips of our fingers on the cursor and this thing would zip all the way around the room, sometimes keep going by itself for a few seconds (quick jumps and turns, without us even touching it) when we couldn't keep up. He would constantly circle on top of the tile where Kyla would see the lights. We were never sure why, but he considered it his. And this tile was exceptionally warm compared to the rest - all of the time during this whole experience.

The last night we had contact with this spirit was exceptional and scary. Here is how it went:

We had Bob back over, along with one of his buddies who was interested in what was going on and had never experienced anything like it. We figured it would be okay, and it was. The spirit ended up enjoying becoming a source of entertainment. I asked him if he could show us a trick. He said yes, watch. We watched. We put our hands on top of the cursor and before any of us could say anything, the cursor forcefully FLEW into the CD player sitting next to us on the floor and forced itself upright - it basically smacked the damn thing. This was confusing.

We put the cursor back on the board, and then all of a sudden I could hear a wurring noise. I open the CD player and the disk inside is spinning and spinning incredibly fast... This CD player is UNPLUGGED. We freaked out a little bit and had our laugh and were quite excited, as was the spirit as he expressed his enjoyment quite thoroughly. Then, I asked if we could hear his voice. He said, yes - laugh. So, we kind of sat there in silence for a few minutes. Nothing. Hands go back on cursor and it moves immediately again to "you need to laugh". I explain that we all can't just laugh on command, and he would have to tell us a joke. And he did, he had us roaring - and then all of a sudden off in the corner where Kyla's bed was located we hear this bellow of male laughter last about 3 seconds until we all completely stopped - looked at one another, and ran out of the apartment - down the stairs, and basically just took off.

It terrified us all. I honestly did not think that was possible. We all went for coffee, Bob & his buddy refused to come back with us as they were quite freaked out and giddy over the experience and that was good enough.

On our way back to the apartment I started to feel terrible, as did Kyla - we panicked and literally RAN away. This poor spirit is doing nothing but trying to entertain us and enjoy himself - and wow, I honestly felt incredibly upset about us just running away from him like that. We didn't want to go back to it right away but we could definitely feel his presence, I let him know we'd get around to it in a bit - us girls just want to talk for a while.

We were sitting together on the floor cross legged both with a glass of beer in our hands. Kyla's finger was somewhat inside her glass while she was talking to me and I noticed her finger tapping the side of the glass softly but quickly, but we weren't listening to any music - so I asked her if she was nervous. She looked down at her finger and quite abruptly stated that she was NOT doing that with her finger, and started to panic.

Not too long after us noticing that - her elbow started to lift and she stated to me again that she was not the one doing it. I was getting angry with her, I told her this was a cruel joke and that it was completely impossible for something like this to happen. She started to cry, the tears and the fear in her eyes were what convinced me - I screamed STOP! And it stopped. I grabbed the Ouija Board and proceeded to tell this spirit that using our bodies involuntarily was not acceptable - and maybe we learned to trust him too much. I'm not sure what gave him this ability, but it was terrifying. I told him if he did it again I would cut off the conversation and we would never speak with him again. You could feel the room go solemn, and sad.

We sat down and started talking to him, he apologized, he felt terrible. He just didn't know why we ran away, he didn't mean to scare us, and proceeded to tell us that in not so many words. We came to common ground and started talking about random things. He started to joke with us again and we had a bit of fun for an hour until he said: "your fading".

Us: "What?"

Spirit: "y-o-u-a-r-e-f-a-d-i-n-g"

We were pretty confused by this.

Spirit: "i-c-a-n-t-h-e-a-r-y-o-u"

Kyla and I looked at one another and just kept our fingers on the cursor.

Spirit: "i-a-m-s-o-h-a-p-p-y-t-h-a-n-k-y-o-u"

Kyla and I both sitting across from one another waited a little bit, something intense was in the air but the board was no longer working. We put both of our hands in our laps, and I said "maybe he passed over?" All of a sudden, I could feel tingling in my feet, and it started to move up my legs - I thought maybe my legs were falling asleep. I told Kyla, and looked up at her, and her eyes were wide and she said "oh my god, it's happening to both of us".

This tingling sensation ran all the way up through our bodies, both of our arms flew up into the air without us moving them ourselves, and a tear rolled down each of our cheeks (a tear in which we did not cry).

To this day, we are still not too sure what to think of this experience. And the fact that someone else experienced it with me and can explain the story exactly the same with details is incredibly strange. Bob & his buddy still talk about the experience they had with us and the ghost earlier that evening.

After that the presence was entirely gone. The Ouija Board no longer works, and I refuse to touch them. I've been in the same room as people when they're playing the Ouija Board and they complain about it not working and constantly saying "M-A-M-A". Remember this encounter earlier. I don't even have to be in the same room, I can be next door. I've had complaints from our next door neighbors at one point explaining this M-A-M-A phenomenon (and these people didn't even know my story). So something's out there preventing spirits from getting close to me, I think.

What do you think? What is your take on all of this? It was an incredible experience, but I think those last two are good enough for me to last a lifetime.