My home has an un-airconditioned basement that we use primarily for washing clothes, keeping the dogs, and storage. When it's not too hot or cold outside, I will go down there sometimes at night to do group chats with friends after my wife and kids have gone to sleep. One evening, while down there, an old Operation board game started making one of the noises over and over again. This was a version which had a funny sound for each of the organs to remove. It initially scared the crap out of me, but afterwards, I laughed about it and the guys on my group chat heard it and laughed too. It would do this randomly every so often for months at a time, using different sounds each time, over and over. I assumed that it was just the old board game slowly dying. My family all heard it as well.
Later, we began finding evidence of a rodent in our basement. I caught glimpses of it out of the corner of my eye and assumed, because of its size, speed, and ability to climb rapidly, that it was a squirrel, as we'd had them in the attic. It did a good deal of hidden damage, especially chewing up books or other research material, and we began to find nests all over the garage. We tried various means to get rid of it, including a variety of traps, poison and a sound emitter. Nothing worked. We eventually saw the culprit, which turned out to be a very large rat, but we could never catch it. It was able to climb vertically as fast as a squirrel; much faster than a rat should have been able.
It seemed to be abnormally intelligent, like, Rats of Nym, intelligent. It would get the bait from the traps without triggering them, and wouldn't eat the poison blocks. I put all the poison blocks in the rafters and ductwork to prevent the dogs from getting them. However, at some point, the rat pushed one of the blocks onto the floor, where one of our dogs found it, and we had to quickly take him to the veterinarian to induce vomiting and ensure he was okay. He made a full recovery.
During this same time frame, when I opened the basement door and turned on the lights, I would notice a shadow in the shape of a person at the bottom of the stairs, just for an instant before vanishing. Not always, but sometimes. I could turn the lights off and on again and it would not reappear. I assumed it was some weird electrical issue.
My daughter finally encountered the rat in the basement and killed it with her softball bat. I got rid of it and cleaned out the basement, and we thought that was the end of it. Only, another rat showed up in the next week or two and continued the damage and continued to elude death or capture.
Eventually, I started to think outside the box, as I had never really put any of the three phenomena (he rats, the shadow, and the Operation noises) together, but realized they had all occurred during the same time frame. I noticed that my old Ouija board was directly beneath the Operation game. I had not used it since high school. I researched Ouija boards and discovered that you are supposed to close sessions by moving the pointer to goodbye, and not to store the pointer on the board. I had never done that, although the board had not been used in more than 20 years, and I had never had any real encounters with it; just pushed it around to scare the other teenagers.
That evening, when I went home, I took it down and opened the box, and sure enough, I had left the pointer on the board, which I reckon left the connection open for all those years, until something found it and used it. I quickly moved the pointer to Goodbye, asking any presence to leave and not return, and saying a prayer. I then stored the pointer in the box, separated from the board.
A few days later, we found the dying rat in a drawer, poisoned, and after cleaning the basement out again, have had no further rodent problems. The shadow stopped appearing at the bottom of the basement stairs as well, and the Operation game stopped making noises. I don't have any concrete evidence, or any real answers, but at this point, my hypothesis is that something found its way through the open Ouija board and somehow managed to manipulate the board game, the rats, and manifest as the shadow at the bottom of the stairs. Our home has been saged, and I grow sage in our basement as well, now. I have also done enough research to be able to respond if anything happens again.
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