Quasi-ouija Prediction

When I was in my early teens I used to spend a few weeks each summer at my grandma's farmhouse out in the country. The house was very old, complete with a root cellar under the kitchen, and a rickety staircase. The front part of the house was bright and airy and happy, but the back part was gloomy and creepy. We mostly used the back for storage and rarely went there. The house didn't generally have bad vibes, but I felt like the happy front part of the house was besieged by darkness lingering in the back and in the creepy root cellar underneath. I was never one hundred percent comfortable there.

One time my grandma was out grocery shopping or visiting a friend and I was left alone in the house. There weren't many kids my age in this tiny town and I mostly had to fend for myself for entertainment. TV reception was terrible (this was back in the 80s!), so I spent most of my time walking, reading and doing crafts.

To break the monotony, I thought that it would be fun to experiment with an Ouija board. I didn't have one on hand, and since I was alone, I didn't think it would work anyway. Then I recalled that a friend once told me that instead of an Ouija, you could use a needle suspended over the alphabet drawn around a circle. The needle would supposedly move and point to letters in response to questions. It didn't sound very legit, but I was bored and decided to try it.

I drew letters around a circle and suspended a needle on a thread over it. The needle settled pointing to the center of the circle (thank you, Gravity) and did not move again. But I wasn't going to give up that easily! I figured that if I rested the point of the needle in the center and tilted the needle a little by lowering its top, I could get the top to spin around while the tip remained anchored in the center, then the top was bound to settle pointing to a letter. This time I had the laws of physics on my side, so the needle did indeed point to different letters each time I gave it whirl.

I'm sure I started with some silly questions about which boys liked me, and I'm sure I got some gibberish answers. It wasn't really working. I was ready to give up, but decided to ask what my profession will be when I grew up. The needle spelled the word "shoe". This freaked me out. I ran out of the house and sat out in the yard until grandma returned.

Once back from summer break, I told my friends about what had happened. We had a good laugh about me becoming a shoe. Several years went by and I had forgotten about the incident entirely. It all came back though, when I found myself working in the SHOE department at a large store.