Tales of the Ouija

THE OUIJA'S WARNING

"I used to live in a house in Pueblo, Colorado that I always thought was 'peculiar' because of the way I always felt in it," says a reader who uses the name Aphrodite. She always felt like she was being watched, a feeling that intensified when she was alone. But she couldn't quite identify the feeling.

Was the watcher staring in anger or fascination? Soon the feeling turned into sounds.

One night her father had to go out to the store. To feel safe, Aphrodite locked every door in the house while she was upstairs. "The house is very big, so it creaks a lot, especially the stairs," she says, "but as I was stepping into the shower, I heard the floorboards creak like someone was walking on them." Aphrodite wrapped a towel tightly around her, counted to three and flung open the bathroom door to confront the intruder. There was no one there. She dismissed the sounds as her imagination and got in the shower. As she turned on the water, she heard the floorboards creak again. "Determined to find out the source, I left the shower running and with one huge thrust opened the door and, expecting to see someone, pushed forward so they'd fall down the stairs," she says.

Aphrodite grabbed only air.

Now thinking that the intruder might be a spirit, Aphrodite went to her room and fetched the Ouija board from under her bed and set it up on the floor. "I thought, if it was a ghost, it might want to communicate," she says. Aphrodite lit five candles: red, green, yellow, blue and white.

She set four of them at the corners of the board and placed the white one between her legs. "I gently put my hand on the board and called the spirit out. 'If there's anyone here who wishes to communicate with me, please make your presence known.'" Something blew out the red candle and the Ouija's pointer began to move. "The spirit told me he was a man age 32 who wanted to communicate with me," she says. "He also said that he hated the way I lived and that's why he watched me. I asked him if he was mad at me. He said yes. And the last message he relayed to me was: 'GET OUT. WON'T BE SAFE LONGER.' And with that the board was done."

Aphrodite didn't tell anyone of this experience, but she did try to convince her dad to move from that house. They didn't even move when, during dinner one evening, they both heard the stairs creak, followed by an upstairs mirror crashing to the floor. They finally did move when Aphrodite's dad got a new job. "Ever since then, I have wondered if the spirit is still there," she says. "I still wonder if maybe I should have faced it or if it was a good thing we moved. I've talked to the recent owners of that house, and they say that their dog won't go into my old room and that the wife gets violently shoved when she is alone."