Spooky Tales and Stories

CHILDREN. STOP. NOW.

Many years ago, as a 14 year old, staying overnight at a friends house, with 3 other friends, similar ages. We'd all grown up together, except one, who was a cousin of the kid who lived there, and we'd never met him before. His older sister, 16 at the time, was the babysitter while the parents were out for the evening.

She decides to unearth a ouija board from a cupboard somewhere, and thinks it'll be a laugh to scare us shitless. This was back in the days, when you could buy ouija boards as a 'board game' from your local toy store.

So we all gather round, and she starts off with a kind of yes/no lie detector, directing questions to the each of us in turn. Cue nervous giggles, but also a feeling of unease, as we all began to feel like this was awesomely amazing, like some kind of secret that we'd all been unaware of before.

Shit gets strange, when the sister asks out loud, that 'if anybody is here, please show yourself'. A pause of a few seconds, and then a framed picture falls off the wall, and onto the floor. Naturally, we all freak the fuck out. She calms us all down, and insists we go back to the board, because we have to help whoever knocked the picture down.

Ashen faced and hearts pounding, we start asking questions (And I should also add, the pointer is moving smoothly and rapidly, in a completely different manner than before.)

Are you in the room? Pointer says yes. Are you a man? Pointer says no. Do you need help? Pointer says no. What's your name? Pointer spells out S-A-R-A-H. Tell us a secret, we ask... pointer spells out FLIPACOIN.

So we did. Someone leaves the table and gets a 10p piece from out of the loose change jar in the kitchen. This was in the days when 10p coins were big and chunky. The coin goes spinning high up into the air...as we watch it coming down, it stops spinning and serenely falls edge down to land on the table. When I say land, it didn't bounce, it didn't rock, it just came down and met the table, perfectly balanced on it's edge, as if someone had reached out, and gently placed it there

Breaking the silence, the pointer starts moving again. Seemingly random letters, we soon realize they're initials, including middle names. Family tradition for my friend and his sister was to have 3 middle names, something not all of us knew. Aside from the brother and the cousin, no-one else would have known the older sister's full name, and we'd met the cousin for the first time that night. Somehow, every person present, had their initials correctly spelled out to them.

Pointer pauses, and then spells out 3 last words. CHILDREN. STOP. NOW.

Took me many many weeks to be able to sleep properly. No one told their parents, and over the years it became our collective shared secret. Couldn't rationalize it then, still cant rationalize it today.