I used a Ouija Board for fun when I was a teenager and this is why I've never touched one since
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As a child in the 70s and 80s I was fascinated by the supernatural, aliens, space - anything and everything outside the sphere of everyday normality. I would collect those series of magazines they did, like The Unexplained, which delved into mysteries no-one really understood.
The 80s were the era of the original Poltergeist films, ET, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Popular culture was awash with the other-worldly and we all wanted to be Elliott and find a friendly alien in our garden shed, then be chased by police on our Grifter and Chopper bikes.
But these things were always just fiction or someone else's story. I wanted things like aliens, ghosts and extrasensory perception to be real, but I'd had no first hand experience that they were. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here
That all changed one night when I was a young teenager and I spent the evening with my parents at a relative's house. My parents had always been pretty straight-laced - as far as I was aware. My dad was a businessman, my mum a stay-at home parent at that time.
They would mostly scoff or tease me when I'd regale them with stories I'd read about 'real-life' supernatural events, or UFO encounters. I had no reason to believe that they thought it was anything other than made-up nonsense.
Then, that night, they decided to use a Ouija Board to contact the dead. It sounds dramatic, but it wasn't. It was a lark in their minds, a bit of fun after a few drinks. It was a popular thing to do in the 60s and 70s, despite the odd scary story - we weren't a family of occultists if that's what you were thinking - the reality is that we were oh so very normal.
They had no 'board' as such - they just had squares of paper, each one with a letter of the alphabet or a number on, arranged in a circle with a tall glass in the centre and a piece of paper with 'yes' or 'no' on it either side. Everyone then put their finger on the top of the glass while one person asked, over and over, "is there anybody there".
My older sister and I weren't allowed to partake and were shut out of the room. But we snuck into the garden to watch through the window. I don't recall fully how much we saw, but I don't think we saw what happened next.
However, I do remember everyone returning to the room later, all still in high spirits (if you excuse the pun). All bar one, that is.
There was one person there who was known for always making jokes and winding people up. But he was quiet for the rest of the evening, sat, seemingly staring into space, deep in thought. I was told that, for days afterwards, he would not return to the room where the event took place. I remember being surprised at that.
We spoke to my parents after and I think they explained a little of what had happened. The general gist was that you asked questions and the glass would move, with everyone's fingers still on it, either to reply 'yes' or 'no', to spell out some response using the letters, or count out one with the numbers.
I recall they seemed fairly chilled about it, even my dad which surprised me, although I felt he was still pretty cynical. My mum had always claimed to have 'feelings' about certain places, especially if something bad had happened there, so was a little more spiritual, you might say, although neither were or still are religious in any way.
My mum's advice was that, if you ever used a Ouija Board, or the DIY equivalent, you should never ask about the future, because you might learn something, true or not, that you'd rather not hear.
Someone, maybe her, told me a story at the time about how some schoolchildren or students had once been using a Ouija Board in a classroom and how the glass had smashed the moment a particular girl had entered the room.
I had no idea of the significance of that story, if it was just coincidence, or even if it was true, but it fuelled the feeling within me that people were messing with something they did not really understand, the stuff of myth and hushed conversations, something potentially powerful.
Of course, being an acutely curious kid, the temptation was just too great.
I think it was with my older sister that we first tried a DIY Ouija Board with the bits of paper and the glass. My memory has faded, but I recall something short-lived happening, but only after quite some time.
But it was when I encouraged a friend to try it with me, that things really started to happen.
The first evening we tried, nothing happened for what seemed like ages. We were on the verge of giving up, when suddenly there was movement.
After that, it didn't stop. In fact, we just had to stop ourselves in the end as I had to leave, even though the 'conversation' on the board seemed set to continue all night.
I can't recall everything we asked - we avoided questions about the future, as per my mum's advice - so i think it was mainly people's names, where they were from, where they were.
Few of the answers have remained in my head. You would have thought that with something so momentous, I'd remember everything but, weirdly, I recall very little - although it is 40-odd years ago to be fair.
The one thing I do recall with great clarity is the answer it (I'm using the word 'it' for ease right now - but I'll come back to that) gave to one particular question - as it stood out so much.
That question was: "How long have you been there." I can't recall the exact context to that question, but I remember that we had established it was somewhere, shall we say, not of this world, and we wanted to find out for how long.
If I was somehow controlling the glass myself, and I wanted to answer that question, I might have gone to some set number of years, like 50, 100, 364 - whatever. I have always thought that would be what most people would do.
But it didn't do that. First it went to the 'zero', then to the number '1', then '2', then '3' and so on. When it got to '5' or '6', I asked: "Are you trying to say you have been there too long to remember". It shot, without hesitation, to 'Yes'.
We dabbled with the Ouija Board a number of times after that, but with diminishing returns. It either took too long, or the response was so weak, that eventually we gave up.
I've never done it since, although I thought about it a few times.
I've never stopped thinking about what it all meant and whether there really was an 'it', a spirit of some kind, involved at all. The obvious possibility was that one of the two of us was pushing the glass. We suspected that at the time, even though I trusted my good friend and, I believe, she I, but to rule it out, we tried in turn to push the glass without the other knowing we were.
It was impossible. Your finger would not slavishly follow wherever the glass was pushed. It either left the glass if it was pulled away from you. Or you stopped it if it was pushed towards you. Try it yourself - there is no way to push a glass around the table when two or more people have their finger on it, without both or all those present co-operating.
The second thing was - we were using a small, traditional sherry glass with a long stem and a small area which held the sherry. Try and push it with your finger and the friction of the table would make it tip over. We just couldn't do it - it fell over every time, especially when you tried to move it towards you.
So - one of us couldn't have faked it - it could only have been both of us co-operating, and I know for a fact I wasn't. There would have to have been a conversation between us to fake it and prior knowledge about how we would answer each question. There was neither of those things, and at the end of the day, what would have been the point? We were alone in the room, there was no-one to dupe except ourselves. Agreeing to push a glass around a table and try and pretend to ourselves it was neither of us would have been utterly pointless.
Another possibility was that, somehow, our minds and actions became linked, that we pushed the glass around the table in subconscious coordination through some shared hypnosis which manifested physically through our co-operation in deciding where the glass would go and stopping it from falling over.
That's a pretty weird explanation in itself - although shared hypnosis is a real-world thing. It happens, but you'd really need a trained hypnotist in the room to carry it out. Neither of us were hypnotists at the time or since, as far as I am aware, and there was no-one else in the room. But, still a possibility I guess, if unlikely.
As I've got older, my interest in science has deepened. I'm fascinated by theoretical physics, the quantum world, all the weird quantum effects that have been discovered in experiments.
I know about theories of parallel universes, hidden dimensions - the stuff of science fiction you might think, but all actually established theories of reality explored by some of our greatest minds.
One such scientifically observed phenomenon is called quantum entanglement which basically means the properties of two particles can be intrinsically linked even if they are separated by a vast distance. Albert Einstein called it 'spooky action at a distance'.
The term 'spooky' is not one you will come across much in science but its use by one of the most famous and cleverest scientists ever is an indication that there's plenty we didn't understand when Einstein was around and still don't.
I'm not religious. Lately, I've thought of myself as more of an atheist. But I'm also open-minded to the idea that there are things out there we don't understand. People once looked at the sky and saw lightning and thought the gods were angry. Perhaps one day people will look back on our scientific theories and observations of the 21st century with the same bemusement.
There is no proven scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts or spirits, I know that. But until we can explain everything, it's difficult to 100% rule out anything.
Maybe it was all some shared hypnosis, or an elaborate hoax that I or both of use fell hook, line and sinker for. Maybe someone is still having a quiet chuckle at our expense.
Perhaps we live, as some scientists postulate, in some kind of simulation and someone 'up there' pushing all the buttons like we're in one big game of The Sims thought it would be fun to play a little prank on these two gullible kids with their Ouija Board.
Whatever the reason, I can't explain it. I've gone through it over and over in my mind, like I did at the time, and I've never cracked the mystery.
It makes me question everything I know.
And that's why I've never done it since. Because, if those really were spirits of the dead, or some kind of floating souls, voices from a parallel universe and so on... then they were there, in that house with us, or occupying our minds.
If that was the case, my thinking ever since has been, "why would I want to invite them into my home".
I don't really like ghost horror films, that sort of thing - they freak me out and I end up spooked in my own home, afraid of dark unseen corners.
But, if by using a Ouija Board you welcome in things that wouldn't have been there otherwise - how do you know they have gone when you finish. And how do you know their intentions are good?
It's a freaky thought, and that's why you'll never (probably) find me asking that question ever again: "Is there anybody there".
I'd genuinely really like to know the answer to that question. Is there anybody there? But until someone can definitively prove whether there is or there isn't - I'd very much rather not take the risk of potentially welcoming them into my life.
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Wales Online
13-06-2025
- Wales Online
I used a Ouija Board for fun when I was a teenager and this is why I've never touched one since
Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info As a child in the 70s and 80s I was fascinated by the supernatural, aliens, space - anything and everything outside the sphere of everyday normality. I would collect those series of magazines they did, like The Unexplained, which delved into mysteries no-one really understood. The 80s were the era of the original Poltergeist films, ET, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Popular culture was awash with the other-worldly and we all wanted to be Elliott and find a friendly alien in our garden shed, then be chased by police on our Grifter and Chopper bikes. But these things were always just fiction or someone else's story. I wanted things like aliens, ghosts and extrasensory perception to be real, but I'd had no first hand experience that they were. For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here That all changed one night when I was a young teenager and I spent the evening with my parents at a relative's house. My parents had always been pretty straight-laced - as far as I was aware. My dad was a businessman, my mum a stay-at home parent at that time. They would mostly scoff or tease me when I'd regale them with stories I'd read about 'real-life' supernatural events, or UFO encounters. I had no reason to believe that they thought it was anything other than made-up nonsense. Then, that night, they decided to use a Ouija Board to contact the dead. It sounds dramatic, but it wasn't. It was a lark in their minds, a bit of fun after a few drinks. It was a popular thing to do in the 60s and 70s, despite the odd scary story - we weren't a family of occultists if that's what you were thinking - the reality is that we were oh so very normal. They had no 'board' as such - they just had squares of paper, each one with a letter of the alphabet or a number on, arranged in a circle with a tall glass in the centre and a piece of paper with 'yes' or 'no' on it either side. Everyone then put their finger on the top of the glass while one person asked, over and over, "is there anybody there". My older sister and I weren't allowed to partake and were shut out of the room. But we snuck into the garden to watch through the window. I don't recall fully how much we saw, but I don't think we saw what happened next. However, I do remember everyone returning to the room later, all still in high spirits (if you excuse the pun). All bar one, that is. There was one person there who was known for always making jokes and winding people up. But he was quiet for the rest of the evening, sat, seemingly staring into space, deep in thought. I was told that, for days afterwards, he would not return to the room where the event took place. I remember being surprised at that. We spoke to my parents after and I think they explained a little of what had happened. The general gist was that you asked questions and the glass would move, with everyone's fingers still on it, either to reply 'yes' or 'no', to spell out some response using the letters, or count out one with the numbers. I recall they seemed fairly chilled about it, even my dad which surprised me, although I felt he was still pretty cynical. My mum had always claimed to have 'feelings' about certain places, especially if something bad had happened there, so was a little more spiritual, you might say, although neither were or still are religious in any way. My mum's advice was that, if you ever used a Ouija Board, or the DIY equivalent, you should never ask about the future, because you might learn something, true or not, that you'd rather not hear. Someone, maybe her, told me a story at the time about how some schoolchildren or students had once been using a Ouija Board in a classroom and how the glass had smashed the moment a particular girl had entered the room. I had no idea of the significance of that story, if it was just coincidence, or even if it was true, but it fuelled the feeling within me that people were messing with something they did not really understand, the stuff of myth and hushed conversations, something potentially powerful. Of course, being an acutely curious kid, the temptation was just too great. I think it was with my older sister that we first tried a DIY Ouija Board with the bits of paper and the glass. My memory has faded, but I recall something short-lived happening, but only after quite some time. But it was when I encouraged a friend to try it with me, that things really started to happen. The first evening we tried, nothing happened for what seemed like ages. We were on the verge of giving up, when suddenly there was movement. After that, it didn't stop. In fact, we just had to stop ourselves in the end as I had to leave, even though the 'conversation' on the board seemed set to continue all night. I can't recall everything we asked - we avoided questions about the future, as per my mum's advice - so i think it was mainly people's names, where they were from, where they were. Few of the answers have remained in my head. You would have thought that with something so momentous, I'd remember everything but, weirdly, I recall very little - although it is 40-odd years ago to be fair. The one thing I do recall with great clarity is the answer it (I'm using the word 'it' for ease right now - but I'll come back to that) gave to one particular question - as it stood out so much. That question was: "How long have you been there." I can't recall the exact context to that question, but I remember that we had established it was somewhere, shall we say, not of this world, and we wanted to find out for how long. If I was somehow controlling the glass myself, and I wanted to answer that question, I might have gone to some set number of years, like 50, 100, 364 - whatever. I have always thought that would be what most people would do. But it didn't do that. First it went to the 'zero', then to the number '1', then '2', then '3' and so on. When it got to '5' or '6', I asked: "Are you trying to say you have been there too long to remember". It shot, without hesitation, to 'Yes'. We dabbled with the Ouija Board a number of times after that, but with diminishing returns. It either took too long, or the response was so weak, that eventually we gave up. I've never done it since, although I thought about it a few times. I've never stopped thinking about what it all meant and whether there really was an 'it', a spirit of some kind, involved at all. The obvious possibility was that one of the two of us was pushing the glass. We suspected that at the time, even though I trusted my good friend and, I believe, she I, but to rule it out, we tried in turn to push the glass without the other knowing we were. It was impossible. Your finger would not slavishly follow wherever the glass was pushed. It either left the glass if it was pulled away from you. Or you stopped it if it was pushed towards you. Try it yourself - there is no way to push a glass around the table when two or more people have their finger on it, without both or all those present co-operating. The second thing was - we were using a small, traditional sherry glass with a long stem and a small area which held the sherry. Try and push it with your finger and the friction of the table would make it tip over. We just couldn't do it - it fell over every time, especially when you tried to move it towards you. So - one of us couldn't have faked it - it could only have been both of us co-operating, and I know for a fact I wasn't. There would have to have been a conversation between us to fake it and prior knowledge about how we would answer each question. There was neither of those things, and at the end of the day, what would have been the point? We were alone in the room, there was no-one to dupe except ourselves. Agreeing to push a glass around a table and try and pretend to ourselves it was neither of us would have been utterly pointless. Another possibility was that, somehow, our minds and actions became linked, that we pushed the glass around the table in subconscious coordination through some shared hypnosis which manifested physically through our co-operation in deciding where the glass would go and stopping it from falling over. That's a pretty weird explanation in itself - although shared hypnosis is a real-world thing. It happens, but you'd really need a trained hypnotist in the room to carry it out. Neither of us were hypnotists at the time or since, as far as I am aware, and there was no-one else in the room. But, still a possibility I guess, if unlikely. As I've got older, my interest in science has deepened. I'm fascinated by theoretical physics, the quantum world, all the weird quantum effects that have been discovered in experiments. I know about theories of parallel universes, hidden dimensions - the stuff of science fiction you might think, but all actually established theories of reality explored by some of our greatest minds. One such scientifically observed phenomenon is called quantum entanglement which basically means the properties of two particles can be intrinsically linked even if they are separated by a vast distance. Albert Einstein called it 'spooky action at a distance'. The term 'spooky' is not one you will come across much in science but its use by one of the most famous and cleverest scientists ever is an indication that there's plenty we didn't understand when Einstein was around and still don't. I'm not religious. Lately, I've thought of myself as more of an atheist. But I'm also open-minded to the idea that there are things out there we don't understand. People once looked at the sky and saw lightning and thought the gods were angry. Perhaps one day people will look back on our scientific theories and observations of the 21st century with the same bemusement. There is no proven scientific evidence for the existence of ghosts or spirits, I know that. But until we can explain everything, it's difficult to 100% rule out anything. Maybe it was all some shared hypnosis, or an elaborate hoax that I or both of use fell hook, line and sinker for. Maybe someone is still having a quiet chuckle at our expense. Perhaps we live, as some scientists postulate, in some kind of simulation and someone 'up there' pushing all the buttons like we're in one big game of The Sims thought it would be fun to play a little prank on these two gullible kids with their Ouija Board. Whatever the reason, I can't explain it. I've gone through it over and over in my mind, like I did at the time, and I've never cracked the mystery. It makes me question everything I know. And that's why I've never done it since. Because, if those really were spirits of the dead, or some kind of floating souls, voices from a parallel universe and so on... then they were there, in that house with us, or occupying our minds. If that was the case, my thinking ever since has been, "why would I want to invite them into my home". I don't really like ghost horror films, that sort of thing - they freak me out and I end up spooked in my own home, afraid of dark unseen corners. But, if by using a Ouija Board you welcome in things that wouldn't have been there otherwise - how do you know they have gone when you finish. And how do you know their intentions are good? It's a freaky thought, and that's why you'll never (probably) find me asking that question ever again: "Is there anybody there". I'd genuinely really like to know the answer to that question. Is there anybody there? But until someone can definitively prove whether there is or there isn't - I'd very much rather not take the risk of potentially welcoming them into my life.
NBC News
12-06-2025
- NBC News
Live updates: Plane carrying 242 crashes in India; most passengers feared dead
An Air India plane with 242 people on board crashed Thursday near a major international airport in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, the airline and the country's government said. Air India, the country's flagship carrier, said in a post on X that Flight 171 from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick had been 'involved in an incident' and that it was 'ascertaining the details and will share further updates at the earliest.' The flight was scheduled to depart at 1:10 p.m. local time (3:40 a.m. ET). Reuters reported that 242 people were on board and cited police in adding that the plane crashed into a civilian area. 'Shocked and devastated to learn about the flight crash in Ahmedabad,' Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu, India's civil aviation minister, said in a post on X. 'I am personally monitoring the situation and have directed all aviation and emergency response agencies to take swift and coordinated action.'
NBC News
12-06-2025
- NBC News
Air India plane crashes near India's Ahmedabad airport
An Air India plane crashed Thursday near an airport in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad, according to local media, which did not say whether there were any fatalities Air India, the country's flagship carrier, said in a post on X that Flight 171 from Ahmedabad to London Gatwick had been 'involved in an incident.' The airline said it was 'ascertaining the details and will share further updates at the earliest.' It was scheduled to depart at 1:10 p.m. local time (3:40 a.m. ET). The plane crashed in a civilian area outside the airport, Reuters reported, citing police. The aircraft involved is a Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, according to flight tracking site Flightradar24, which said it received the last signal from the aircraft just seconds after takeoff. It was not immediately clear how many people were on board.
