 For 22 years, I made myself believe that this disturbing series of events never happened. I successfully convinced myself that I imagined it all. Then I spoke with a friend that I hadn't contacted in a long time. He confirmed the whole thing we went through this together. I'll do my best to accurately present the entire story, just as it happened. Because apparently, it's all true. The story revolves around a Ouija board. I hate to even say or type those words. I haven't touched one since 1997. I was 13 at the time, an age when most of us like to investigate the curiosities in the world around us. It's no longer just having sleepovers with friends, playing various video games or getting into high school sports. Girls were starting to become appealing. This was a time when professional wrestling was just starting to really take off. And a group of my friends were diving into horror movies and scary stories. This is something that always appealed to me. Ever since reading scary stories to tell in the dark, I was hooked. This series of books came out when I was about 8 years old. They sold them at our Scholastic Book Fair. Looking back, these stories and illustrations were way too intense for 8 year olds in my opinion. But I sure did enjoy them. We all like to be scared. We like to feel something more than the everyday mundane drudge of life. My friend Philly and I enjoyed getting together to watch horror movies and scare each other with urban legends. We started doing this almost weekly, especially during the summer when school was out. Of course, this was pre-internet, so all we had media-wise was actually running a movie or physically going to the theater. And since most horror movies were R rated, we couldn't get in to see them. I'm sure to most millennials or post-millennials, this sounds like a nightmare scarier than any real life story. Because we got tired of running the same movies over and over, we often focused on urban legends, what we call creepypastas today. We might find some books at the library that had them, or we just made up our own. But we really wanted to feel some actual terror. I wish we would have just stuck with our stupid scary stories. I bet every group of friends had one of those Parker Brothers board games stashed. The infamous Ouija board. Just a simple game, a toy, really. They even used to advertise it. A board with the alphabet, numbers, yes, no, and goodbye. I suppose this was inevitable. Every kid has to learn for themselves that these are not to be played with, literally. And metaphorically, growing up in a God-fearing family, I knew this felt wrong. There was something about this board that just wasn't right. I also could see through the marketing strategy that Parker Brothers were targeting these specifically to children, like all board games. But this was different. They only wanted kids to play this, not adults. You played Monopoly and shoots and ladders with your parents. You sure as hell didn't play the Ouija board with them. I felt this was wrong, but I also didn't know anything for sure. I was 13. My current 35-year-old self has a hard time understanding what happened and why I dove into this knowing that the outcome would not be ideal. I found it, my buddy Phil said, under my sister's bed. This was the start of a series of events that would haunt me for quite a while. Of course was the board. We made sure no one was home when we pulled it out. There was an air of mischief around this thing. Certainly we couldn't deal with his sister finding us in her room and definitely not Philly's mom finding out what we were up to. The board was glossy and new. It looked like possibly we were the first to use it. The device that two or more people used to glide over the board, revealing the answers to your questions, was almost ivory. I wanted to research what this was called, but I don't even want to start down that rabbit hole online. If you've noticed, I don't even want to call it by its name simply referring to it as the board. I'll call the gliding thing the oracle for this story. We had only two sessions with the board that was enough to keep me away for 22 years. The first session was incident free. We asked a few silly questions, what our future held if we'd get married and have kids, stuff like that. Even though I'd never played this before, I still knew not to ask certain questions. Like what was the name of the person we were talking to? Maybe we figured that out from all the hours spent watching scary movies. It was the second session when things got weird. Me and I were going back and forth with the board, asking simple questions about our future lives. I remember asking where I'd live as an adult, and the board said Seattle. I was living 2,000 miles away from Seattle at the time. This is when I felt the aura of the board shift. The air became static, like a thunderstorm was brewing. One were the sky turned red. The oracle we used to piece out answers to our dumb questions had moved slowly before. Now it was jerking, almost skimming off the board as it flew to the next letter. I can tell you this about the game. It is real, and neither one of us was moving the oracle. My hands weren't even on it at some points, but back to the Seattle question. I was and I still am a huge baseball fan. I have rooted, unfortunately, for the Detroit Tigers for my entire life. The mid to late 90s was the explosion of Ken Griffey Jr. to Major League Baseball. I loved watching him play. I got his jerseys for a couple Christmases and birthdays. I'm sure most people know that Griffey played for the Seattle Mariners. I loved how that national S looked on that teal colored uniform. I started researching the city of Seattle, and I thought how cool it would be to live there. Do you see where this is going? This board was not plastic and glue to me anymore. There was something controlling it. Something powerful and dark that knew I had this particular city on my mind at this time. I didn't let on to my buddy what I was feeling. He didn't seem to let on that he was afraid either. So we kept going. The next round of questions is a blur to me. All I remember is the Oracle going mostly to know when we asked a question. Even if it wasn't a yes or no question that was required. Then I asked the last question that I would ever ask the Ouija. Don't get your hopes up. It was nothing profound or deep at all. This is what I asked. Would the Detroit Tigers ever win another World Series? The Oracle moved so fast to goodbye. I thought a tiny trail of fire would be on the board. I'll never forget looking at Philly and seeing what I'm sure was the exact same eye bulging mouth open expression that I had on my face. We knew that one of the rules of this game was when the board said goodbye, you put it away immediately. I think we even read about that in the instructions. We threw the board into its box, hustled to his sister's room as fast as two hostess cupcake and Mountain Dew filled teenagers could. Philly chucked the board under her bed. Like nothing happened. After a few breathless moments, we finally started to let out tiny little laughs, lighting up into big belly laughs as we hit the floor rolling. We were laughing out the nervousness, although kind of feeling dumb at how scared we got. After the madness finally started dying down, we moved on like nothing happened. I should have stated right from the beginning that it was late at night when we started playing. I'd say it was about midnight as cliche as that is. When the board said goodbye to us, it couldn't have been more than one in the morning. Philly lived in the country across the street from a cemetery. I know now it's really getting into cliche territory, but I swear it's true. There weren't many houses around. If you wanted to walk to your next door neighbor, you better plan for a good 20 minute hike. Well, finally we started to get tired from playing video games and we decided to step outside. We looked at the graveyard, noting how calm the night was. A large section of Philly's house was covered in rose bushes. They were wildly overgrown and not kept up. Needless to say, nothing would be able to get through those bushes without getting pretty diced up. We heard rustling, again the night was calm and I don't remember any wind at all. At first we could just hear the bushes, then we heard movement. To this day I do not know and I do not care to know what it was. It could have been an animal, but I highly doubt it. We knew something wasn't right and we bolted for his house. Even now, writing this, I can feel an eerie presence. We both knew somehow this was related to the board. Philly suggested we call it a night and try to get some sleep. I wish that was the end of the story. Just a few short hours later, we woke to a series of faint knocking sounds. I couldn't determine where they were coming from, but it sounded like it was outside the house. We both cautiously got up and moved through the kitchen to the front door. I slowly peeked outside and saw something that made my heart drop into my stomach. A man was standing right outside the door. He had creepy looking horn-rimmed glasses on, outdated even for the late 90s. Philly had a porch in the front that was raised about five feet up from the ground, and the man was on the ground, so we were actually looking slightly down at him. It's an image that's burned into my mind. He didn't move. He just stood there. We once again fled to his room and slammed the door shut. We didn't call the police or his mom. We just sat in the room not sure what to do. After a few minutes went by, we stupidly decided to go see if he was still there. He was gone. I successfully convinced myself that there really had been no man outside the house. I just couldn't handle what was happening. Philly did the same. Finally, day broke, and we dismissed the disturbing events of the previous night. I don't even think we discussed what had happened. About a week later, I got a call from Philly. He said he had a dream that we were playing the board, and a hand came up from the center and reached for his head. He said he tried to push himself away from the table, but he was moving in slow motion, like when you're trying to run away in a nightmare. The fingers on the hand were long and spidery. The skin was ashen gray. They skittered slowly up his face, lingered over his eyes, then grabbed a fistful of hair. Philly tried to scream, but no sound came. The hand began forcing his head down into the surface of the board. As Philly's chin was pulled through, it felt like the bitter cold of outer space. And when his mouth and nose disappeared into the board, all of the air was sucked out of his lungs. He couldn't breathe. He woke up gasping for air and felt pain on the top of his head where the thing had grabbed him. I hated to admit that, but I had the same dream. Right there, we decided to meet up and make a plan to get rid of the board. A few days later, my mom dropped me off at his house for a sleepover. When I arrived, Philly wasn't inside. This was before cell phones, so I didn't have the option to simply call him and see where he was. I checked out back, by the garage, and there stood Philly, with the board sitting atop a pile of kindling in a metal barrel. His mischievous grin told me what his plan was. We lit that sucker on fire. Nothing happened. Now I was really freaking out. We've all heard the stories of people attempting to burn a Ouija with no success. Philly wasn't phased, though. He pulled out a jerry can full of gasoline and doused it. Finally, the board erupted into flames and quickly burned to nothing but ash. It was over. As far as I can remember, nothing happened after that. We never spoke of anything we experienced that night. Over the years, I chalked it all up to an overactive teenage imagination. I may have told a handful of people once or twice, mainly just to tell a scary story around a campfire. I know that I've said this a few times, but I've always treated this like it never really happened. To me, this was all imagined. We did play the game, but the rustling bush, the man, none of that happened. Over the years, I've moved quite a distance away from Philly. We kept in touch, one of us calling the other a few times a year. Ten years ago, I even made the thousand mile trip to go see him. Fast forward another ten years and I decided to make the trip one last time to see my hometown and get together with Philly. He invited some people from the area and struck up a massive bonfire. In between bites of pizza and swigs of beer, I recounted the story of that night. I told him how I imagined the aftermath of our decision to use that board. I know you're gonna think this is crazy, but I thought there was a man standing outside your house that night. I said, Philly looked at me as stone cold as he could and said, Yeah, I remember that too. I remember it all. My blood went cold. My friend went on to confirm exactly what happened that night. Word for word, just like I remember. It was like we were both back there again 22 years ago. The Ouija is nothing to play around with. I haven't touched or looked at one in over two decades. How a piece of cardboard can summon some kind of evil from another realm is beyond me, but I know it can happen because it happened to me.