Ouija board

[BlueSeagull]

Reading another thread where OP daughter believes she is seeing a ghost, lots of the advice was it a medical issue there’s no such thing as ghosts etc. OP updated that her daughter disclosed her and her friends had used an ouija board and they were all upset as a result. I have never used one I am too skeptical (people close to me and I have had experiences that have no logical explanation) intrigued if anyone has used one ? Did anything happen?

You can even get unofficial Ouija boards for Barbie. Not produced by Mattel or Hasbro, so makers might get in trouble, but it'll be a copyright infringement case they summon, not a spirit.

If the glass spelt out the name of your tutor then you were the one unconsciously pushing it. I know it feels "real" but it really isnt. For example, we asked it who I would marry. It spelt out the name of my current crush. What a surprise! I wasn't pushing it and I don't believe the others were on purpose but it's easy to do it without realising. And it really feels as though the glass is running away with your hand on it. Obviously I didn't marry that person 😆

I've met up recently with the girls i used to do it with and they think it was working still. So they weren't pushing it on purpose and nor was I. Yet it spelt out the name of my crush which means one of us, or more likely all of us, were pushing it unconsciously.

Even if you believe in woo you must surely concede that the spirits are subconsciously making the participants push the glass around without them realising? Because if the spirits were actually doing the physical work themselves, they wouldn’t need anyone’s finger to be actually touching the glass for it to work. You could all just sort of hover your fingers around the glass. Once you accept that the players are the ones pushing the glass, you can be open to non-woo explanations for it.

There's nobody more than me that woukd like them to be really speaking to spirits but they don't. Id love there to be ghosts, I've been to graveyards, abandoned houses etc late at night at a teen. I've tried to conjure dead people. It's all utter bollocks im afraid. Ghosts don't exist and ouija boards do work but they don't commune with spirits.

Ideomotor movement absolutely, 100% feels like you aren't pushing it. People aren't (usually) lying when they say they weren't pushing it, they honestly feel like they're not, but they are. Derren Brown's necklace thing really does feel like it's swinging by itself but it isn't.

We would do it as teenagers at school, it completly freaked me out and I would have trouble sleeping but I scare very easily - hate anything remotely scary on tv. Looking back now am sure one of the girls moved it as she liked the drama of it all.

This has also brought back another memory from school days which we all did which was the ring on the string. You would dangle it above an open palm and ask questions, think it it swang on a circle it was no and across the palm it was yes.

Yes I’ve used one twice - nothing happened because it’s all a load of nonsense.

Have you noticed that lots of people who claim they have had “terrifying” experiences with them will never elaborate because they’re apparently “too traumatised to talk about it”? Load of shite

I'm a complete non believer however around 30 years ago some friends and I used a ouja board. The glass moved & spelled out a name. I honestly don't think any of my friends moved the glass as they are not the sort of people to do that & there was no pressure on the glass from any of them, we just all had our fingertips lightly touching it. It was weird to say the least

The Ouija board is a victorian parlour game invented by Elijah Bond, whose gravestone is a large granite one - the victorians loved spiritualism and it tapped into that. The patent was taken over by Hasbro in the early 1900's - its a toy, made of cardboard, that has no more power to summon the spirits than any other spiritualist device.

Our "spirit" or soul, our personality, is just a succession of electrical impulses in the brain, a vastly complex biological computer if you will, but within a very short time after our heart finally stops, so do they, and that's it folks - its all over, no coming back, just nothing - and a bit of hasbro cardboard can't reverse that.

Ahh, I didn't know there was a name for it. But from experience, this is exactly what happens.

I’m too terrified to mess with anything like that but I do remember Darren Brown did a show demonstrating how they are fake. He took some uni students to somewhere haunted and told them a story about a dead girl who was said to haunt the place. They were all communicating with her through the board it was spelling her name etc. then at the end he brought the girl in alive and well to prove that it was all autosuggestion and they were moving the glass themselves subconsciously. I found it really interesting but I still wouldn’t mess with one. My grandma always told a story that my uncle had been playing with one with his friends and an entity appeared in the kitchen and he got out his rosary beads (I’m quite intrigued wondering why he had those at the party to be honest) and it went away. Whether it really happened or not I don’t know but it certainly put me off for life having being told age 7 not to mess with them.

What's TAAT?

Thread about a thread.

I remember at high school our class, out of the blue, being given a very strong lecture about the dangers of Ouija boards including a warning about opening doors you couldn't close. It was the one and only time anything like that was ever mentioned. It terrified me and stayed with me forever.
Looking back I wonder what prompted it. There were rumours (of course) that a girl, who had left school suddenly, had become possessed or had "gone mad" and been sent to a psychiatric hospital.
It's the first time I have thought of that in years but Ouija boards still scare me to such an extent that I would never touch one and previously warned all my children and their friends when they were in their teens against dabbling with them.

Ouija boards are copyrighted and manufactured by the Hasbro toy company which in itself makes me dubious they can act as a gateway for the undead.

I can’t believe people are still whipping up hysteria about ouija boards based on something someone else once said had happened to them years ago when using one. That’s like not going to see your GP because someone you know did and turned out to be terminally ill!

Yes. I don’t believe in ghosts etc but it really scared me as a teenager and I was petrified for weeks. It is scary what you own brain can do and how your senses can be tuned into sounds/ smells etc when you think something paranormal is potentially going on. It can be dangerous - especially when vulnerable young teenagers start messing around with it - not because of ghosts but because of the mental health impact.

It was never designed for ghosts, the point is that it reveals the subconscious. However of course when children play they will collectively encourage it to say things to scare each other, then all deny it and all scare themselves.

Reminds me of the crying Mary statue in Derry girls. Kids feed off their own hysteria sometimes. She doesn’t actually see a ghost but she had herself convinced she does and now the story is bigger than the truth.

Yes, at uni. It was a very strange experience I wouldn’t want to repeat!

They don't summon spirits, but with the right sort of personality and mindset (there is a reason these terrifying experiences usually happen with teenagers and students and not among pensioners) they can put a person in a very suggestible state, scare the bejesus out of them and have them seeing things and running scared for weeks. The belief, the mindset, is the power. For that reason, anyone who isn't very very firmly clear on how they work and what ideomotor movement is (and such people tend not to be interested) should leave them alone. They won't summon any ghosts but they will mess with your mind and that can have terrible effects.

Surely the other people would be able to tell if someone was pushing it?

I would never do one either or be around others who were doing one. As a teen I left somewhere before when others I was with said they were going to do one. A family member told me they did one and the glass flew off the board and smashed against a wall. This family member wouldn't have lied to me.

They open doors nobody wants to open.

I personally wouldn’t and told my kids not to either, mainly because of the reasons above.

There’s an interesting documentary called A Cursed Man that explores these topics, basically a film maker goes out of his way to get cursed by various occult practitioners to see what happens…