In honor of ~spooky~ season, we recently asked members of the BuzzFeed Community to share their real, scary experiences with a Ouija board — here are their bone-chilling responses:
1. "Not me, but my dad. When my sister and I were teenagers, we wanted to get one, and our mom said yes. When she mentioned it to my dad, he flipped out and said, 'No way, absolutely not, one of those things is never coming in this house.' My mom had never heard him so upset and asked him what the issue was. He refused to say anything and said the conversation was over. A few weeks later, he finally told my mom his story. When he was younger, he had a friend whose older sister and boyfriend used one. The boyfriend had asked if he would be rich (typical questions), and the board said, 'Yes.' Two years later, the guy was in a horrific car accident and ended up becoming paralyzed from the neck down. The accident was because of an issue with the car, and the family successfully sued the manufacturer. The guy was awarded millions. So he was rich, but confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life."
"When my dad and everyone else heard about it, all they could think of was the encounter with the board a few years prior."
2. "Not sure how much I believe in it, but I did have a creepy experience. My friend and I were using one in college. The board started spelling my boyfriend's name, then gibberish. Over and over again, his name then gibberish. We decided to write down what it spelled and ask my boyfriend about it. When we showed him, he grew concerned and then left us. Found out later, he called home and discovered his grandmother had died that day. The board was spelling a message to him phonetically (in another language) from her."
3. "I was 13 at a sleepover with some friends shortly before my grandma passed away from cancer. I asked the board, 'How much longer will grandma be around?' It pointed to '2.' Well, I ignored that in the moment. Then, because of my Christian upbringing, I got very bold and asked the board if it was controlled by Satan! I counted to three and told my friends to let go of the pointer piece, and it started moving on its own till the board floated up to about face level and started spinning. The board shot straight at my face. I just barely managed to duck in time. It hit the wall behind me and fell to the floor. When we got the guts to look at the board, the indicator pointed to YES. Two days later, my grandma succumbed to her cancer."
—Anonymous
4. "My friend and I were in our teens when we did this. We invited my younger sister (who was about 10 or 11) downstairs to the basement after we had set up candles and a homemade Ouija board. My friend and I put our hands on top of the planchette, closed our eyes, and moved it around the board...chanting, you know, for effect. The two of us couldn’t help but laugh while my sister was terrified. We told her it was her turn and to also put her fingers on top. We started the ritual again. My sister asked if anyone was there. The planchette moved to yes; my sister let go and started crying. I started sweating, and my friend backed up in shock. I know I didn’t move it, my friend said he didn’t move it, and my sister...I doubt she moved it."
"Being as freaked as we were, we crumpled everything up and went upstairs. The lights were all off (could’ve been a coincidence), so we grabbed a candle and sat in the middle of the living room. It was so quiet in the house, we didn’t have dogs, only cats, and we couldn’t see them. But we could hear footsteps walking up the stairs from the back of the house. We blew out our candles and ran outside. I called my mom and asked her to come home. I haven’t tried to play with a Ouija board since. Weird stuff happened in my house after that. We had a mirror fall off the wall and slide about five feet from the wall. I had a computer chair start to spin on its own. To this day, my friend swears there was someone sitting at the top of my basement stairs."
—Anonymous
5. "When I was a teenager, I would go to my grandma's, and she would have me make a Ouija board out of paper and a CD so I could communicate with my uncle who was stillborn. The Ouija board never worked when my grandma tried it, but it would work for me. Anyway, in the beginning, it did seem as though my uncle was communicating with us. The energy was very innocent and childlike. After a few times, though, the energy started to feel really heavy and dark, so I asked if I was still speaking with my uncle. The entity told me no. It said it had my uncle and that it was going to take me, too. As soon as it said that, I blacked out for what was only probably a few seconds, and the lightbulb in the dining room exploded. I burned that paper, broke the CD, and will never play with a Ouija board again!"
6. "My mother and her little sister had recently moved into a new house, an old Victorian built in the 1890s. This was the late '60s, and Ouija boards were all the rage. They contacted a spirit who called herself 'Mrs. Moon,' and she told them she lived in the house and that her husband had died of a heart attack after their only son died in WWI. After that, she said she took on boarders. She seemed friendly, but it freaked them both out. So, they went to the library, and the public records they found proved everything 'Mrs. Moon' had said."
"Flash forward to the '80s, my parents bought the house from my grandparents, and I ended up growing up there, too. I always felt a presence, even when alone. Things were always moved around when it made no sense. It wasn't until I was maybe 15 that my mom explained that so many weird things I experienced in my life, in that house, were 'Mrs. Moon.' She was a benevolent spirit by and large, but she was appreciably angry when we were about to move."
7. "I refuse to ever touch one, but an ex of mine and a couple of my friends used one when I was around. They decided to use it in an old graveyard in our town. Knowing it was a bad idea, I only went to make sure they were careful. They started using it, and I felt everything was just off. I could already sense that something wasn’t right. I tried to get them to stop. Nope, they wouldn’t until my ex asked if the entities would show themselves. I saw three different things — a dark figure, an older woman, and a child. One of my friends saw them, too, and immediately said we needed to say 'goodbye' before something happened. They did, and we all booked it with my friend shouting, 'YOU AREN'T ALLOWED TO FOLLOW US HOME! YOU ARE NOT WELCOME TO FOLLOW US!' We got in the car and drove off. After that, none of us spoke about it, and only recently, I brought it up with my friend, and she said that night still gives her chills."
8. "Had a sleepover in eighth grade for Halloween. While watching The Pit and the Pendulum, a very good friend and I started using a Ouija board. The spirit told us we were speaking to an evil spirit named Tom, then the planchette started going on its own, and my friend got a full-on gushing bloody nose. We stopped for the night, but after that, items in my room would be moved (like little porcelain statuettes). I made my mother burn the board after that. About 15 years later, a coworker was going to play with her Ouija board, and I told her to ask about that night and the name of my friend — the board answered the correct name!!!"
—Anonymous
9. "My mum did. She and my dad weren't getting on as well as they had previously. She and some friends had a Ouija party, and it indicated my dad was having an affair with our neighbor (which turned out to be true). For the next six months, though, we had a 'playful spirit,' or poltergeist, in the house. It terrified us kids. The local parish priest held an exorcism, and we never saw it again."
10. "In college, my floormate asked me to use the Ouija board to ask the college ghosts if they’d taken something of theirs. I did it in my darkened room with the door closed and locked. I saw something tall, shadowy, and covered in darkness reaching down to grab me in the mirror in front of me. I ran out of my room and waited for my roommate to come back before I went back in my room."
11. "Back in the early '80s, my friend Paul and I walked from his apartment to our other friend Jim's apartment in the same complex. Paul and I were both feeling something creepy there. We were then told that a group of people had been using a Ouija board there earlier. Paul and I felt that we needed to leave. As we headed back to his apartment, we both felt something following us, and we took off running as fast as we could, got to his apartment, slammed the door, and locked it. We didn't see anything, but we both knew that something frightening was after us."
—Anonymous
12. "This happened way back in the mid-1960s. I would have been 6 or 7 and my brother 4 or 5. Our mom was there with us. We were in the kitchen of our home. I don't know why we had a Ouija board. They were looked at differently in those days. We didn't really understand the danger. Just a fun game. So our mom was standing there watching us, and we started asking about our ancestors. We were little kids. We didn't know how to spell much. But it said we were from the Scottish clan of Stuarts, the line of royalty. We certainly did not know anything about Scottish royalty and being spelled Stuart, not Stewart. Mom was just reading the answers. Then the board said it was going to come visit us. It said it was flying over the Atlantic, then New York City, St. Louis, almost to our house. It said it was 'here.' Our mom was freaking out!"
"Then we started hearing a bunch of clatter and loud noises down the hallway toward the bedrooms. Mom got really scared and took the Ouija board out to the trash. I've always remembered it so clearly. It was so strange and scary."
—Anonymous
13. "I played with a friend at a sleepover, and we asked some standard questions, including who we would marry (I got Calvin, she got Josh — still TBD on those, I guess). But for weeks/months afterward, random objects would fall off cabinets and tables in our apartment, until the day my mom said out loud, 'Okay, whatever is in here needs to get the fuck out!' Then it stopped!"
14. "I was hosting a slumber party with my friends, and I took out a Ouija board. We all went to a Catholic school, and some of us (though not me) had pretty religious parents, so we figured it would be rebellious and fun. The spirit said its name was Colette. We asked Colette, 'Colette, where do you come from?' The board spelled out 'THE ROOF.' As this was spelled out, we heard a loud bang on the roof. My dad went up with a ladder to see what it was, but there was nothing there. We put it away after that!"
—Anonymous
15. "When I was younger, I did one with my neighbors in their sunroom. We were done playing; nothing crazy really happened until after the game. We left the room, closed and locked the door, and went to get food in the kitchen when we heard a huge crash from that room and things hitting the windows. We went to investigate, and the entire board, which was in the middle of the table when we had left it, had thrown itself across the room with broken pieces of it flown around. The only logical explanation I could think of was that their cat somehow managed to get in the room, but the door was closed, and it was still locked when we went to open it and see what the noise was about, and there was no cat in the room at the time."
16. "In 2016, my college roommate and I decided to get a Ouija board and try to communicate with a spirit. We ended up communicating with the spirit of a child, and it was very benevolent. We communicated with it for a while and then said, 'Goodbye' and properly ended the conversation. The next night, while my roommate was showering and I was across the room in bed, the TV turned on by itself. I brushed it off as an electrical issue. My roommate came out of the bathroom a few minutes later with this shocked look on her face and proceeded to tell me that she heard a knock on the door and me say her name just 30 seconds before. Except there was no way I could’ve done that and made it back into bed by the time she opened the door. We were freaked out but went to bed, and then at about 2 a.m., we woke up to a crashing sound and turned on the light to find the stapler thrown across the room. The next day we got rid of the Ouija board. Nothing else happened after that."
—Anonymous
17. "First, I want to emphasize my total support for abortion rights, lest this story is misinterpreted as chastising. But, unfortunately, this happened to me during college back in the '90s. My closest friends and I bought a Ouija board and started playing with it at my house. In one of the sessions, I asked the spirit we were playing with how they died. The response was: My mum killed me. So I followed with, who is your mum? And the board spelled my name, odd I thought, and immediately forgot about it. About six months later, I had an abortion. I only remembered the Ouija incident a few months afterward, and TBH, it freaked me out."
—Anonymous
18. "My mom had a Ouija board from the late '60s–early '70s that she had in college. It was always in our board game closet, and I think I played around with it a few times and asked my mom about it. She told me there was a spirit called 'Eddie' that she always talked to before. At some point, my parents rearranged things in the house, and the less used games got moved to the basement, so that's where the Ouija board ended up. A few years later, we were going on a family vacation and picking out some games from the upstairs game closet. Lo and behold, the Ouija board was upstairs. I thought it was weird but figured someone else brought it up and went on with my life. A couple of days later, my mom asked me if I wanted to bring the Ouija board with us since I brought it upstairs. We asked every person in the house, and no one admitted to moving it back upstairs. We decided Eddie must have wanted to come to Florida with us."
—Anonymous
19. "For context, we lived in a very haunted house and collected oddities (including many antique Ouija boards). My daughter was having her 9th birthday 'princess' party and wanted to play Ouija. The party was winding down, and my hubby and I were supervising, so I said OK. Starts out normal, Ouija is active and asks if they want to play 'hide and seek.' Well, of course, they do. Except the items the board was asking to find were things I did not know were in the house... A black bead at the bottom of a lamp... A doll whose hat had fallen askew... Also, by the fourth or fifth 'seek,' the planchette was whipping around the board so fast we could barely keep track of the words."
"So, I told the girls it was probably time to stop. 'No! No! We're having fun,' they laughed. And then the next words spelled out were, 'You stop you die.' So I was full on 'Nope, board goes away.' Well, the board just went nuts spelling, 'I will hurt you,' over and over until I reached over, pulled the planchette off the board, and snapped it closed. We did not play with the Ouija board in that house ever again."
—Anonymous
20. "It all began one night when I was 10. My 17-year-old sister was babysitting me that night. My sister suggested we play a game, but this was no ordinary game, it was a Ouija board. We asked various questions, and afterward, I went to bed. I had never played this game before, so I don't even know if my sister played it correctly. As I lay in my bed that night, I started to get sleepy. The light from the living room was lightly showing into my room, as my door was open. As I started to close my eyes, I saw this shadow figure standing at the foot of my bed, and it seemed to have a rat's head with red eyes. I jumped out of bed and ran into the living room, and it followed me. I was yelling at my sister, 'Don't you see it?!' She stated she did not see anything. It disappeared."
—Anonymous
21. Finally... "My friends and I played with one in fourth or fifth grade. We asked when the world will end, and it said 2052."
