My parents used to tell us kids to never use a Ouija Board because Satan's Angels work them. My Uncle was suppose to have a Ouija Board that was quite active and even now (50 years later) it still gives me the chills.

I never saw the Ouija board. Hi it was suppose to be worked by a devil named Fred.

Anyways - do you believe they work.

I only played with a ouija board once, in 1962, at a party in Bountiful, UT. I was a bit snooty about having the priesthood and thought it was MY priesthood that kept the little guide-thingy from moving when my fingers were on it.

I was a bit of a fuckin' know it all as a wee freshman in college...

I believe Ouija boards work when at least one of the people touching the plastic thing with the clear lens in the center physically manipulates it. Otherwise the plastic thing wouldn't need anyone touching it to make it move.

I know you'll find believers, but it's a simple kids' spelling activity and nothing more in my opinion.

Exactly. If the spirits are moving the planchette, why would they need human hands on it? If anything, they humans would make it harder to move, or manipulate it.

My best friends as a kid were three sisters who lived up the street. They were Catholic. I was sort of generic Protestant. None of us had been told that Ouija boards were evil.

I forget now how we got hold of one, but we spent hours having fun with it. I remember deliberately manipulating it to give silly answers. The other girls caught on, and we had so much fun, teasing each other!!

Our parents never got upset about it.

themaster Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Anyways - do you believe they work.

They never worked for ME (the very few times I tried, when I was growing up)...but this is just one more of the many OTHER things which have never worked for me (but appear to work for other people)...like Tarot cards, and pendulums, and regular card decks, and crystal balls, and coins of all kinds (historical coins as well as coins in common use now), and the I-Ching...

By the time I was about ten or eleven, I knew---when it came to ANY divination tool---that I had NO talent whatsoever!!!

My life since then has universally (100%) supported my childhood self-observation...I am truly and totally hopeless in any of these areas.

Which was kind of weird, since I grew up in a family (the maternal side of my family) who did this kind of thing frequently, either among themselves as a fairly regular family activity, or when some kind of expert in any of these areas was visiting our area (which frequently meant that they visited my relatives too...my aunt was kind of a "must see" friend to a good many of them), and the expert-in-whatever-it-was either gave readings to us, or demonstrated some technique or another.

My maternal relatives (almost all of them) would swear that most or all of these divination tools worked in their lives, and to SOME extent this was more-or-less what I observed, but they NEVER worked when I was either the do-er, OR the do-eee...not even one time that I can recall.

:) :) :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2016 12:49AM by Tevai.

I watched a group of people use one at a party.

I wasn't impressed. Either the spirits didn't know how to spell worth a darn, or there weren't spirits. Let me explain: seemingly random sequences of letters came up, interspersed with numbers, and an occasional yes or no (they get their own spot on the board).

However, there were some people who were looking for a message from the grave were really freaked out by it, because they weren't moving the planchette. But they felt it move. That's the beauty of a device like that: if a few people have their hands on it, they wouldn't know if someone was applying a little pressure. I thought it looked like one of the people WAS doing that.

So what happened was people found meaning in the letters that DID come up. Maybe it was the first letter of someone's name who had passed on, or you could make a phonetic spelling out of the letters. Or a sentence out of the random letters. Maybe that 6 could be a b . . .

Maybe I just wasn't feeling 'the spirit'. I had that problem in the church, too. ;-)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2016 12:35AM by imaworkinonit.

Again with the Ouija boards! And here I repeat what I posted long ago. If they really work, then they have the potential to satisfy all of humanity's energy requirements. Think about it- a totally free source of energy that is operated merely by thirteen year old girls. Entropy be damned! Its power comes from outside our physical universe- so our universe is not a closed system after all...

Just make really big ones at construction sites, etc. and put those teen-aged operators to work!

I was a real nobody at Owen J. Roberts middle school in Pennsylvania. For some reason, the class Vice President, a blond kid named Bob, took an interest in me. He invited me to visit his farmhouse one Saturday. I couldn't believe my luck. Maybe I wasn't a loser like my father said.

So I hiked the four miles to Bob's farmhouse. His parents were gone. He wanted to play Ouija board. I said sure. The board features the alphabet laid out in the shape of a bow. The words yes and no are prominent. What you do is you place a plastic cursor called a planchette on the board. Then all players put one or two fingers on the planchette. A question is asked of the spirits, and then the planchette begins to move on its own to point at letters and spell out answers. Unless a player is cheating, which is impossible to detect.

So Bob asked is there a spirit near? The planchette went to yes. Who are you? Bob asked. Then the planchette said something about the creek and the burial of a Confederate soldier. Bob said we should go to the creek and look. So we walked down to the nearby creek and the bank was all loose dirt. Bob dug into it with his fingers and immediately found a brown glass jar. It contained two human teeth. "Oh my God!" said Bob, "can you believe it, Don?" Bob was actually waving his arms. The cap to the jar was plastic.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2016 01:02AM by donbagley.

donbagley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The cap to the jar was plastic.

:D :D :D

This is a wonderful story, Don!!!

This story makes me think that Joseph Smith might have LOVED to have a Ouija board!

As a kid we used a bottle cap. It "worked". That's why i was perplexed when i saw the original 'game piece'.

One of the best conversation pieces ever. That's about all mine is good for. I'm not too superstitious (like Mormonism) but I'm consciously open to not only what I see but that also which I may not. The conscious mind is powerful. So is the unconscious mind (don't mind).

Sure they do!

Along with peep stones and divining rods. Someday, the one belonging to BY will come out of the church's secret vaults.

I've been told they never work if everyone using the planchette is blindfolded.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2016 01:10AM by PapaKen.

I recall having read that there was no problem with being blindfolded - after all they knew where the numbers and letters were.

However, when THE BOARD WAS REVERSED, the words were all garbage.

The *only* time myself along with some high school friends tried playing it in their basement hangout the little hand held device was literally flying around the board answering each of our questions that no one else in the room knew the answers to, and then some.

We weren't controlling it at all. It was flying around that board like it knew shorthand, and we were speed reading to keep up. The ouija told us it was an evil spirit, and the bible is true. It also told us it wasn't a happy spirit and it didn't want us to be either.

It also ID'd two undercover cops who were working in our high school at the time (twin brothers,) for the FBI as plainclothes detectives pretending to be high school students.

When I went to school the next day I asked one of them if he knew so and so from Pocatello, (that's where the ouija told us they were from,) and he went into shock that I would even know he wasn't from where he said they were from. They high tailed from school that day, and I knew it had something to do with their cover being blown by the ouija. They were narcotics detectives.

The ouija gave us the birthdates of our family no one else knew (they were our control questions to make sure no one person was manipulating it in the room, as we didn't know each others answers would be.) Every question we asked came back affirmed.

It then went out on a whim by saying I would be killed by my 22nd birthday in a gun fight in a bank robbery. When it started getting all creepy on us, the four girls playing around the board got spooked and ran out from the basement family room to get away from that bleeping game.

No, I didn't die at 22. But the person it said I would die in a bank robbery with did die the year before in a murder suicide. After he murdered his wife he killed himself, with a 357 Magnum. I was 21 when he died. He'd been my boyfriend when I was 15 and was a fugitive felon from the law at the time of his death.

His spirit came back for me soon after he died btw. The neighbors in my apartment building around me felt an evil presence in each of their apartments the night before he found his way to my apartment. He made it inside each of their bedrooms. My next door neighbor told me she felt the evil spirit in her bedroom closet. On the same night my downstairs neighbor saw an outline of a hand next to her bed as she slept next to her husband. The hand was groping for her in the dark. They hadn't heard and didn't know of my past boyfriend's murder-suicide until after they'd shared that with me. The night after the same spirit tried to scare them, it attempted to come into my room but as God is my judge there was an invisible force - a light force surrounding me in my bedroom that would not let it past my bedroom door. I could see the outline of the groping hand in the dark, but my guardian angel did not let it get past into my bedroom that night. (My neighbors and I did not know of each others experiences until a week or two after they had occurred. That's when we traded info, not before!)

Right before my ex-boyfriend had died he'd called me up and asked me to meet him for drinks. We hadn't seen each other in five years, and I had a child by him I'd given up for adoption when I was a teenager. He wanted to know if things didn't work out between him and his wife, would I marry him?

I looked at him and just shook my head no. I didn't love him anymore, and hadn't since I'd been in high school. I wasn't the reason for his suicide, but he came back looking for me anyway.

His wife was as sweet as apple pie. Nobody deserved what he did to her. Their four-year old son found both bodies the next morning.

The evil force of the ouija is very real when it is actually working as a channeling device with the spirit world.

My TBM grandmother never believed in ouija boards and refused to have anything to do with them because of the evil spirits associated with them. Once she walked into a room where some women were playing with one. It stopped as soon as she entered the room. They asked it why did it stop? It answered them "Because someone in this room does not believe."

That person was my grandmother. She also didn't have anything to do with tarot cards, or other occult stuff. She avoided it like the plague.

She did keep her bibles face up, in the open in her home though. She believed that helped keep good spirits around and protection from evil ones.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2016 08:17AM by Amyjo.

Wow! those stories are really scary. How the other world knows parts of the future mixed up with falsities is very strange.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2016 07:48AM by poopstone.

I'm not saying it wasn't real, but I see a lot of room for a prank in that story.

1) not your house or board. Even if nobody was touching it, they can be rigged to work with magnets.
2) "control" questions decided upon in advance
3) evil spirit HONESTLY telling you up front that it is "an evil spirit" - wouldn't it try to deceive you?
4) are evil spirits actually privy to all truth so you can ask them anything and they will know?

A more believable test would be:
1) Your house, your board
2) Put the board on the FLOOR
3) Nobody touches the board
4) No so-called "control" questions. Just ask a question that you know only you know yourself.
5) No 13-year old girls allowed - they have special powers



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2016 08:52AM by seekyr.

seekyr Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm not saying it wasn't real, but I see a lot of
> room for a prank in that story.
>
> 1) not your house or board. Even if nobody was
> touching it, they can be rigged to work with
> magnets.

No one in our room was rigging *it*. It didn't need rigging. It worked all by its lonesome. Guess you've never been around an actual Ouija board game in motion.

> 2) "control" questions decided upon in advance

No control questions were *decided* upon in advance. We didn't even know we were going to play ouija until we did.

> 3) evil spirit HONESTLY telling you up front that
> it is "an evil spirit" - wouldn't it try to
> deceive you?

Why don't you ask a functioning ouija board yourself, and let it answer you? It's the only time I ever played with the board, but no one was operating it there but itself. Our fingers were barely touching the plankette. Or whatever the thingy is called.

> 4) are evil spirits actually privy to all truth so
> you can ask them anything and they will know?

You assume to know more than they do or whatever spirits are in a room while a ouija *game* is in session. Some use it as a game. Others use it as a medium. We were using it as a game and it acted like a medium.


> A more believable test would be:
> 1) Your house, your board
> 2) Put the board on the FLOOR
> 3) Nobody touches the board

> 4) No so-called "control" questions. Just ask a
> question that you know only you know yourself.
> 5) No 13-year old girls allowed - they have
> special powers

The control questions were by each one of us, that no one else knew the answer to. Other questions were a free for all, and it answered them as they were asked, one by one. Part as Poopstone says, was a mixed bag. Some of the answers like my future being killed in a bank robbery was thankfully wrong. But the man I was to be killed in a bank robbery with did die from gun violence before I turned 22, and if I had been married to him he'd have taken me out instead of his wife at that time. He was a fugitive felon when he died, and quite capable of robbing a bank. I literally dodged a bullet with that one. :/

No they/we weren't 13 year old girls. We were high school age, everyone in the room, except the spirit that spooked us out of there. We really don't know who or what that was!

So you're a skeptic. You weren't there. I was, and am giving an eye witness account of what transpired based on the actual event. Granted it was more than a generation ago, but the memory is still lucid, and what I shared hasn't changed from what happened. The only thing I left out were details because we didn't log them in a journal.

I'd be more leery of grownups running a ouija with a group of teenagers than the teenagers that were there.

I don't know what might have happened if there'd been a skeptic in our midst.

I only know it didn't work for my grandmother not because she didn't believe in the mystical powers of the ouija board for mediums and spiritists. She did. It didn't work in her presence because she wouldn't have anything to do with them because they were real.

Based on my experience, I have no reason to doubt why it stopped working in my grandmother's presence. It worked for us because we weren't skeptics or at the time very religious. We were all LDS, but inactive and just party girls having a good time until it spooked us really good, we got up and left because we were scared of the ouija. That part wasn't funny at all. Only until we saw daylight outside their house, and the upstairs did we begin to feel safe again.

No one was harmed physically. But whatever happened was very real and a power we or you cannot explain away.

A mystic or spiritist would have been right in their mecca. We were out of our league, and that's why we ended it there and then.

I haven't played the ouija board since then. Have no desire to. My grandma's advice works for me. My children talked me out of buying one for them when they were growing up because I was feeling daredevil and wanted to see what would ouija say after our leaving LDS? They made me take it back to the store because they didn't want it in the house.

(I musta taught em well?)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/04/2016 09:34AM by Amyjo.

I haven't used one, but some of my family have had experiences. My dad asked what is the first letter of the girl I'll marry? (And this was many years before he married) It was absolutely right!

My Grandmother played it while she was in college with her roommates and some mist came up from under the table and some hands grabbed their ankles (Beetle juice style, I guess?)

Only played it once...with some people I wasn't that close to and who knew basically nothing about me and when I asked it some questions about my family it got pretty weird.

RB

Yup, I know that feeling all too well!

+1000

A Ouija Board cannot spell out messages without human intervention. The planchette (indicator) must be guided by the fingers of at least one of the operators.

Ouija Boards "work" through subconscious ideomotor movements by one of the operators as was pointed out by Dave the Atheist. Understandable responses come from the subconscious minds of the operators. Very few of the responses have been at all useful.

Whether or not the so-called "spirits of the dead" are able to communicate with the subconscious minds of the living is another matter entirely and has never been convincingly demonstrated to have happened.

the B.S. is strong in this thread.

Yes, it is time to put on the hip boots!

My uncle had a Quija Board and the evil spirit that worked it was named Fred. Fred claimed to have been part of the 1/3 that followed Satan out of Heaven. Fred said he would sometimes tell the truth so you would believe his lies. All of the stories about Fred and the Ouija Board came from my parental units. I never saw the Ouija Board.

The funny part - all of the stories were about how the church was true.

It would be just like Lucifer to want you to believe that too!

:/

One of the main reasons the Ouija Board has never been proven to actually receive "messages from the dead" is the simple fact that the information received is already known by at least one of the operators.

Tell me next weeks winning lottery numbers and I may just get interested. Other than that....

I see these in the same category as dowsing rods, psychic (shamanistic) surgery, seances, Christian Science healing, and UFO's: scientific, verifiable confirmation is somewhere between slim and none, yet there is a heck of a lot of anecdotal testimony, often from otherwise reliable people, that is hard to dismiss outright. Much of it can be explained away, but there is that small nagging element which can't.

I don't buy into the proponents' explanation that some people are "tuned in" to otherwise undetectable energy, powers, or spirits.

I guess I see 98% of the above as some kind of applied superstition. The remaining 2% may be authentic phenomena, and if so, is probably supernatural, occultic, and should be avoided--just to play it safe.

Interesting we haven't heard from Spiritist on this subject.

caffiend Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Interesting we haven't heard from Spiritist on
> this subject.

I think we already have a fairly strong idea of what will be posted!

Isn't this supposed to be a whimsical thread for those who have had experience with ouija boards versus the skeptics who haven't?

Does every thread need to become a debate of atheist beliefs over non-atheists beliefs as to whether spirits exist or not, and whether evil spirits or good spirits have any influence over us whether through a ouija board game or other means?

The question was asked do ouija boards work?

For those who answered truthfully based on experience why should anyone have to defend their beliefs one way or the other?

So you believe or you don't. What else is new? Why argue over things neither side can prove?

I answered to be a voice for ouija because I've seen how it works, and it defies logic.

For those who want to believe someone is subconsciously moving the needle around the board, maybe that happens sometimes. I haven't used it enough to know based on my observations.

What we saw when I played with it was something else, and it was very mysterious but spot on that no one in the room had any control over the movement of the pointer as it flew around the board. It was practically flying.

For some things there doesn't have to be explanations for everything mysterious there is.

For some of you you wouldn't believe in a sunset if you didn't see it with your own eyes. What if you were blind? Would it make it any less real to those who can see?

They really work—if you know how to use them!

When I was a kid, I used one to block the entrance/exit to the Snoopy-style doghouse my dad built for our new puppy. Once I had him barricaded in there, the puppy finally settled down and slept through the night.

The purpose of a ouija board is to make money for its manufacturer; they work fine

I played with one at a birthday party around age 13. It said I would marry the handsome Dutch exchange student staying a block over from home, would have 5 daughters, would set a race car driving record and become a news reporter. Sooooo, no. I married a handsome American from 3 states away, had all boys, got a speeding ticket once and have never been on TV. I would say the dead or hellish minions we summoned were pretty poor prognosticators. Or maybe they just didn't exist. And I was SO stoked at the thought of being Mrs. Ten Dijk.

Ouija boards were on my TBM mother's banned list, along with playing cards and ghost stories and saying "Bloody Mary" in the mirror. Oddly it was because she believed such things did actually work by the hand of the devil.

So when I went to a friend's house and she brought out a Ouija Board, of course she was able to scare me into tears. My behavior became a joke to the neighborhood kids. And I was very confused at Girl's Camp when we told scary stories around the camp fire about the ghost of Sweet Susie Sour Blood.

It took me a long time to be able to really enjoy horror stories and movies. To laugh at my fear. I'd say that's been a benefit of my recovery from Mormonism.

Ouija boards are very silly. Buffy the Vampire Slayer became one of my favorite TV shows. My kids read Goosebumps and loved them. Even my mom changed and is enjoying Bridge games at her assisted living center.

Isn't life funny?