Ouija Board Contacts
A Ouija board, also known as a Talking Spirit Board, is a flat board with letters and other symbols painted on it. For decades, it was used by many people from all walks of life to contact the dead. Although its popularity peaked at the latter part of the nineteenth century, it is still manufactured (these days by Parker Brothers, who has trademarked the term “Ouija”) and used today in attempts to contact ghosts and spirits. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it has also been used to contact “demonic” entities and, in some cases, extraterrestrials. For however long its lifespan, the Ouija board hasn’t changed very much; it still consists of a highly polished board with numbers and letters printed on it and a planchette, or indicator, which can mover freely across the board with a minimal of friction.[1] A very similar device is described in the Greek historical account of the philosopher Pythagoras of Samos in 540 bc and was used to communicate with the gods and spirits of nature.
In the late 1800s, mystics claimed that in order for the board to work correctly, it had to made out of wood from a weeping willow tree; the letters must be painted in red; and, most importantly, the board had to be blessed by a priest sprinkling holy water while reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Today, the boards are made out of everything from pressed wood to plastic, and in today’s world, I am doubtful Parker Brothers calls in the services of a Catholic Priest to bless the boards as they roll off the production line.
In the twenty-first century, the use of the Ouija board is controversial; some claim usage is very dangerous because it can avail one to “evil” spirits (Djinn?) from other planes of existence. I have investigated a great number of cases where a series of paranormal events began to take place after the use of a Ouija board; terrifying events that in some cases, never went away. I do know for sure that well-noted author and close friend the late John G. Fuller used a Ouija board while doing research for his 1976 book The Ghost of Flight 401. Although skeptical, John claimed to have gotten amazing results when the board was used with a psychic he had worked with in the past.
I have also used a Ouija board in investigations of supposedly haunted houses. In a séance-like setting, the pointer moved so rapidly it actually surprised me. While my hands were on the pointer with another person, I said, “At the count of three, take your hands off.” To my surprise, the pointer continued to move for about two seconds on its own. We repeated this several times and I was convinced that an outside force was pushing it during the session. I and everyone else present during this session had no negative experiences from use of the board, but others have. The case that illustrates this concerns a young man by the name of Bruce, his sister, friends, and a multitude of paranormal experiences that began after he and his friends decided to “play” with a Ouija board one night.
Night Terror (Bruce’s Story)
“I was born in England and came to the United States when I was fifteen years old. At seventeen, I went back to England to spend time with my family who owned a pub. One day in 1977, in the early evening, a friend of mine made a Ouija board from a mirror and drew letters on it with a marker and used lard to make it slippery. We then found an old shot glass, turned it upside down, and used it as a pointer. It took awhile for us to get it started, but we asked some questions, at first it moved very slowly. Then as time went on, the indicator started moving so fast we had to have somebody write down the letters so that we could keep up with it. It was giving us quite a great deal of information and it seemed like there were different personalities communicating with us. Sometimes it spelled out words in modern English and then a new entity would take over and start spelling out words in old English.
“After awhile, whoever was communicating with us would use the extra lard to make patterns and draw a face. Sometimes, when we asked a question that it didn’t want to answer, the shot glass would tip over on its side and stay there until we changed the subject. It drew a face I thought at the time looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. When I think about it today, it was more like that of a reptilian extraterrestrial with huge eyes, scaly skin, and a small mouth. My sister took some photos of it and they didn’t come out, but strangely, every other photo she took did. We tried using the board again the next day and once again used the lard as a lubricant. A short time into the session it drew a picture of a solar system that looked like ours, and they said that they were from another planet that was on the other side of the sun that we didn’t know about. They told my sister and her husband that in Kent (England) there was a natural time window, and if they went there that weekend the aliens would appear to them. In the days that followed, my sister’s husband started acting very strange and finally had a nervous breakdown so they never went. After that, my sister never wanted to talk about what happened, and she stopped using the board to get messages.
“My friend and I continued to use the Ouija for several weeks, but weird stuff started happening around the apartment every time we used it. We heard strange sounds that came from nowhere and things fell off of shelves and sometimes flew across the room. This started to take place every time we used the homemade Ouija. During one session, it got so violent that my friend got scared and said that she wanted to stop. I picked up a bible that was next to me and placed it close to the board; when I did the words KILL spelled out. Then it said GET RID OF BIBLE, KILL. This went on for ten minutes, and I finally said that I wasn’t going to put the bible away. As I picked the bible up, it flew out of my hands and smacked against the wall. The bible hit the wall with such a force that we just sat there startled for at least several minutes without a sound and just stared at each other. It was clear that whoever we were communicating with meant business and didn’t want that bible around. Then the glass that we used as a pointer emitted a bluish white spark and shattered in my hands into a thousand different pieces.
“Things started happening after that night: it was a two-room apartment and my roommate told me that I was stiff on the bed one night and bouncing up and down as if something was shaking me. We often would wake up in the middle of the night or walk into the house after being away and smell a strong scent of burning sulfur of which we could not find the source. There was always a presence in the house that seemed evil; I told my friend not to leave me alone in the dark because whatever this thing was, it was after me and wanted to get me alone.
“Weird things continued to happen for a few days. Then one night in the early morning hours, my friend and I woke up at the same moment and saw a green circle of light moving across the room. When we saw it, a feeling of terror grew in both of us and I felt that if the light moved to the center of the room something was going to open up and it was going to be very bad for the both of us. I then got out of bed and turned on the lights and said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, I will not use the board again and look into this stuff anymore, leave me alone.’ After I said this, the green light vanished and that was it, nothing happened for six months until I moved back to America. While in the United States I experienced what could be called dimensional contacts.”
I would like to stop Bruce’s story here since most of what took place after he came to the United States did not involve a Ouija board but was a series of dimensional alien contacts. It could be that the use of the board opened or created a conduit for these entities to continue contacting him. His further experiences will be presented in my next book, which details my investigations into the contact phenomenon.
Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP)
When I see people on a television paranormal reality show walking around a cemetery with a portable digital recorder asking, “Is there any one here who wants to talk with us,” I can’t help but laugh. Even if it was possible to communicate with those who have passed over, do these people really believe that the spirit of a deceased person would be hanging around the place where their body is buried? Over the centuries, many have tried to communicate with the dead with no
success. Recently, a number of researchers have claimed to have received voice communication on their recorders and modified radios, but the evidence is weak at best. I must mention again that UFO investigators (including myself) have recorded messages, strange noises, and voices on tape recorders while conducting interviews with UFO witnesses decades before ghost hunters. Electronic voice phenomena was more frequent if the person was a contactee or had claimed alien abduction. UFO investigators and ghost hunters alike have to consider that taped anomalies on recordings may not be from the dead, but from intelligent beings from another reality playing a favorite game called “Fool the Human.”
Human attempts from this physical reality to contact another realm of existence go back hundreds of centuries to the oracles of ancient Greece and Rome. Druid priests believed there was one special night of the year in which the past, present, and future coexisted, and it was possible only at this time to talk with those who had died and yet to be born. They also believed that doorways opened up to another reality where spirits would enter our world and interact with
humans. Likewise, it was also thought possible to journey into their reality, but this was considered to be extremely dangerous. Today, we still acknowledge this special day of the ancient Celts and call it Halloween. According to my research, a peak in paranormal reports takes place on or around this day—is it just a coincidence, or are portals opening up at this time?
There are unconfirmed stories that Thomas Edison was working on a communication device to contact the dead. However, most Edison experts would contest this point and say the story about the genius trying to contact the spirit world is only a myth.[2] In 1899, while experimenting with a large electromagnetic generator (now called the Tesla coil), the great self-taught scientist Nikola Tesla claims that—after the device was turned off—to have heard a series of clear dots and dashes on his radio monitoring equipment. He said that the signals “were of a clear order that could not be traced to any known source.”[3] Had Tesla’s coil produced enough electromagnetic energy to create a small wormhole on the quantum level allowing beings in another dimension to send a message?
While on board his yacht in the Mediterranean in summer 1921, the inventor of the wireless telegraph Guglielmo Marconi claimed to have detected “unidentifiable radio signals” he said sounded like voices and strange sounds in the distant static.[4],[5] He also said some of the sounds he heard were very similar to the same type of signals Tesla had detected in 1899. Stranger still, Marconi was very surprised when he heard dots and dashes he was able to decode as the Morse letter “S,” the exact duplicate of the first radio transmission that was sent over the English Channel from South Foreland, England, to Wimereux, France, on December 12, 1901. He speculated that somebody was trying to communicate by sending his message back to him. Since no one was using the frequencies Marconi was experimenting with at the time, there would be no explanation for what he heard. Marconi was respected by his peers as being a down- to-earth person so no one doubted his claim; it remains a mystery.
Later, in the mid-twentieth century, a number of radio astronomers speculated that Marconi may have received extraterrestrial signals. However, it is much easier for me to believe part of his first radio transmission leaked into a parallel dimension where it was picked up by intelligent beings and then sent back twenty years later. Why wait twenty years to acknowledge the signal? Perhaps time flows at a different rate in this other reality and a period of twenty years between Marconi’s experiment and when he picked up the unknown signals was only minutes in this other dimension.
Modern Technology and EVP
Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) refers to an inaudible voice (or voices) being successfully recorded on tape recorders or heard on some type of communication device like a radio receiver. Also, we have to consider EVP being heard on computers, television sets, and telephones. I have experienced EVP a number of times while recording a telephone interview. When you play the tape back and hear something your physical auditory system did not hear, it can send a chill up your spine!
The voices that are picked up give some type of message and very rarely can an actual conversation take place. People experimenting with EVP think the voices originate from the spiritual plane and are actually messages from discarnate people who have “passed over.” I don’t agree with this theory; it seems more reasonable to me that the voices are coming from another nearby dimension in our physical reality. It could also be that in some cases, entities in this other reality (Djinn perhaps?) are using identities of deceased humans to gain trust and establish communication with our world.
Back in the early seventies, I used a tape recorder with magnetic heads to record interviews and on more than one occasion, picked up voices and sounds that were not audible in the room. It seems the magnetic properties of those now-outdated recorders seemed more suitable for picking up EVP than new digital recorders of today. The digital recorders can pick up some sounds, but the voices are not clear and sound more electronic.
The “Ghost Box”
The most popular equipment for receiving EVP by radio is the “ghost box.” Basically, it is an AM receiver set to rapidly scan up and down the commercial bands from about 550 to 1640 kilocycles. According to the paranormal researchers who have used this device, it creates audio bits and white noise that ghosts and/or spirits can manipulate into formed words. I have my doubts about this explanation and the truth of the matter is that no one really knows how the ghost box works.
I have used several versions of this device belonging to paranormal researcher Rosemary Ellen Guiley and have had mixed results: although you can hear words quite clearly, who or what ever is communicating seems to be able to answer one question only and very briefly. For example, when the researcher asked the question, “Is anyone out there?” the answer came back, “Spirit bodies.” When another question was asked, the paranormal researcher didn’t receive any more answers. On one occasion, the question, “Can you see?” was answered with, “It’s too dark.” When using the ghost box, the main problem is that only a very small percentage of questions answered actually make sense. Although the responses are clear, they are usually short; most skeptics feel it’s just a coincidental mixing of words formed when the receiver is scanned through this crowded radio band.
Is It Real?
The question of whether or not these transmissions are from some type of spirit or dimensional entity is difficult to answer. My personal response would be: I believe so, but it would take a great deal of evidence to completely convince me of its origin. The voices on the radio seem to be coming from somewhere and, in rare cases, they are apparently responding to questions but usually only one question receives an acceptable answer. The only recording of EVP I’ve heard that gave answers to several questions was done by Rosemary Ellen Guiley in the basement of the Lincoln Theater in Decatur, Illinois. Some EVP recordings made from the ghost box have intrigued me so greatly that I used my background in science and technology to try to understand what had taken place.
The biggest question about the ghost box I have is who is coming through the devices and why are their messages only two or three words long? Some people feel that EVP are from demons, fallen angels . . . some even think they have received messages from extraterrestrials. Most of the paranormal community believes the voices are from ghosts, or the spirits of people who crossed over to the “other side.” Although I can’t discount any of these theories, I personally do not agree with them. It is my opinion that the voices are coming from beings from another dimension: they are not human and have never been human. The EVP messages received are for the most part non-threatening, but at times the “communicator” on the other side can become malevolent and just plain nasty without cause or warning.
My Analysis
The ghost box operates by scanning through an entire band with the EVP being received over a number of adjacent frequencies in the AM, FM, and upper
and lower sidebands. This means the EVP is not on any particular channel; it is a signal with a very wide bandwidth. In my mind, this is what makes it so unusual. In order for the device to work and pick up a “spirit voice,” a strong standard signal is required, so the more crowded the band with radio stations, the better chance of getting EVP. It seems the EVP part of the signal is so weak that it needs a stronger standard AM signal to piggyback itself on in order to be heard. The piggyback effect is simple to understand since one weaker radio signal on the same frequency rides on another stronger one to reach the receiver. I have seen the same effect in amateur radio when a signal that normally would be much too weak to hear will piggyback itself on a stronger and closer signal and be heard. By throwing a “dead carrier” (transmitting a signal with no modulation), you can actually hear stations in the background hundreds and even thousands of miles away riding in with the carrier wave. This is what seems to be happening with the voices on the ghost box; they are riding (or piggybacking) on standard AM radio station transmissions to the receiver. This seems to be done by design, indicating intelligence with a purpose.
To check this theory, I took a number of EVP recordings obtained from a ghost box and ran them through an oscilloscope. I discovered there were two basic signals in the transmission: the first is the standard AM radio station signal erratically modulated due to the band sweeping. The second signal was aligned with the first and could be separated by changing the sweeping rate. After this was done, the signal showed two independent transmissions that had continuous modulation very similar to an FM source.
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