Witness Recollection
About 40 years ago, while still at school (in Maidstone, Kent), six of us decided one rainy lunchtime to while away the time in a private study room with a ouija board. Not having the ready made article we improvised with letters written on scraps of paper spread round a polished table top, and used an upturned glass tumbler as our pointer. All six of us put one finger on the tumbler and someone (I forget who) asked “Is anybody there?” Not surprisingly the answer spelled out “yes” (we had neglected to make ‘yes’ and ‘no’ markers for our improvised board). The next question was who are you? The names “Rasputin”, “Jack the Ripper”, “Attila the Hun” and “Adolf Hitler” were spelled out in quick succession. We were laughing and accusing each other of pushing the glass around deliberately – nobody ever admitted doing this – when we all, simultaneously, realised that there was a seventh person in the room with us.
We did not panic but quietly cleared away our improvised ouija board, throwing the letters into a waste bin, and left the room. We counted only the six of us that started the experiment leaving the room: there was no sign of the seventh person.
In the discussion that followed we all agreed that we felt that the unknown person meant us no harm, and that nobody recognised who it was. Everyone had felt that this person had been sitting next to them at the table. I have since realised that there were six additional “people” in the room and we could each only see the one sitting next to us. Obviously with 20-20 hindsight is easy to realise that they were there to protect us from the consequences of what we were doing, and to warn us to stop.
I have not touched a ouija board since, and have no intention of ever doing so again.
