The Wind Began To Switch…
by Red
I was raised in a good Catholic home, and was never exposed to anything like tarot cards, magic (except illusionists,) divination of any sort, or Ouija boards. I’ve always had a vivid imagination, and I used to be quite sheltered and gullible. That changed when I was 13 years old. I had my first and last experiences with a Ouija board.
I was at my best friend’s house, which interestingly was a house away from being next door to a very nice, hilly cemetery. She had made a homemade Ouija board out of cardboard and a permanent marker. The planchette was a piece of paper with a hole cut out of the middle. We asked questions, and mostly just got gibberish, until it finally spelled out “GCARR”. That was it. . GCARR. Then we just got more gibberish, and moving around without stopping on anything. As it was a little cool, but still a nice, sunny day out, we decided to go for a walk. We went down the road, and into the well kept cemetery. We went about reading the grave stone markers, pointing out anything interesting we found.
At the top of the big hill, there was a great big stone, a family marker for the other smaller graves to the sides of it. If you looked out my friend’s bedroom window, this was the stone you could see. The name on this stone read “George Carr”. Of course, we thought this MUST be our “GCARR” from the board, and we thought he must be trying to communicate! We went back to the house to get the board, and our idea was to sneak it into the cemetery and use it there, thinking we’d get better answers. (We had to sneak it so her parents and the neighbors wouldn’t think we were up to no-good, which in a way, we were.)
We walked the block down to the cemetery with the board folded and stuffed under my friend’s jacket, and just as we got to the entrance of the cemetery, the wind picked up. It had been completely still a moment before, but again, this is Michigan. We got a few yards up the little paved road, and the wind got even stronger. We really took notice of it now. It seemed to have come out of nowhere. The further into the cemetery we tried to walk, the stronger the wind blew at us, until our hair was whipping out behind us, and we were blinking from the sting of it in our faces. The wind became so strong, we physically couldn’t go any further, and, by now we were scared.
We turned around and hurried out of the cemetery, the wind chasing us the whole way back. Here’s what sealed the experience as strange: The second we stepped past the front entrance, the fierce wind stopped completely. It just died down, like it had never happened, and was completely still. We couldn’t have been given a more absolute sign that our presence, (or that of the board,) was not wanted. We walked back to her house, and foolishly, brought out the board one more time.
Besides the regular gibberish, it started spewing hateful, frightening, and ridiculous messages and answers to questions. It told me I was going to die at age 44. (Only about 16 years from now, I should hope not!) It told me that a crazy multi-jeweled broach I liked to wear was evil, and would kill me. (I was scared enough to get rid of it eventually. It was hideously gaudy anyway.) I don’t recall what it told my friend, but the messages were equally scary for her. Being a Catholic girl, I was wearing a small gold cross, which I perceived to be heating up as I wore it. I was scared, so I said a prayer. My friend at the time was an atheist, so she did not. I had my eyes closed, (because that’s how we played, so we couldn’t direct the planchette ourselves,) and my friend said that she had opened her eyes before the planchette stopped moving. She said she saw two white fingers on the planchette next to mine, and two red ones next to hers. This is about the time we decided to quit.
The board apparently wasn’t ready to quit. My friend folded up the board, and put it in the trash. The next morning, it was under her bed. This time, she ripped it up, and threw it away. The next morning, it was under her bed in one piece, with crease marks where she had ripped it. Finally, she took it in the back yard and burned it, and that was the last we saw of it. That was also the last time I played with a homemade Ouija board.
I could explain a lot of that experience away as an overactive imagination, or say that maybe my friend was just playing one big prank on me and being so gullible, I really fell for it. But the one thing I couldn’t have made up in my imagination or explained was the forceful wind that blew us out of the cemetery. That, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to convince myself that it was anything other than something of a paranormal nature.
