It all started when my friend and I made our own Ouija board - and it worked! I was always curious about using one as I did not think it would work.

That night my two friends and I were asleep, but I was awakened by the feeling of something brush against my feet. I burst into tears straight away as it terrified me. The next night I slept at my own house and my boyfriend was asleep next door. Half asleep, I heard my bedroom door open and the sound of something running up the stairs into my bedroom. It felt like someone was standing in the center of my room staring at me.

There was a kind of black mass in the air, which is quite hard to explain. I called my boyfriend repeatedly and banged on the wall several times to wake him up, but he didn't. From that moment, I do not remember what happened to me, but my boyfriend tells me he found me lying on his bedroom floor crying. Then he says that the muscles in my body were having a spasm of some sort, like I was having a fit.

After around five minutes of this, it all stopped and I was normal, not remembering what had happened. I told my parents, but they said I was being silly. I changed rooms after that day, and it felt like a weight had been lifted. A few nights later, however, I heard knocking at my door, like someone trying to get in. It also touched my cheek when I was lying down.

When I went into my previous room the other day to collect some of my clothes, my lamp was thrown at me from the desk. I was so scared that I ran out straight away. Whatever this is, it is driving me crazy as I am only 16 and I am not getting any sleep. Do I have a ghost? And why is it trying to hurt me? - Natalie W.

THE OUIJA’S WARNING

“I used to live in a house in Pueblo, Colorado that I always thought was ‘peculiar’ because of the way I always felt in it,” says a reader who uses the name Aphrodite. She always felt like she was being watched, a feeling that intensified when she was alone. But she couldn’t quite identify the feeling. Was the watcher staring in anger or fascination? Soon the feeling turned into sounds.

One night her father had to go out to the store. To feel safe, Aphrodite locked every door in the house while she was upstairs. “The house is very big, so it creaks a lot, especially the stairs,” she says, “but as I was stepping into the shower, I heard the floorboards creak like someone was walking on them.” Aphrodite wrapped a towel tightly around her, counted to three and flung open the bathroom door to confront the intruder. There was no one there. She dismissed the sounds as her imagination and got in the shower. As she turned on the water, she heard the floorboards creak again. “Determined to find out the source, I left the shower running and with one huge thrust opened the door and, expecting to see someone, pushed forward so they'd fall down the stairs,” she says. Aphrodite grabbed only air.

Now thinking that the intruder might be a spirit, Aphrodite went to her room and fetched the Ouija board from under her bed and set it up on the floor. “I thought, if it was a ghost, it might want to communicate,” she says. Aphrodite lit five candles: red, green, yellow, blue and white. She set four of them at the corners of the board and placed the white one between her legs. “I gently put my hand on the board and called the spirit out. ‘If there's anyone here who wishes to communicate with me, please make your presence known.’” Something blew out the red candle and the Ouija’s pointer began to move. “The spirit told me he was a man age 32 who wanted to communicate with me,” she says. “He also said that he hated the way I lived and that’s why he watched me. I asked him if he was mad at me. He said yes. And the last message he relayed to me was: ‘GET OUT. WON’T BE SAFE LONGER.’ And with that the board was done.”

Aphrodite didn’t tell anyone of this experience, but she did try to convince her dad to move from that house. They didn’t even move when, during dinner one evening, they both heard the stairs creak, followed by an upstairs mirror crashing to the floor. They finally did move when Aphrodite’s dad got a new job. “Ever since then, I have wondered if the spirit is still there,” she says. “I still wonder if maybe I should have faced it or if it was a good thing we moved. I've talked to the recent owners of that house, and they say that their dog won't go into my old room and that the wife gets violently shoved when she is alone.”

EVIL PRESENCE AND DEAD FROGS

Unlike Rena, there are some people who were so terrified by their Ouija experience that they swear they will never touch one again – and warn everyone else to stay away as well. Reb, for example, begins her story with this warning: “Don't ever touch one or even be curious – they are the work of negative spirits, not benign to help you!”

What scared Reb so badly? Her tale begins in the summer of 1975 when she was 14 years old. Reb’s family was in a state of transition that year. They had just sold their house in Whitby, Ontario, Canada and hadn’t yet decided where they were going to purchase a new house and settle. So until that decision was made, they lived in a small apartment complex.

One day, a girlfriend was over for a visit. Bored and looking for something to do, Reb told her about the Ouija board she had received from her mother for Christmas. Reb asked if she’d be interested in giving it a try. “Sure,” her friend replied. “If it works, I'd like to contact my grandfather.”

In the basement beside the laundry room, the apartment building had a dark, dingy, nearly empty storage room with one window. Reb figured this would be an atmospheric place for their impromptu séance. The girls took the Ouija to the basement and set it between them on an old crate. Each put a hand on the planchette.

“Grandpa,” the friend began, “if you are there, can you please let me know?" The pointer started to slowly slide around the board. The girls eyed each other nervously. And although it was a hot July afternoon, the storage room suddenly became uncomfortably cold. Instead of frightening the girls, however, it actually excited them. “This is neat-o!” Reb recalls them exclaiming. “We felt some heavy energy in the room and definitely did not feel alone in the room anymore. Apparently, it was her grandfather.”

Apparently. The friends asked a few more questions and received some answers, but after awhile tired of the game. Reb packed up the board and the girls parted to their respective homes, vowing not to discuss their possible spirit contact with anyone!

“Around 7:00 p.m., I got super tired while playing in my room,” Reb says, “which was unusual. So I lay down on my bed looking up at a picture above my bed, and I immediately fell asleep. But the room was spinning and I was fighting to wake up because I felt panicked, as if something else was going on. I felt like my spirit was being pulled from my body! I got really scared and, after a struggle, woke up.”

Reb felt she had to talk to someone. She decided to call her best friend Ted from the pay phone just down the street and ask him for help. “I felt very depressed, almost as if an evil black cloud was around me,” she recalls. “As I walked toward the pay phone, I saw some frogs on the side of the road and ‘knew’ that when I returned from the phone they would be dead. They were, too!

“I spoke with Ted and he said to get rid of that Ouija board immediately. They are evil. Paint a red cross on the back of it, he told me, break it in half, and throw it out. So I went back home and that is what I did. I used my red nail polish and made a cross, broke the board in half, and threw it in the dumpster by the apartment.”

Reb’s ordeal wasn’t quite over, however. “For several years after that, even when our family moved 200 miles north, I had that same recurring fight at around 7:00 p.m. when I felt the aching desire to sleep, feeling a sudden exhaustion,” she says.

That was the least of it. “Often times, the foot of the bed bounced around and shook, like something out of The Exorcist, and I'd feel ‘beings’ around my bed placing heavy invisible objects on me that would get heavier and heavier,” she says. “It was always a very frightening experience. No matter what I did, it wouldn't go away. I had a lot of bad luck. Some very bad things happened to me, the worst of which was that my sister went schizophrenic and had to be institutionalized – which I very strongly believe is possession!

“One day, I took out the little Bible that I got in grade school and started to pray to Jesus. I begged for help... and I got it. I started to feel at peace and never had those paralyzing, fatigue-induced states again. Yes, the Ouija board is very nasty,” Reb again warns. “My current best friend is a psychic ‘cleaner,’ and he told me that whenever he went into a home to cleanse it, he would ask the homeowners where their Ouija board or Tarot cards are, or he'd immediately zone in on them and remove them from the house.”

BROKEN BARRIER

Many paranormal researchers who have experience with the Ouija board advise that if you’re intent on using the board that you should first perform a cleansing ritual or create a psychic barrier of positive energy around you. Rena knew about this practice, but it doesn’t always work.

Rena was just finishing her sophomore year in May, 2007 when one of her best friends invited her to her house to spend the night. As sometimes happens when teens get together, they began to have a conversation about ghosts, demons, and scary things they had experienced. “I've always seen things,” Rena says, “so I had plenty of stories to tell. As I was telling one story, I saw a little black dot floating in front of me... kind of like a fleck of dust, but it caught my attention. When I asked my friend if she saw it, too, the dot started to float up to the ceiling. I kept my eye on it all the way, and then it was gone.”

Apparently, that got Rena in the mood for something even more thrilling, and she convinced her friend to try the Ouija board with her. “We weren't stupid and we knew how dangerous they could be,” Rena remembers, “so we opened a circle and set up a barrier to keep out evil spirits. I don't know if either of us really thought it was going to work. We didn't even have an actual board, so we made our own out of a Scrabble game set and a cup as a planchette.

“We asked the question that everyone asks: ‘Is anybody here with us?’ As soon as I asked that, the cup moved. We both looked at each other in silence for a moment. When my friend recovered, she asked how many people were present. We went on that night for about two hours, and when we finally closed the circle, we were completely exhausted. I ended up staying with her another night and we were fascinated by this new thing that we were doing.”

Rena and her friend were consumed by this strange phenomenon. They talked about it on the phone and told other friends about their experience. One friend in particular was also very interested, and the next time Rena got together with her, they gave the mystic oracle a try. “But this one didn't go so smoothly,” Rena says. “Our barrier wasn't strong, and something ended up getting in. My friend started crying. You could feel the evil in the room. That’s not a fun thing to feel, by the way. I went home to bed.”

Rena carried that creepy feeling home with her, it seems. “I woke up at three in the morning with a nightmare about a door,” she says, “just looking at a door. I don't know why it scared me, but it did. I still had that oppressive, ominous feeling in my heart. I woke up again at three-thirty, hearing a loud breath in my left ear, but went back to sleep after saying a little prayer. The last time I woke up was four, and I had had another nightmare. I was so freaked out that I told my parents and we all got together and prayed. It went away.”

Despite this experience, Rena hasn’t shunned the Ouija board completely. “It's made me more cautious,” she admits. “I didn't turn away from it because I know that just like in the physical world, there are good and bad spirits. But I'll never forget that night.”