The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (15 page)

Ouija boards are presented as the occult equivalent to marijuana, a minor lapse in itself, but one that opens the door to more destructive behavior. “Most Ordinary People buy the game thinking that is [sic] would be COOL to talk to a spirit of a dead relative or a famous person.”(17) Dabbling in the occult supposedly leads to witchcraft, then Satanism (“NOTICE HOW I PROGRESSED FROM BEING ENTERTAINED TO HAVING MY LIFE COMPLETELY WRAPPED UP IN THE OCCULT!” screams one web-site”(18)), and ends in demonic possession and damnation. (“Please WARN as many as you can about the
Ouija
board. This dangerous occulic [sic] device not only can lead to demon possession, but even eternal damnation in the lake of fire.”(19))

Demonic possession is presented as the natural outcome of consulting the board, though the most famous example is actually a work of fiction. William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel,
The Exorcist
, tells the story of Regan MacNeil, a girl that who becomes possessed after meeting a demon named “Captain Howdy” through the Ouija board. The book and film are probably the best–known representations of demonic possession in popular culture, and the author claims he was inspired by a real case. It was reported in a newspaper story, “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held In Devil’s Grip,” that appeared in
The
Washington Post
on August 20, 1949. The boy involved was supposed to have become possessed after experimenting with a Ouija board, but the account, including this detail, is poorly documented and unreliable.(20)

In addition to automatism and spirits, there are cases in which the experimenter appears to be in telepathic contact with living, incarnate minds, other than their own, but these are rare.

Astral Mischief

What spirits actually say varies from practical information about the location of the car keys to metaphysics, with many entities showing a particular interest in philosophy. Jane Roberts, for example, was using a Ouija board when she first contacted Seth, an “intelligence residing outside time and space.” Roberts went on to channel Seth and published his teachings in a series of books. There is a darker side to these communications though, with some boards producing demented or obscene material, and others seemingly intent on frightening the sitters. Ouija boards have even been blamed for murder.

One scandalous episode of this type began on November 18, 1933, when Mattie Turley, aged 15, shot her father with both barrels of a 12-gauge shotgun at their ranch near Springerville, Arizona. He died a month later and the girl was arrested along with her mother, Dorothea Irene Turley. Mattie told police a strange story. “The daughter confessed to the shooting, blaming her action on an ouija [sic] board, which she claims ‘told me to kill daddy so that mother could marry the cowboy.’”(21)

Dorothea was a beauty contest winner from New York who had been educated in England and married Everett J. Turley, a retired Naval officer. They moved to Arizona for her health, and there she developed an interest in Ouija boards and a certain “handsome cowboy.” According to the prosecution, Mrs. Turley convinced Mattie that spirits wanted the girl to kill her father and that she would not be punished for doing it.

The defense claimed that the shooting was an accident; that Mattie had been aiming at a skunk when she hit Mr. Turley, and police had forced her to confess. As for Dorothea, “She knew nothing of the Ouija board’s instructions’ to her daughter and…the girl was ‘talking insanely.’”(22)

Mrs. Turley was convicted and sentenced to 10-25 years in the State Prison at Florence, where she served three years before the conviction was overturned. Mattie received six years in the State Reform School for Girls at Randolph, where “the little girl told the reform school matron that she was sorry she killed her father but that she was ‘certain of the ouija [sic] board’s instructions.’”(23)

Most people that experiment with the board will not end up in a cell or a ward or tied to a bed listening to the
Rituale Romanum
. Critics typically overstate dangers in the “Marijuana: Assassin of Youth” vein,(24) but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Sitters can become over involved with the board; it can leave them scared or emotionally upset, and paranormal phenomena have been reported in connection with Ouija.

The Bridge to Body Island incident is not one of those cases where the planchette flew through the air or spelled out B-E-E-L-Z-E-B-U-B, and while the horrors are gruesome—almost lunatic—they’re never seen. In that respect it’s something like W.W. Jacobs’ famous short story, “The Monkey’s Paw.”

“Eli,” one of the principles, wrote this account in third person form. I have changed the names and included some explanations.

The Bridge to Body Island

At the end of the summer of 1990, three friends living in a small town in Wisconsin carried out an experiment with a Ouija board that brought them into contact with a monster.

Sun Prairie is in the southern part of the state and is best known as the home of artist Georgia O’Keefe. [She was a painter of big flowers and cow skulls; O’Keefe hated Sun Prairie.] It is surrounded by dying family farms and scattered hamlets like Pumpkin Hollow and Killdeer Creek. It has some of the last one-room schoolhouses in this part of the country and, more importantly for this story, is just three miles from the railroad hub between Chicago and Minneapolis.

I had just received a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Stevens Point-Wisconsin and decided to pursue a graduate degree in Madison, Wisconsin. Katherine, my long-time girlfriend, was born and raised in Madison and was working there for the summer.

I got a job at a group home in Sun Prairie, working the night shift. It came with a small salary and a smaller apartment in the basement of the house. It was on the outskirts of Sun Prairie, a stone’s throw from Pumpkin Hollow on a dead end street near the county line. I was responsible for watching over three adults who had Prader-Willi Syndrome (PWS), a genetic disorder named after two German doctors. People with PWS manifest a number of disturbing symptoms, including stunted growth, limited brain development, and high-pitched voices (like cartoon characters), but the most dramatic symptom is their insatiable appetites. PWS patients do not produce the hormones that inform the brain that the body has had enough to eat, so they always feel famished. Since the brain thinks it’s starving, it sends messages to the endocrine system that stunt growth and preserve every calorie taken in. A vicious cycle develops, with the body squeezing every last bit of fat out of food while cannibalizing the muscles for more protein. As a result, those with PWS get obese with fewer calories than normal adults, and never feel full no matter how much they eat. In order to satisfy their ravenous appetite, patients will periodically try to escape, break into stores, order huge meals at restaurants, etc. They would eat anything, whole jars of mustard, toothpaste by the tube full, even medications if given a chance. My job was to keep them in the house and out of trouble in the evenings.

Katherine’s parents and most of her friends had moved away and she was working part time for a political organization. Her job did not pay enough for her to live in the city, so she moved into the basement with me.

I drove to school every day and dropped off Katherine at work; then we rode back to the group home at night so I could work. Between school and the group home’s evening schedule, we didn’t have time to meet new people in the area, so we were very happy when a mutual friend moved there from Stevens Point. John got a job as a dishwasher and took a room in a nearby boarding house run by an old woman.

The three of us hung out all the time in Sun Prairie. We took walks in the fields, checked out the local graveyards (some of the oldest in the state), and collected local folk tales and urban legends. (I was studying both Anthropology and Folklore and previously had done parapsychology work with OBEs at Stevens Point.) [An O.B.E. or “out-of-body-experience” is the sensation of having left the body. Spiritualists call it “astral projection” and it may or may not be paranormal in nature.]

That fall, a childhood friend gave me a Ouija board that he’d found in the attic. It was an old wooden board and John and I spent hours trying to get messages, but all we ended up with was gibberish. I convinced Katherine to join me at the board but our results were no better. Then she tried it with John and they immediately started to get results.

For the next few days, the three of us spent hours on the board. The messages came from the “Spirit of the Board,” an entity that had never lived and that acted as an interlocutor between other entities and us. These entities had different personalities and individual ways of moving the planchette: some used abbreviations, some were terrible spellers, and others used Latinate words with some skill. Some preferred using the pointed end of the planchette to choose letters, while others liked the porthole.

The Spirit of the Board would control and introduce each of these intelligences, and for weeks we communicated with them. Like the Spirit of the Board, they claimed to not be spirits of the dead but some kinds of archetypes or free-ranging consciousnesses. Each entity had its own personality, but for the most part they concentrated on imparting New Age-type wisdom and philosophy. Since the board would only work when Katherine and John used it, I got the job of transcribing the proceedings and carefully filled notebooks full of the correspondences.

I am interested in scientific parapsychology and wanted to find out if some sort of paranormal phenomena was indeed happening, so I started to conduct a number of experiments with John and Katherine. They got messages from the board by touching the planchette with their palms or a single finger, with the Ouija board turned around, and wearing blindfolds in a darkened room while I followed the planchette with a flashlight. No matter what innovation I introduced, the results were the same; the entities kept communicating. I suggested automatic writing and even attached a small golf-pencil to the planchette but this did not work. Then we tried for EVP phenomena with similarly disappointing results. [EVP or Electronic Voice Phenomenon are the “spirit voices” caught on recording equipment, especially audiotape.] We also tried pendulums, but again the board was the only method that got results. I decided to add a new twist to the procedure by writing down the questions without saying them out loud. I selected questions that would need to be answered by numbers, words, or letters. Though the answers were vague, as usual, they remained consistent and could be said to correspond with the questions.

After weeks of this, John and I were getting bored with the eight or so entities that the Spirit of Board would let us communicate with and their repetitious philosophy. I was determined to talk to a spirit that had lived, whose existence could be verified, and who would give us information we could check. At one point the board told us that there were indeed other entities we could communicate with but they might be dangerous, and it encouraged us to continue talking to the other entities. After some digging, we heard about a sinister entity that wanted to communicate with them. They also found out that this entity was not only a human but was still alive. John and I were eager to communicate with whoever it was but Katherine was adamantly against it. She had a history of paranormal experiences and had been sufficiently spooked by them to not even watch scary movies; she certainly had no interest in deliberately contacting something sinister. Katherine refused for a few days, but the two of us were able to wear her down and she agreed to try again. She was not happy about it but was very close to both of us and we were determined to see it through.

At first, to Katherine’s relief, the board simply refused to communicate with the desired entity and instead brought us the same old tiresome folks. The questions that I wrote or asked were now all about the living mind that wanted to reach us. At one point we learned that all of the other entities knew about this person and gave us a name; he was called the Bye-Bye Man. Upon seeing that name spelled out on the Ouija board, Katherine panicked and quit the board again. We tried to press on without her but nothing happened.

Katherine was now very clear; she refused to try to communicate with the Bye-Bye Man but we cobbled together a compromise. We would not communicate with the Bye-Bye Man directly but would try to get some piece of information about him from the other entities, something that could be tracked down and verified. Now we began interrogating the spirits but they refused to cooperate until John got an idea: we would stage a strike. The Spirit of the Board was given notice that we were tired of the entities and their refusal to tell us anything about the Bye-Bye Man, so from now on we were going to be using the Parker Brother’s board that we’d bought for the planchette.

We tried the new board for a few days but got nothing. Even Katherine and John got nothing useful. Still, we waited a few more days before picking up the old board and discovered that the strike had worked; when we communicated with the Spirit of the Board again it agreed to tell us about the Bye-Bye Man.

The story came out in bits and pieces over several sessions. It began in Louisiana sometime in the 1920s, when an odd little boy was put in an orphanage in Algiers. Nothing is known about his parents but the boy had albinism, a genetic condition that causes a lack of pigment in the eyes, skin, and hair; but it was his behavior that was strange. Maybe part of it was the physical and social isolation that can happen to children with albinism; their unusual appearance, the way they must avoid the sun and, in this case, ever worsening eyesight. He could not play games, and may have been teased or bullied by the other children.