I was listening to the Belief Hole podcast recently, to an episode they did on the topic of Ouija boards, so I thought I’d share a couple of my experiences.

There is a Ouija board that hangs on the wall in my home office. I’ve had this board since I was a kid. I still remember what the box looked like. I don’t remember where or when we got it, but I remember the box was tattered and broken. It was the box pictured below, though this one is in MUCH better shape than ours was.

From what I have been able to find, this packaging was used in the 50s and 60s, and the box image changed in the 70s. Our board, this would have been in the very late 70s, early 80s that we got it, probably picked up at a yard sale or flea market, because my family was big into those things back then.

I remember my sister and I “playing” with it a few times, and my mother said it was evil and tossed it in the trash. I found it under the bureau in our room a few days later. I think I may have mentioned in a previous post that I had an abusive mother. Of course, she assumed we pulled it out of the trash, so I got a beating for it being back in our room, and she tossed it again. A week later, she found it under my bed. Another beating, another toss in the trash. When it turned up under our bureau again, this time I just hid it away in the top shelf of our closet, way in the back. Mom being only 5’2″, she wouldn’t have known it was there lol!

By this time, because it had been trashed so many times, the planchette had lost its little plastic pointer. The round clear plastic part was still intact, but the little pointer had broken off, so there was a tiny hole in the center instead of that little pin thing hanging down.

Years later, when I moved away from home, I left the Ouija board behind, forgotten way in the back on that top shelf of the closet. With my sister and I both gone from the house, our younger brother (9 years younger than her, 11 years younger than I) knocked the wall down between his tiny bedroom and our bigger bedroom. Doing so, he emptied out the entire room, closet included. The next time I saw him, he handed me the battered old Ouija box and said, “You left this in the closet.”

So I brought the board home and it moved with me, buried in the bottom of some box or another, from our first apartment to our second apartment to our third apartment and finally to our house when we bought it (closed on Halloween 2003!), at which point, I found it. I think the box is still in the house somewhere, I don’t remember. I don’t think I’d have thrown it out. I’ve heard enough stories about Ouija boards being destroyed that looking back, I realized that the thing belongs to me, whether I want it to or not, and I’m okay with that. It has a nice home and someone who respects it, doesn’t mess with it, doesn’t treat it like trash.

Pulling it out of the box in the early 2000s, though, the planchette is fully intact, pointer and all, which is weird. I mean, I know we never replaced the planchette. The board pretty much just languished in the back of that closet shelf until my brother gave it back to me. I know the pointer was missing in the 80s, but now it’s fully intact. The Ouija board now hangs on the wall of my home office behind me (actual pic to the right here), and I have the planchette hanging from a piece of fishing line. I haven’t actually used it since I was a kid. After the Belief Hole episode, I’ve thought about pulling it down off the wall and giving it a go, but I don’t know if I will. BUT, I will share a story about an experience that I had with a Ouija board in high school.

As I said, I grew up with an abusive mother. It made me weak…well, maybe meek is a better word. I was meek and mousey when I was a kid. I was also small and skinny. I got bullied incessantly, from grade school right up through high school. I guess I was an easy target. In high school, the marching band was my saving grace. I wasn’t in the band, but I was in the color guard (I spun a rifle). So most of my high school friendships were there. I still was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole, even with them, but the glory of it was that they didn’t care. They accepted me for my weird self.

One time after a band competition, there was a party at one of the band member’s houses. In the family room in the basement, a bunch of us girls started messing with a Ouija board that was down there. There were two sisters – I’ll call them Carol and Lisa Quimby. Their last name did begin with a Q and Carol’s first name did begin with a C, and I’ve kept those initials because they’re important to the story. Carol was older than me by two years, and Lisa was younger by a year. I think at the time, I was a sophomore, Lisa a freshman, and Carol a senior. The board seemed to respond especially well to Carol, and when the older kids decided to go upstairs and left us younger kids downstairs, we kept trying to talk to the Ouija board. I asked it if I’d ever get married, and the board responded with “CQ.” We rolled our eyes, thinking it wanted Carol Q. to come back, and I asked again, and again, the board responded with “CQ.” The third time I asked, the board then kept responding “CQ CQ CQ CQ CQ” over and over again. We all just thought it would only respond to Carol Q., so we lost interest and put it away.

Fast forward about a decade, and I met the man who would become my husband, and his initials are CQ. I didn’t remember the Ouija board incident at the time; it wasn’t until a few years later when it popped back into my brain and I remembered. I even brought it up to Lisa Q. at some point, and she remembered. Her sister had passed from cancer a couple of years before, and we were talking about her, and that’s what made me mention the Ouija board incident.

Interestingly enough, I’ve also since learned that CQ is an amateur radio call essentially meaning ‘Calling all stations.’

So do I believe we can communicate with spirits through the Ouija? I don’t know. Was the CQ just a coincidence? I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, if the initials were something more common, maybe I could completely write it off as a coincidence, but last names that begin with Q aren’t all that common as say Jones or Smith or Brown. So who knows. And maybe…whomever or whatever was speaking to us through the board that night was simply putting out a call to anyone who was listening… “Calling CQ, CQ, CQ, CQ…”