The Dark Sacrament by David Kiely Page A

will pose a question, which the board attempts to answer. It does so with the aid of a planchette, literally a “little plank.” Again, designs vary considerably, but generally speaking, the planchette, or pointer, is a small, triangular piece of wood or plastic that moves smoothly over the surface of the board. Often it has a “window” of clear plastic, by which a letter or number is framed. Each player places a fingertip on the planchette. The board responds to a question either by moving the pointer to yes or no or by spelling out the answer by choosing a sequence of letters.
    This is the first contentious aspect of Ouija. Who—or what—is moving the planchette? Those who have used Ouija relate with awehow the pointer moved of its own accord. Participants will swear to their fellow players that they did nothing to influence the pointer’s progress, and indeed most believe this to be the case. Ouija users often describe it as having “a life of its own.”
    Yet skeptics dismiss this. They speak of “ideomotor” action: unconscious muscular activity by which minuscule movements are made without a person being aware that they are making them. Since it takes very little effort to set the planchette in motion, this theory might well be valid.
    And yet, it is less important who or what moves the pointer than where the game leads and the uses to which it is put. Some use the board to look into the future; others to make contact with the dead; still others as a means of experimentation in a spirit of fun. Ouija as board game—as innocent as a round of Risk or Trivial Pursuit. All might be well, were it not that dabbling with Ouija seems to have had disastrous consequences for many users.
    Canon William H. Lendrum suggests that all right-thinking people should shun it completely. He believes that Ouija is a portal by which malignant forces can enter this world and cause great distress, even insanity. He recalls one of his most upsetting cases, that of a County Antrim woman whose life was turned on its head from the moment she dabbled with Ouija. The “game” was to cause her fifteen years of great distress and torment—one of the longest cases of demonic attack on record.
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    Julie’s ordeal began on a cold and wet November afternoon in 1980, when her son Gordon came home from school in high excitement. The boy had learned of a new game. It required no board, nor indeed any outlay at all. One needed only to divide up a sheet of paper and write the letters of the alphabet on the pieces, as well as numerals, and the words yes, no, and goodbye. Gordon had played it with his school pals.
    They had put questions to the board, and it appeared to be able to foretell the future. It knew who would marry and when, what somebody would do on leaving high school, what they would do in later life, whom they would work for, if they would be successful in their career. It was uncanny.
    His mother knew at once what he was referring to, though she did not know Ouija by that name. She had come across it from time to time in the rural area where she grew up. The country people had called it the “talking board.” They would play the game, with or without an actual board, to while away a long winter’s evening. To the best of Julie’s knowledge, it was simply harmless fun. She followed her three children into the living room and prepared the pieces of paper accordingly, and they settled down to an evening’s amusement.
    The game began as solely that: an innocent diversion. Following Gordon’s instructions, each of the four placed a finger atop an upended tumbler. Somebody—Julie herself or one of the children—posed the first, formulaic, question. “Is there anybody there?”
    No one had expected the glass to respond, and so it came as a surprise to Julie when it moved almost at once to the yes. There was the customary reaction from the