12.12.05: I’ll Be Home for Christmas… Even Though I’m DEAD!

For three days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow but phone calls taper off.
Johnny Carson

I’ll Be Home for Christmas… Even Though I’m Dead!

December 12, 2005

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them!

An early Chrismakwanzakkuh gift from my hubby—sapphires, diamonds, and silver, and big enough to knock your teeth out. Its brilliance dazzles the camera, hence the rather blurred photo. Thanks, Tony. :-)

Now that I’ve flaunted my bling, we can move on to the main topic of the day, which is: I See Dead People… Opening My Presents! Yes, folks, it’s true: just in time for the holidays, I’m going to tell you how to contact the dearly departed. Now you can have your entire family around you during this special time… and, thanks to the miracle of cheap paper boards and automatic writing, you won’t have to smell their decomposing corpses! Gives a whole new meaning to the term “Christmas spirit,” doesn’t it?

The Ouija Board

You’ve probably tried a Ouija board at one time or another—probably at a party, because it’s considered more of a parlor game than anything else. The concept is simple: a board with letters and numbers written on it, and a moving piece (called a planchette) that, when touched by human hands (and directed by spirits), selects letters in turn to spell out words, supposedly allowing conversation between two levels of existence. Can it really contact spirits? Who knows? Personally, I think it’s got more to do with the subconscious than any “higher powers,” but I’ve always found that the subconscious holds some interesting ghosts of its own.

The rules on the box recommend that you place the board on your lap to use it; if you’re in a group of people, you can put it on a table or in the middle of the floor. Everyone places their fingertips on the planchette; someone asks a question (it’s “polite” to begin with “Is anyone there?”, although that seems a bit redundant), and the board (ideally) spells out the answer. Of course, this doesn’t always work out perfectly; sometimes the planchette doesn’t move, or spells out nonsense words, or one of the “players” is found to be deliberately controlling it.

The Ouija board works just as well alone, although the planchette might move slower without the “life force” of the other players. The good thing about using it alone is that you can take your time and ask questions without feeling foolish in front of other people; the bad thing about using it alone is that CAPTAIN HOWDY WILL COME AND GET YOU. Just kidding, just kidding; I have a hard enough time thinking that real spirits could get through the board, and I certainly don’t believe that Satan could come through it and possess you. Everyone knows that Satan is a telemarketer, and that he invades your body through your phone line (usually around dinner time).

I have an old, second-hand Ouija board that I bought at a thrift store when I was a kid. (The cashier refused to touch it, even to bag it—“Those things is evil,” were her exact words.) Back when I was more into Wicca and parapsychology, I spent quite a bit of time using it, with some interesting results. The first “ghost” I contacted was a middle-aged Haitian woman who spoke only French; I had to use my French-English dictionary to painstakingly translate each word as she spelled it out. (On the other hand, my subconscious had obviously absorbed more of my French lessons than my conscious mind!) She only communicated a few times. The next “ghost” was Norman, a college boy turned soldier who had died in World War I; he stayed quite a bit longer than the first ghost, and communicated with me off and on for several months. He liked practical jokes, told me about his family, and described the Afterlife as monotonous, boring, and loaded with the relatives one never wished to see again, as well as the relatives one did. It was fascinating to see how my mind could produce a full-fledged personality, complete with quirks and background details. At some point, he told me his last name (can’t remember now, but it was fairly unusual), and I did a bit of research—imagine my shock when I actually found records on a man of that name who had died in World War I, at the same age as my ”ghost“! That incident brought me closer to believing in the “other side” than anything I’d read or seen thus far; still, I’m not a believer by any means—I just like to see what tricks my mind can play on itself.

Automatic Writing

Again, this is almost certainly more subconscious than supernatural, but it’s still an amusing game, particularly when you’re bored during class. It takes a bit more practice than the Ouija board, but once you’ve got the hang of it, it can flow even faster than your natural writing. You can do this easily with just a few sheets of paper and a pen; always have more paper than you think you’ll need, in case you get a real talker on the “other end”. Just hold your pen as you would normally, perhaps slightly looser, and then wait—wait, and wait, and wait, because it always takes awhile to get the ink flowing, so to speak. It might take minutes, hours, or even days, but eventually it’ll probably work: your hand will start to move as though something else is controlling it; the first lines probably won’t look like anything recognizable, but eventually you’ll start recognizing letters or shapes.

It took me about two weeks of steady practice to get really good at automatic writing; even then, it looked more like a second-grader’s beginning attempts at cursive than adult handwriting. Still, it flowed fairly quickly, and was decipherable enough; my friends and I used to sit through our most boring class watching my hand skitter across the page and trying to convince the “spirit” to throw an eraser at the teacher’s head. I contacted two “ghosts;” the first provided me and my friends with the aforementioned in-class amusement, and the second ended up being so unwieldy that I left off automatic writing altogether and took up scrying instead. As with the Ouija board, I was amazed at the fully-formed personalities lurking in my subconscious; maybe it’s my authorial imagination, or maybe I have latent Multiple Personality Syndrome. (Now, which option doesn’t involve straitjackets?...)

Necromantic Ritual

Only good for those who a) have a good memory for speeches, routines, and foreign names, and b) don’t mind sacrificing a small mammal or two. Since I fail both criteria, I naturally fail at this type of thing; my summoning rituals were full of stutters, stumbles, and knocked-over implements, and the only small mammals present were my befuddled pets. It’s a good thing I don’t believe in spirits; with my clumsiness and bad luck, I’d probably summon up Beelzebub by mistake, forget to stay in the magic circle, and end up getting skewered and roasted over my own scented candles.

Mediumistic Trance

Hard to do for most folks, and not very pleasant, unless you don’t mind ectoplasm coming out of your ears. I’ve never had any luck with this, and don’t intend to try it again any time soon—apartment living is not conducive to the bugle-blowing and table-tipping that goes along with most sèances.

So… who wants some ectoplasm in their eggnog? :-)