I started playing the Ouija board just after my best friend died. It was the weekend before my fifteenth birthday and we were supposed to celebrate together but a bottle of liquor and a huge tree on a stretch of country road at three in the morning took her and a handful of other mutual friends lives and put an end to all our future plans together.

She wasn’t my first or only friend to die but she was the most painful loss.

I spent hours walking in the dead of night, alone, so I could spend time at the cemetery with her. I even slept on her grave more than once. It really wasn’t healthy, but I had no other way to grieve. My mom had refused to even let me go to the funeral, telling me it was “morbid” to want to go at my age, and she had been my friend since second grade so I felt lost without her.

So, I tried to talk to her through the Ouija board which backfired, of course. Instead of getting closure with her, it opened a door into the occult that I now wish I never would have opened. One that took me forever to close again.

They say once you open that door it can never truly be closed again and I believe that. I still have Ouija boards show up in the most unusual ways, trying to find their way back into my life. I’ll write about that more later.

I never did talk to my friend again but the Ouija board did give me faith in things unseen.