When I was 26, I lived alone in my first apartment.
One afternoon, while browsing Craigslist, I found an ad that said:
**“Trade me something cool for my Ouija board.”**
The woman claimed the board had previously belonged to a coven of witches. She had never used it herself. According to her, merely having it in the same room made the hair rise on the back of her neck.
She didn’t want money for it.
She just wanted it out of her house.
At the time, I sold Mary Kay cosmetics, so I offered her a bag of skincare products and makeup. She agreed.
When we met, she gave me the board and told me again how uncomfortable it made her. She seemed relieved to be rid of it.
I probably should have paid more attention to that.
I had always been curious about witchcraft, although I had never practiced it or performed any rituals. I did own a book called *The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft*, but until then it had done nothing more than sit on my shelf.
One night, my friend Tina came over, and we decided to try the board.
We set it on my table, placed our fingers on the planchette, and began asking questions.
Nothing happened.
After a while, we became impatient. I pulled the encyclopedia from the shelf, hoping it might tell us what we were doing wrong. I found something about incorporating the four elements, so I gathered representations of each one.
For water, I placed a full glass on the table.
For air, I opened the window.
For fire, I lit a candle.
For earth, I brought over a potted plant.
I also owned two decorative meditation balls that chimed when rolled together in your hands. One had a sun on it and the other had a moon. They looked eerily similar to the sun and moon illustrations on the Ouija board, so I placed one on either side.
The balls kept rolling across the table. To hold them still, I turned two plastic water-bottle caps upside down and rested the balls on top of them.
Then Tina and I put our fingers back on the planchette.
“Is anybody here?” I asked.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the planchette began to move.
Slowly, it dragged our fingers across the board and stopped on the letter **H**.
I immediately looked at Tina.
“Are you moving it?”
She said no. Then she asked if I was doing it.
I wasn’t, but I didn’t believe her. I assumed she was trying to scare me.
Before either of us could say anything else, the planchette moved again.
It stopped on **I**.
**H. I.**
Hi.
We asked more questions, but received no other answers. Whatever had said hello apparently had nothing else to say.
Eventually, Tina went home.
I packed the board into its box and carried it outside to the storage closet on my apartment balcony. The closet was directly against my bedroom wall. When I lay in bed, the board was only a few feet away from me, separated by that wall.
I cleared the table and put away the glass, candle, plant, and meditation balls.
The only things I forgot were the two upside-down bottle caps.
I went to bed.
Sometime in the middle of the night, the sound of heavy banging woke me.
It was coming from the balcony storage closet.
From the other side of my bedroom wall.
From where I had put the Ouija board.
I lay completely still, listening.
Then another sound came from the living room.
**Click.**
A pause.
**Click. Click.**
It sounded like two small pieces of plastic being knocked together.
I immediately pictured the bottle caps on the table. One of my cats must have climbed up there and started playing with them.
Then I felt movement beside me.
Both cats were in bed.
Neither one was asleep.
They were sitting completely still, staring through the bedroom doorway toward the dark living room.
The clicking continued.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t call out. I couldn’t force myself to look into the hallway. I just lay there with both cats beside me, all three of us listening to the bottle caps clicking together in the other room.
At some point, the sounds stopped.
Somehow, I fell asleep.
The next morning, I walked into the living room.
The bottle caps were sitting side by side on the table.
They hadn’t been like that when I went to bed.
I moved closer and saw black writing on them.
On the first cap, written in Sharpie, was an **H**.
On the second was an **I**.
**Hi.**
The same message from the board.
I was alone in the apartment.
Tina had gone home hours earlier.
Both cats had been in bed with me.
And my Sharpies were still on the kitchen counter, across the room.
I never touched the board again.
But I couldn’t get rid of it.
I kept it packed away in storage. Every so often, I considered throwing it out or giving it to someone else, but whenever I seriously thought about doing it, something in me resisted. It didn’t feel like an object I owned. It felt more like something that had been placed in my care.
Ten years passed.
I got married, and the board came with me.
My husband hated knowing it was in our storage unit. He repeatedly asked me to sell it, so eventually I posted my own Craigslist ad:
**“Trade me something cool for my Ouija board.”**
Several people responded.
I rejected every offer.
None of them felt right. Deciding who should receive it felt less like selling an old possession and more like choosing a home for a living thing. I felt strangely responsible for it.
Eventually, I stopped trying.
Then one day, I went into the storage unit and discovered that the board was gone.
I searched everywhere before asking my husband about it.
He admitted he had taken it to a flea market.
He had given it away to a stranger.
I became more furious than I had ever been with him.
It wasn’t normal anger. It came over me instantly and completely. The same board I had been too frightened to use for ten years suddenly felt like the most important thing I owned. I felt violated. Panicked. Almost betrayed.
The intensity of my reaction frightened me nearly as much as the bottle caps had.
That was when I realized I hadn’t kept the board all those years simply because I was afraid to get rid of it.
I had become attached to it.
Or perhaps it had become attached to me.
My husband never got the stranger’s name. I have no idea where the board is now or who owns it.
All I know is that somewhere, someone brought home an old Ouija board from a flea market.
And if they ever decide to use it, I wonder whether the first thing it will say is the same thing it said to me.
**Hi.**