Just Curious

[_candygal]

I posted this question to MD@D also...a lot of talk about the devil ..was wondering if any of you had experiences with the Ouija Board in you younger years. Please be honest..alot of you were active and had said priesthood at the time..does any one have anything to share? I did have an experience...a chill..passed around a coat of a young friend/cousin...who died at age 14...we wanted to talk to her...asked questions..it was and eerie feeling yet looking back I feel like some sort of idiot.but I never forgot.

[_Fence Sitter]

I remember messing around with them a time or two, but being the prankster I was at that age I always tried to push it into weird or scary answers, then shout really loud to see who would jump.

McConkie had a paragraph about them in his Mormon Doctrine.

Ouija boards are trade-marked devices used by spiritualists mediums in receiving messages from evil spirits. Marked with the alphabet and various signs, and having a planchette with a pointer instead of a pencil, the boards are used by mediums at seances to spell out words and otherwise receive answers to questions. Use of Ouija boards is a wicked and evil thing; communion with Satan is involved; and those who use the devil's tools , soon find themselves in complete subjection to him to whom they turn for revelation and guidance.

Personally I think the whole thing is nonsense made up to prey upon gullible people's fears.

[_honorentheos]

My parents were of the Joseph F. Smith school so I felt pretty scandalous playing card games with face cards as a preteen. I wouldn't have dared to use an Ouija board. But there was a period after my friends and I had read Jay's Journal where we became interested in finding out more about the occult. One of my friends really became interested in it and believed there was something to it. We had a class together in 8th grade and while day dreaming through a boring lesson I noticed the papers beginning to flutter on my desk. When I moved a little they stopped. It took me a moment to realize the air vent was angled in such a way that depending on how I sat in my chair I could block the air or kind of direct it at the papers to make them move. So, I bumped my friend's foot, pointed at the papers, and then made as if I was really concentrating on them at which point they began to flap like they might take off. His eyes got big but he got really excited, too. He whispered to ask how I was doing it, and I said something about working on focusing my energy. He asked that I do it a few time before he realized what was going on. He seemed pretty disappointed, too. We drifted apart as friends in high school, and by the time we graduated he was listing studies of the occult as a hobby in the senior year book. So I guess he figured something out I just thought was purely material...

ETA: I did convince myself that one of my friends and I shared dreams periodically, though. It started on a summer day when we both had a strange dream and when we were describing them, we started thinking they were very, very similar to the point that we were almost certainly inventing detail out of what was really much more fuzzy dream memories to support the theory. At the time, though, it kind of freaked us out. We started comparing notes on our dreams and of course there were other times where by chance we dreamed something that might have included the other person and had similar dream plot points. Reflecting back on it, it makes me feel a little sheepish because in the back of my mind I knew the dreams weren't really detailed enough to be meaningful but there was also a certain appeal to the idea my best friend and I had some sort of psychic connection. Kids.

[_honorentheos]

Oh, just remembered something else similar. My dad played church basketball as an elder, and we'd go to the games but were too young to pay attention. So all of my friends whose dads were playing and our siblings would sneak off using the stage to go explore the church. The church house we attended was set up so that the two wards who shared it each had a "wing" or side of the building with the chapel and cultural hall in the center accessible from either side. When we went exploring, it was always to the other ward's side of the building. Our side of the building had the library, the baptismal font, and always seems more roomy and light. Their side of the building seemed to be essentially a narrow hallway that started with the bishop's office, a clerk's office, and then classrooms that formed a short "L" shape with a door leading outside at the end of the short leg of the "L".

The result of this was it was almost pitch black during the basketball games. And we were terrified of walking down to the end of the hall. The game we played involved swallowing one's fear and walking all the way down the hall, around the corner, and turning on the hall lights. As a big brother, I'd sometimes act like I wasn't scared to walk down and around the corner but in reality it felt like something evil was down that hall. Anyway, one of the siblings of a friend took the challenge to make the walk by themselves and, just as they turned the corner they screamed and came running back yelling that they had seen "red eyes" like in the Amityville Horror outside the door. That was all it took to convince us the devil was really trying to get us at the end of the hall and we all went into the chapel because one of us claimed it was dedicated so the devil couldn't go in there.

Of course our parents ended up amused by our claims and that we were scared of rear car lights which they saw as the obvious source of the red eyes. And we lost our free range privileges, too. Guess the leadership didn't like kids running around the church house claiming the devil was chasing them.

[_moksha]

Candygal, I hope the MD&D board pointed out that the only officially sanctioned medium to help receive messages from beyond is a Seer Stone placed in a well-conditioned sorting hat.

Barring that, the only other such permittable medium would be an ancient brass breastplate with yes/no stones dangling from tassels which would be spun by the wearer before being read. This breastplate was known as the Urim and Thummim and was named after the great military leader General Urim T. Zelph.

[_candygal]

Candygal, I hope the MD&D board pointed out that the only officially sanctioned medium to help receive messages from beyond is a Seer Stone placed in a well-conditioned sorting hat.

Barring that, the only other such permittable medium would be an ancient brass breastplate with yes/no stones dangling from tassels which would be spun by the wearer before being read. This breastplate was known as the Urim and Thummim and was named after the great military leader General Urim T. Zelph.

Actually...they are not saying too much..pretty much laughing at the whole question I was asking. There are some priesthood inferred in there...but I guess it was a boring subject..or that everyone was just too scared to try. Kind of disappointed. Who in the world did not try ouijah board? I guess if you are scared of playing cards...that would be a big deal. Seer stones...so not scary...they only work in dark ..in a hat..how scary is that???

[_krose]

My parents were of the Joseph F. Smith school so I felt pretty scandalous playing card games with face cards as a preteen. I wouldn't have dared to use an Ouija board.

I can relate to this. I was also affected by the scare stories passed around of kids who died horrific deaths after playing with one (“rotted from the inside” was a popular story).

These days I’m just a bit annoyed by the name and how to pronounce it. Yes-yes in French and German should be “wee-yaw,” I would think. But what I’ve always heard is “wee-jee,” with only the French half getting decent treatment and the German half getting butchered. Weird.

But maybe it’s to be expected in a country where the kara in karaoke is generally pronounced “carry,” while being pronounced “kuh-raw” in karate.

[_honorentheos]

My parents were of the Joseph F. Smith school so I felt pretty scandalous playing card games with face cards as a preteen. I wouldn't have dared to use an Ouija board.

I can relate to this. I was also affected by the scare stories passed around of kids who died horrific deaths after playing with one (“rotted from the inside” was a popular story).

I never heard that about kids rotting from the inside. But it was made clear using one was inviting the devil to look your way and nothing good would come of it. Possession was a possibility but more likely something like what was described when Joseph Smith was praying during the first vision account. I envisioned it as being similar to the way the movie from the '70s portrayed it. It was irrational either way. And maybe my experience was a little extreme as I also had uncles and aunts of high school or college age at the time who would tell us about the Satanic links between rock bands like KISS (which obviously stood for Knights in Satan's Service because that makes sense) and other crazy superstitions.

Growing up there was another family in our ward who we were friends with, with siblings roughly the same ages as me and my siblings. We had an annual combined family camping trip we made until the oldest were of scout age. I have a very distinct memory of the parents telling stories about missionaries dealing with their companions or ward members becoming possessed because they prayed to Satan or did something else that invited diabolic trouble. Maybe it was just ghost story talk around a camp fire up in the Uintah mountains, but at the time I thought they really believed it and it did a decent job of scaring me.

These days I’m just a bit annoyed by the name and how to pronounce it. Yes-yes in French and German should be “wee-yaw,” I would think. But what I’ve always heard is “wee-jee,” with only the French half getting decent treatment and the German half getting butchered. Weird.

But maybe it’s to be expected in a country where the kara in karaoke is generally pronounced “carry,” while being pronounced “kuh-raw” in karate.

This is kind of embarrassing but until your post above, I had no idea it was a compound of "oui" and "ja". Huh.

[_moksha]

Businessman Elijah Bond had the idea to patent a planchette sold with a board on which the alphabet was printed, much like the previously existing talking boards. An employee of Elijah Bond, William Fuld, took over the talking board production. In 1901, Fuld started production of his own boards under the name "Ouija". When Fuld took over production of the boards, he popularized the more widely accepted etymology: that the name came from a combination of the French and German words for "yes". The Fuld name became synonymous with the Ouija board, as Fuld reinvented its history, claiming that he himself had invented it.

Thank goodness the Etch-A-Sketch escaped the scrutiny of President Joseph F. Smith. My parents would have never permitted me one had they been told by Church Authorities that the Etch-A-Sketch originated as an instrument of the Sumerian demon Padzuzu.

[_toon]

I remember playing with them as a kid. They never seemed to work, except when someone opened an eye and tried to "game" the game. But I remember other friends swearing that they, or someone they knew, had freaky experiences with them.

Their testimonies of the evils of an Ouiga board weren't all that different than any other testimony of someone's spiritual experience, successful blessing, etc. Always subjective and questionable when put under close scrutiny.

Come to think of it, it was also a lot similar to the Bloody Mary games we used to play in the elementary school bathroom. We'd close our eyes, say her name three times, and usually run out before really finishing. Yet there was always some kid who swore to have seen something.