Everything You Know Is Wrong (Part Three)

Greetings Ouijaphiles!

Those three weekends were amazing in their frenetic nature. We needed maps of Lowell in order to find cemeteries described by the board. We found gravestones with predicted inscriptions….It was basically nuts.

One of our brothers, “Ma” (so called because he was so neat and a role model for truth justice and the American way), who was in ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) at the time, and eventually a retired lieutenant colonel for the Air Force, became intrigued. He was from Whitman, Mass and went home during this time and did some research that, I am sure, affected us.

He discovered the ties of the Ouija board to its role of religious dictation; that there was a hierarchy of communication that could be ascertained by the position of the stylus on the board (or plastic disk in our case). At the top of this hierarchy pyramid was Jesus. This position was almost never achieved and you should dial 911 if perceived. The next level was quite interesting. It consisted of two entities, Rosenkreuz and St. Germain.

The Rosicrucians were related to the Knights Templar era and St. Germain was an alchemist. I believe if the stylus stayed between ‘R’ and ‘S’ it indicated Rosenkreuz and if it slid back and forth between ‘G’ and ‘T’ it was information from St Germain. (If out of town then call collect!).

There was also a satanic position and I am not going to seed your little subconsciouses with that location.

Ma swore that at one of the sessions back home a blinding flash of light appeared in the room while in contact with some upper hierarchy. This did not help us focus on our studies.

The dean of the college had to ask his father, who had lived in Lowell all his life, about the information we gave him concerning the Shaw Hospital. When it was verified, he was somewhat curious as to how we found all this out. “Ouija board, Dean!”. I think the dean preferred the regular Monday morning meetings with fraternity officers to consist of explaining police reports rather than the occult.

Someone discovered that the witch had been in contact and was curious as to any succeeding events after the séance broadcast. It was quickly agreed she would come back and visit the fraternity house. It is to my regret that Gini and I decided to spend that weekend at her apartment in Boston rather than in Lowell. I did not find out what really happened that weekend for over a year.

Here is what I eventually was told:

The witch arrived with her own board. It was multicolored and ‘dipped in morphine’. She was a member of a coven (you know, instead of getting together to play bridge you cast spells) and the coven members were focusing on and supporting her from afar for the evening.

A tape recorder, which actually had been used in recent sessions, was set up and a recorder designated. The session kicked into gear quickly and the Shaw Hospital became the ongoing topic. I do not know how long this transpired but at some point the stylus switched to the Jesus position on the board, the tape ran out, the recorder stopped recording and of the more than a dozen people there, only 12 were awake (oh, you apostles, you).

The board then began to personally address each person in the room through dictation to the point where each person broke down crying before dawn because of the intimate nature that the board was describing about their personal lives. They were supposedly assigned a mission and were to meet one year later and no one outside the group was to know about this. Subsequently they were encouraged to go to church in the morning. I was told that when they emerged from the fraternity house, dawn was most refulgent (who needs LSD?). However their collective experience at the church was a bit of a disappointment and all returned to get some sleep.

Now I return from Boston and begin hopping around, “What happened with the witch? Did you find out anything else about the doll or the hospital? What happened? Huh?! Huh?!”.

This was met by very guarded responses. they talked about the strange board the witch had brought, the coven and some information about the hospital, not much of it new.

What I was not told was that one of the brothers (was it Rick?) who lived in an apartment and would use my bed on the weekend when I visited Gini, was told that he would wake up screaming that night. So he did not get much sleep. I, on the other hand, then became the next person to sleep there. It was the top of a bunkbed. Terry was in the lower bunk. Bill and Dave were next door in their bunk beds. I started to drift off to sleep. In my mind’s eye a face appeared and started to come closer to me and as it did it became older and older and closer and closer….

I screamed.

There was a slight pause. Then Terry quietly asked, somewhat petrified, “Captain, are you alright?”. Dave and Bill (also participants the night before with the witch) had their fingernails clawed into the adjoining wall and door.

“I think I’m okay but I had this image of a face getting closer and older .. it really freaked me out!”

Terry followed with, “Well, the witch said that if Rick went to sleep in your bed he would wake up screaming. We weren’t supposed to tell anybody.”

My quick response was, “Thanks a shitload!!”

I did not learn any of the rest until the future appointment a year later had come and gone without the group reassembling.

What did all this mean? Who the heck knows?! It did happen and many of us still have sharp recall of the creepy feelings from specific parts of the tale. In fact, Terry just wrote me yesterday to reminisce about how outrageous all this was. He pointed out that the radio station had the year wrong. It was 1970 and not 1971. This makes more sense.

My grandmother Rienzo, the mystic (and that’s another story) would have had quite a chuckle about these naïve children of the sixties floundering in wacko-dimension land. But, as stated, it just reinforces the idea that everything we know is wrong.