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.

Everything You Know Is Wrong (Part Two)

Your basic Toys R Us Ouija Board.









When the board was moved to the main floor many people tried to use it. Each time one of the two with their hands on the stylus would accuse the other of moving it. Everyone denied it.

The board seemed to know its audience and how to get them on edge. It spelled everything quickly, correctly and in complete sentences. It became very specific about the history of the Shaw Hospital. It claimed the reasons for all the brouhaha was that illegal and sloppily performed abortions and operations were the reason for the eventual closing of the hospital. Spirits from these people were not at rest. Much to several people’s chagrin, seven sets of initials were presented as being associated with seven of the patients/victims at the hospital. Gini was one of them. This was not really my idea of ‘showing her a good time’.

The seven were then charged with liberating the spirits of these unfortunates. This could be done by finding records of these incidents and publishing them. These records could be found inside a doll which was somewhere in the hospital.

Obviously we all took this very calmly – yeah right! Thankfully no one changed appearance or their voices. However we did have to pop the plastic disc out of the center of the stylus because it had taken to traversing the board quite rapidly. Only one finger of each of the two ‘conduits’ was now on the disk. It was easier to control this way. Again, thankfully, when the fingers were removed the disk stopped moving. It did want to spin and twist as a tripod and slide quickly off the edge, ergo just use the plastic disk.

Now since Dr. Shaw was not too pleased with ‘those college students’ from the radio broadcast the night before and had boarded up all the windows and doors to the hospital, we were concerned about our mission. As we were discussing how to get in to the hospital the board stopped hovering over letters and switched to highlighting numbers; none of which were higher than 7. Some brilliant person cried, “They must be musical notes!” and ran off to get a guitar. So we then played “Name That Tune”.

Either myself or some other crazed Irishman announced that the tune was “Tu Ra Lu Ra Lu Ra”, an Irish lullaby. This tune was to be sung on our way to the hospital.

Can you imagine us now treating this board like another person as we asked, “Who should go?”. The board immediately slid and threaded out, “All 20 of you”. Now who had been keeping count of how many were coming and going in a fraternity house on a Saturday night? So we stopped and counted…16..17..18..19…oh shit…20.

Each count resolved itself the same way…whoops! We then found our focus and asked the board, “How do we get in there”. Zippin’ and zappin’ it spelled out that we should use the northeast stairway and go 22 steps. We should do this at 9:07 (or sometime close to that).

Well, we decided that we would accept the challenge and we should all go. That is, 19 of us did. Prow, a fraternity brother of long standing and our cook, was in the kitchen banging around pots and pans. He was not going.

Prow (for some reason our nicknames bespoke of a nautical paradigm, mine was Captain) was a rather large person but was a mild mannered student who worked in the Plastics Department. He actually became rude as he emphasized he was not going.

“Prow, come on! We have to sing this song…go at 9:07….find the papers..free the spirits..come on!”

He would not budge until finally, at 9:10, he told us why he would not go.

We were fairly new to this fraternity house on East Merrimack Street. In fact the first house for the newly formed chapter of Kappa Sigma at Lowell Tech was on Methuen Street the year before. Prow was one of the charter brothers who helped start the chapter. He was also a member of the ‘House Search Committee’. This group had looked at several large, old houses in Lowell (of which there were many to choose)…including the Shaw Hospital. They had eventually decided that there would be too much work to be done to get the place up to code and had moved on to other properties. However during the tour of the hospital Prow distinctly remembered seeing something that was somewhat inconsistent with the hospital surroundings…. the doll!

Now we were sure there was a series of explanations that would rationally align all this but somehow it escaped us. So now, 19 of us, struck out for the hospital singing Tu Ra Lu Ra Lu Ra walking down the middle of the street.

Our poor neighbors..they had been subjected to parties, rock bands, the sixties and now this sight – arrgh!

One of the crew reached in his pocket to pull out a rosary and jokingly yell, “Look we’re protected!” but what he showed no longer had the crucifix attached. He was replaced by a puff of smoke making its way back inside the fraternity house. He was later found hugging a Jack Daniels bottle and mumbling, “Glory be to…”.

So 18 is a good number isn’t it? ….Tu Ra Lu Ra Lu Ra…Tu Ra Lu Ra Lai…Tu Ra Lu Ra Lu Ra…Hush, now don’t you cry…

We stood before this brick monstrosity of a hospital, complete with spire and tower and, using the nearby Merrimack River to orient, determined the northeast stairway. Counting 22 steps we turned to a solid brick wall. That was it…gotcha!

We began our sheepish retreat to the fraternity house but the conversation settled into- “What if we should have paced 22 steps instead of counting 22 stairs? There were landings along the way up.”

So we ran for our handy-dandy Ouija Board and demanded, “Steps or paces?”. … “Paces” was the response. Further conversation with the board resulted in Gini, two others and myself as the candidates who would return to the hospital.

Upon re-encountering the staircase we used up several of our ‘paces’ on the landings and wound up much further down the stairway. We turned…there was a window…there were no boards or plywood over the window…we pushed…it opened.

Gini and I then duly appointed ourselves the guardians of the open window and would defend against impossible odds anyone who would attempt to gain entrance to the house while the other two explored. Our offer was accepted and they entered. After about ten minutes they returned…doll-less.

Our return to the house led to some more rapid ‘dictation’ from the board and it was all duly recorded. Love those engineer-types. The only remaining dramatic instance from that particular night was a call for a bible. As someone went to fetch one (see – we may have been crazed hippy freaks, engineers and jocks but there was a bible in the house) the board dictated a book, chapter and verse. This was done before the person returned, so we waited.

When they returned they placed the book down already open. Of course! It was already open to the chapter and verse cited by the board’s gallivanting. The passage pertained to murdered children…need I say more?

The next day, Sunday, we went down to the hospital to check for possible entries that were not obstructed. There was only one. We also managed to procure the original tape of the broadcast from the radio station. As stated earlier, some of the brothers worked at the station and could get it for us. Also, remember that the on-air broadcast had been edited through a several second delay, specifics of the location and the background of the hospital would not be heard over the radio.

We compared the notes from the night before to what we heard from the tape. The accuracy of what we had written when compared with the portions of the tape that were not broadcast was a bit disconcerting.

Returning to the transcript of the WBZ broadcast:

“…And everything that we got was not one hundred percent of what was on the tape but everything that we got was a hundred percent accurate …And that pretty much , uh-ah, brought it to our attention that maybe we were playin’ with somethin’ here and we managed to further investigate the hospital…”


“…We were asked to do all sorts of bizarre rituals such as singing of songs, finding of graves and, uh, all the information that the Ouija Board would volunteer …we would have no idea what it was talkin’ about but then it would give us enough direction so that, sure enough, its information would be correct…To the point where we were asking the dean of the college as to the background to the Shaw Hospital. And our basic mission for this whole thing was to, supposedly, vindicate certain spirits and certain people operating the board were associated with these spirits….Though they were never, ah, physically affected by it. The board just associated them with it. And this went on for, oh, about three weekends. Until they finally brought the witch back and, uh, I wasn’t there that night. And the night they brought the witch back…”

Oh what a night! To be continued…..

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Ah – All Hallow’s Eve. This day rated as my favorite holiday. (Bastille Day was second – serving our Heads of State to the masses). Granted there were times during the punk era when it seemed like we celebrated it daily!







It does bring out creative talents. Gini gave it her School-Of-Fashion-Design-all to enable Chip to ‘come up to bat’:



In fact, each year we felt it was a challenge to gather the Von D’Luccis and let ‘er rip. When we lived at Branch Street in Lowell we were famous throughout the city for our Halloweeen festivities. Literally hundreds would show up in this 8 apartment, century old Victorian house. Each apartment was devoted to some theme such as food, dancing or ‘other’. We even had visitors from Remulac…er…France:



Metamorphosis was not uncommon. Take one bank executive and one software consultant and poof! It’s Magenta and Medusa casually discussing what to do with the guests.



Though my all-time couples appearance for Gini and myself was as Patty Hearst and Gary Gilmour (look him up in your Funk n’ Wagnalls), sad to say there is no photographic evidence to reminisce. However we can ogle the Pink Panther and her alluring tail:



Some of us, however, aspire to artistic heights year after year:













But topping all of these soirees is the all time Zuma/Rodriguez/Von D’Lucci Halloween experience – the Shaw Hospital and its aftermath. To this day it remains the wonderful enabler to the adage, “Everything You Know Is Wrong!”. It occupied the lives of those of us attempting to go to Lowell Technological Institute (now UMass Lowell) and redesign the fraternity experience during the cerebrally challenging 60’s and early 70’s.

Each year, as a teacher, I would reserve a class day for the telling. At one point, while teaching at the University of Lowell (yet another manifestation of LTI), my lecture hall, usually about a third to a half full, would teem to capacity with eager listeners to what became known as the ‘Ouija Board Story’. Fame spread to WBZ radio whose nighttime host, Larry Glick, decided to broadcast the story nationally (11/4/1991), thus including myself in Warhol’s prediction of fifteen minute fame (actually a half hour).

It all began with a the college radio station wanting to have a live broadcast in a haunted house in Lowell. These facts can be objectively viewed at:

http://www.wuml.org/history2.php
(in the last quarter of the page)

The station at the time was WLTI (now WUML) and they had convinced a real witch, from New Jersey no less, to be in on the shenanigans. It was Friday, October 29, 1971. The fraternity heard the first rumblings, however, the next day. Several of our brothers worked for the station and one was involved with managing it. Other reports had emerged about students freaking out at a house near our fraternity house on East Merrimack Street. In fact the house was the Old Shaw Hospital only five houses away. It was a favorite ‘haunt’ of ours because of its imposing architecture and the ‘ark’ in back which was actually a creation of Dr. Shaw.

The radio website agrees that someone who believed she was a witch cooperated with them to do the broadcast as a ‘fun’ endeavor. The hospital was prepared with gimmicks and sound effects. Participants were collected at the school, blindfolded and then brought to the hospital. A séance was initiated. Before the evening was over many of the volunteers would initiate information about where they were and incidences in the history of the hospital. The tape of the show was eventually procured and the events were even shaking up the announcer as his voice quavered and cracked. At one point a charcoal drawing of a girl on the wall was thought to turn blue and have a tear appear on a cheek. The witch finally declared that this was all too much to handle and everyone ran from the house (a la Monty Python – “Run away! Run away!!”). None of the planned gimmicks or sounds had been activated.

Our weekend at the fraternity, so far, had been part of a series of events planned to enjoy with our dates. Saturday’s scheduled activity was a hayride. Gini and I had just started dating and were looking forward to the fun.

My roommate, Terry, was affianced to someone back in New York and decided to forego the hayride. He convinced a few other brothers to indulge in a trip to Toys R Us to purchase a necessary item for one of his ‘hobbies’.

We had been roommates for three years (Mike F had joined us for one) and I had traveled home with him on vacations so I could ‘practice’ on his parents before I took on mine. During those visits it became quite clear that he was a key member of a cabal that partied with Ouija boards (you know, the original internet). Well, maybe not a cabal, just very close high school friends. Many times they severally attested to the strange and bizarre whenever their group ‘seanced’ and the board did its thing.

So as we returned to the house after our golly-gee-willikers hayride, we were met by a darkened house. On a Saturday night?! Cautiously we realized that there was a small cluster on the second floor. The scene was discovered to be candle-lit and the board was very ‘active’.

At this point I will attempt to transcribe from the narrative I did on Larry Glick’s radio broadcast:

“..But when we came back from that hayride, they had the stylus on that Ouija board moving very, very quickly and managed to be describing relevant events to the Shaw Hospital. They managed to describe events that we had not heard through rumors; that we had not heard through the radio station. In fact, the radio station was careful to eliminate certain information from being broad cast over the air. I am sure you are familiar with tape delay… We had managed to pick up this information independently through a Quija Board. And later, after we got this information, we took it down in written form after it was dictated from the board and compared it to the tape from the radio station, which was unedited. And everything we got wasn’t a hundred percent of what was on the tape, but everything we got was a hundred percent accurate. and that pretty much uh brought it to our attention that maybe we were playing with something here and we managed to further investigate the hospital…And I don’t know what Jim (friend of Larry Glick and my student at the time) has told you, but some of the more dramatic events were that the people who owned the hospital, boarded up the hospital after the séance…Not wanting any more college kids to run around ‘spookin’ the neighborhood… And we managed to find out a way to get into the hospital mainly through the Ouija Board after he (Dr. Shaw) had gone through a lot of trouble boarding up windows and doors…we were brought specifically to a spot in the hospital so as to gain access, two of us did, and we were asked to do all sorts of bizarre rituals such as singing of songs, finding of graves and all the information that the… “ (pause transcript)

There’s a lot to fill in here that the radio broadcast did not cover in detail. This posting has gone on for quite a bit. What do you think? Do you want some more of the story?