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…..