The Ouija Board
 
 It came in an old nondescript box addressed to me.     
 
A fan had sent it.          
 
With a simple, “Here,” a studio technician handed me the box just before I went on the air.
 
I had no idea what it was. Maybe it was a gift given in good conscience. Maybe someone sent it to me on a dare. I’ll never know for sure. Whatever the sender’s intention, the weathered and worn Ouija board inside the box ultimately took me to the very edge of reality, from which point I looked over the brink into an unfathomable black pool of chaos.
 
Why is it that such an innocuous piece of cardboard with its triangular-shaped planchette holds the threat of becoming a force for evil? This was not a question that came to mind that late-night in the KTRS studios in St. Louis as I was hosting Coast to Coast AM back in 2002, filling in for the legendary Art Bell.
 
I was taking calls, as usual, from listeners who had experienced their own encounters with the paranormal: ghosts of loved ones, voices offering help or consolation from the other side, cats or dogs whose behavior mysteriously foretold of danger, shadow people you could see just out of the corner of your eye, Big Foot, the giant bird, Mothman, UFOs of all shapes and sizes, and flying triangles. People were calling on open lines about abductions and other traumatic events that had shaped their lives. And then I told my audience about the Ouija board in the antique box. Should I use it on the air, I asked the listeners?
 
Calls came pouring in, jamming the switchboard, the first-time caller line, and all the wildcard lines: “Do it!”
 
I slid the Ouija board out of its box.
 
Now, for anyone who has never seen the inside of a modern radio broadcast studio, the sight of so many switches, dials, flashing indicator lights, and phone hookups, all set around a table festooned with standing and hanging microphones and computer monitors for reading e-mail can be intimidating. On those very few occasions when I have hosted in-studio guests, I always tried to let them get acclimated to the array of equipment well before we went on the air so that there’d be no dead time between questions and answers in an interview because the overwhelming presence of technology had distracted a guest’s attention.
 
This amount of technology is comforting to me, because I know I’m hardwired into the rest of the universe. However, for every diode, switch, and electronic circuit there are probably a hundred things that will cause them to fail. That’s why you have redundant and back-up systems and why you have a studio engineer as well as a producer backing you up and reading the dials to make sure the system’s working the way it’s supposed to. It’s complicated, but it’s only electronics. It’s science.
 
For every equipment failure, there’s a physical reason. And for every failure there’s a fix. That’s what you learn on the job. That’s what your engineer signals to you when a piece of equipment goes dead and you stare blankly through a glass window at the producer. That’s what you have to rely on when nothing is coming through your earphones.
 
On this particular night in St. Louis, amid the mass of electronics and blinking lights arrayed all around me like a nice warm security envelope, I unfolded the Ouija board and set it on the studio desk. I felt a hesitation. Should I or shouldn’t I? The listener calls kept flooding in. Voices in my earphones were egging me on in front of a ten-million-person audience stretched almost 5,000 miles diagonally across the entire continent from Halifax in Canada to National City, California, on the Mexican border.
 
“Hi, George, this is Josh from Watertown. Ask it a question.”
 
But I remembered The Exorcist, as well as countless other movies, when the person about to become the innocent victim finds that the pointer is out of his or her control and the demonic voice speaks through that person’s fingertips. Sure I hesitated. Who wouldn’t?
 
My audience was insistent.
 
“I have a question, George.”
 
“Can it talk to the dead?”
 
A truck driver phoned in from somewhere along an interstate outside of Lawrence, Kansas. He, too, had a question begging for an answer.
 
I took the planchette out of the box.
 
Okay, I thought, maybe just once. I told the audience what I was doing, placing my fingertips lightly on the planchette so as to let whatever force was present guide the reader across the letters laid out along the board. Ask a yes or no question, the planchette will direct you. Ask for a name or a word, and the planchette will spell it out. Remember every B horror film you’ve ever seen where the camera does a close focus on a pair of hands being guided by something out of their control, and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
 
“Okay,” I said to the audience. “I’m ready. Call in with a question and let’s see what this baby can do. The numbers again are . . .”
 
Darkness, sudden and terrifying. Not even the diodes were blinking.
 
Before my eyes could adjust, the lights came on again. The back-up generators had kicked in and the studio came alive.
 
“What was that?” I heard one of the engineers say through my earphones.
 
“You’re supposed to know,” another voice said. Maybe it was my in-studio producer, Howard Morton. “Are we on generators?”
 
There was a lot of background chatter as I stared down at the planchette on the Ouija board. It was pointing to “No.”
 
“Hey, George, I got a question,” a caller’s voice crackled through the earphones. He was on a cell phone, I could tell.
 
“Go ahead,” I said. But just then my earphones went dead.
 
I signaled to my producer on the other side of the thick glass window that separated the control room from the broadcast booth, “Are we on?”
 
He gave me a thumbs-up back, but I still couldn’t hear anything coming out of the earphones. I pointed to my ear and gave him the cut sign across my neck. Audio was dead to me. I could see him check his board and shake his head. Then the sound came back.
 
“So what do you think, George? Can you ask it?” The caller’s voice said.
 
“Hey, my friend, you broke up out there,” I said, hoping that it was his phone and not our audio. “Run that by me again?”
 
I looked down. The planchette was still sitting on “No,” only this time it seemed as if it had moved a little. My hands were resting on it, but I felt nothing.
 
My caller began speaking when, as suddenly as the lights had gone out moments earlier, all the dials on the panels in front of me dropped to zero as if somebody had pulled the plug. I still had sound in my earphones, but none of the instruments were registering. And, again, I shot a what’s up look to my producer, who only shrugged and then gave me a...