Most scary Ouija board stories start with teenagers at a sleepover asking a dead kid questions. I never asked mine anything. I never even put my fingers on it. The pointer moved by itself every night anyway, one letter at a time, and it was looking for somebody named Margaret. I collect board games, not scary supernatural stories, and I didn’t want this one.
I collect vintage board games. It started with my grandpa’s old Monopoly set and got out of hand. I live alone in a small house in Rochester, New York, and one whole wall of my living room is shelves of old game boxes. Most Saturdays in the summer, I go to estate sales.
In July of 2022, I went to an estate sale in a big old house in the Browncroft neighborhood. The woman who lived there had died at ninety-four. The sale was run by a company, and everything had a price sticker on it. Furniture, dishes, about forty years of National Geographic.
In a sewing room upstairs, on a shelf, I found a talking board. Wood, not cardboard. From the 1940s, I guessed, with the alphabet in an arc and the sun and moon in the corners. The heart-shaped pointer, the planchette, was in the box. It was in beautiful shape. Twelve dollars.
When I got it home and opened the box, there was an index card taped inside the lid. Old handwriting, careful, in blue fountain pen.
“Do not put it away with the pointer on the board.”
I thought it was charming. A little superstition from the lady who owned it. I set the board on a shelf in my living room, leaning against the wall, and I put the planchette on it, right in the middle, for display. It looked great.
One Letter a Night
The next morning, the planchette was sitting on the letter H.
I noticed because I walk past that shelf to get to my kitchen. It had slid up and to the left. Its little glass window was right over the H.
I figured it slid. The board was leaning against the wall at an angle. Maybe a truck went by. I live on a busy street. I pushed it back to the middle.
The next morning it was on E.
The next morning, L.
I started taking pictures. I’m a careful person. I’m a pharmacist. I like evidence. I took a picture every night before bed, planchette in the middle, and a picture every morning.
L. Then O.
HELLO.
I laughed out loud when I figured it out, standing in my pajamas with my coffee. But it was the kind of laugh you do when you don’t know what else to do with your face.
The Name on the Board
I could have put it away. I know that. But it had said hello, and I wanted to know what came next. I kept taking pictures.
Over the next eight mornings, it spelled MARGARET.
Then it went to the corner. The word “YES” is printed in the corner of the board. Then it went back to the letters.
IS SHE THERE.
That took nine more mornings. I had a whole folder of pictures on my phone. I’d started sleeping badly. Every night I’d lie in bed and listen for the sound of wood sliding on wood in the living room. I never heard it. Not once. It only ever moved when I was asleep.
I looked up the estate sale listing. The woman who had died was named Margaret Ostrander.
So I called the estate sale company. I told the woman who answered that I’d bought a talking board at the Ostrander sale and wondered if she knew anything about it. I didn’t tell her the rest. I didn’t want to sound crazy.
She knew right away. She said, “Oh, the board in the sewing room. That was Margaret’s sister’s.”
She said Margaret had a younger sister named Ruth who died in 1961, when they were both in their thirties. The neighbors told her that Margaret never got over it. She said Margaret used that board every night. Every single night, for sixty years. She’d sit in the sewing room and talk to Ruth before she went to bed.
“Sweet, in a way,” the woman said.
I asked her if Margaret ever said what Ruth told her. She said no. She said Margaret was a private person. She said the only thing anyone remembered was that Margaret always, always took the pointer off the board when she was done. She was very particular about it.
I hung up and looked at the shelf. The pointer was sitting in the middle of the board, where I’d left it for display. Where I’d left it every night for three weeks.
Why Scary Ouija Board Stories Always Have Rules
I decided to put it away that night. I picked up the planchette and the board and the box. I was going to put the planchette in my desk drawer and the board in the box and the box in the basement.
But before I did, I looked at the board one more time. And I thought about Margaret, sitting in that sewing room every night for sixty years, asking her sister if she was there. And I thought about whatever had been answering her.
And I thought about the last thing it had spelled. IS SHE THERE.
It wasn’t Margaret asking for Ruth. It was something asking for Margaret. And Margaret was dead.
So who was it talking to now?
I put the board in the box. I put the planchette in my desk drawer and shut it. I went to bed.
I woke up at 4:10 in the morning. There was a smell in my bedroom. Lavender, old and powdery, like the inside of a grandmother’s purse. And something hard was against my cheek.
The planchette was on my pillow, an inch from my face. Its little glass window was right over my eye.
Since Then
I didn’t sleep in that room for a week. When I finally went back to the desk, the drawer was still shut. Nothing else was missing.
I gave the board to a woman in a paranormal collectors group on Facebook who said she knew how to “close” it. I don’t know what she did. I didn’t ask. I mailed her the board in the box.
I didn’t mail her the planchette. I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t on my pillow in the morning, and it wasn’t in the drawer, and it wasn’t anywhere. I tore the house apart.
That was two years ago. I still haven’t found it.
Some nights, very late, I hear a small sound from my nightstand. Wood sliding on wood. Just for a second. Like something being pushed an inch across the top.
I never look. I’ve learned that much. I just say, very quietly, into the dark, “She’s not here.”
And it stops.
For more horror paranormal reads, try the haunted elevator story about the 2:17 stop, our ghost hunting stories post about an EVP recorder, or the scary park ranger stories from a lake basin in Idaho.
Share your scary Ouija board stories
Have you ever owned a talking board that seemed to keep going after you stopped? Tell us your scary Ouija board stories, or any scary paranormal stories from a secondhand object you brought home, in the comments below.
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