I used to be that person who rolled my eyes at ghost stories. Not because I was brave, but because it was easier to laugh than admit how easily my imagination could turn shadows into monsters. If you’d asked me back in high school whether a Ouija board could ever be more than a silly party trick, I would’ve said no without blinking.

And then three different nights across my life tried very hard to prove me wrong.

The first time happened when I was still in my last years of school. The kind of age where you think you’re untouchable, where horror movies feel like fast food for your nerves, where you tell yourself fear is just a funny story you can turn off when the credits roll. It was one of those weekends my family trusted me enough to leave me alone. My best friend came over with her boyfriend and his best friend. We watched a scary movie, joked about how we’d never survive in a real haunted house, and then—because we were young and reckless and feeling invincible—someone said, “Let’s try a Ouija board.”

We didn’t have one. So we did what teenagers do: we went online and made our own.

Cardboard. Marker. A cheap homemade planchette that looked like something from an elementary school craft day. I remember thinking how ridiculous it was, how the whole thing already felt like a setup for laughter. We sat on the floor in my living room with the lights dimmed, the way people do when they want to feel brave in the safe simulation of danger. The planchette moved a little, and we immediately accused each other.

“Stop pushing.”

“I’m not!”

“Okay, sure.”

We asked dumb questions at first. The kind you ask when you want a dramatic answer but not a real one. Then the board started spelling the name of an illness. Over and over. We laughed nervously. We changed the questions. We tried to redirect the energy, if you can even call it that. But it kept coming back to the same word, like a needle stuck on a record.

One of the guys—my best friend’s boyfriend—asked if one of us had it.

The board answered no.

He asked if someone in our family had it.

His best friend went from playful to pale in seconds. He was the first one who looked genuinely scared, not performative-scared. Not “this is fun” scared. He said we should stop. We teased him into staying because teenagers are cruel in the most casual way. We convinced him it was just someone messing around.

Then the board spelled: “Mom.”

That was the moment his best friend stood up so fast his chair scraped the floor like a warning. He said we were idiots. He said we didn’t know what we were doing. He said it wasn’t funny anymore.

We blamed the boyfriend for scaring him. The boyfriend swore he wasn’t moving anything.

And then my best friend—who had always been the bold one, the “I dare you” personality in our pair—sat closer and asked the question that, in hindsight, makes my stomach twist.

“Whose mom?”

The planchette slid to two letters.

You.

A cold little word.

A simple little word.

The kind that lands like a slap.

We didn’t scream. We didn’t run. We did that thing people do when they want to keep their dignity: we laughed, but smaller this time. We joked, but with shaky voices. We told ourselves it was a coincidence. Someone had to be pushing it. Someone had to be playing a sick prank.

And then my phone rang.

It was my best friend’s mother.

She asked me to come over immediately.

I still remember the drive: the way my hands felt too sweaty on the wheel, the way my brain tried to negotiate with reality. Maybe she just needed help with something. Maybe my friend had gotten into trouble. Maybe I was overreacting.

But when I got there, the house felt heavy with the kind of silence that means something irreversible has arrived.

Her mother sat us down. She wanted us there so we could support her kids when she said the words out loud.

She had been diagnosed with that exact illness.

Advanced stage.

Months, not years.

The universe loves cruel timing.

I don’t care how rational you are—tell me your heart wouldn’t drop through the floor in that moment. Tell me you wouldn’t replay the board spelling “Mom” until it felt like a bruise inside your head.

After that, my best friend and I never talked about that night again. It was like an unspoken contract: if we didn’t name it, we could pretend it didn’t stain us. After her mother passed, our lives shifted. Grief rearranges friendships in quiet, invisible ways. We stayed friends, but something about that night hung between us like a closed door neither of us dared to open.

I told myself it ended there.

I told myself that was the one creepy coincidence I’d ever get, the kind of story you share once in a dramatic whisper and then file away under “wild teenage memories.”

Then the second time happened.

My family is pretty normal. Middle-class, practical, the kind of people who solve problems with common sense and a little sarcasm. But we have wealthy relatives—like most families do. The kind who own a massive house they barely use. Before they moved away from the city, they bought this large modern place with a pool and a view that looks expensive even when you’re just standing still. They rented it occasionally, but never for long. When it was empty, they paid me to check on it.

At the time, it felt like the coolest job in the world.

I could bring a few close friends, swim, eat snacks in a giant kitchen, feel like I was living someone else’s glamorous life for a night. I knew I wasn’t allowed to throw parties. But a small gathering with trusted people? I thought I could control it.

One Saturday we went over with food, music, and that reckless confidence that comes from being young and convinced you’re clever enough to avoid consequences. Someone brought a Ouija board.

A real one this time.

We played until late, and nothing happened. No twitching planchette. No mystery. No dramatic, cinematic moment. I remember feeling oddly relieved. Like the board itself was embarrassed of our expectations.

Most of my friends left after midnight. Two of them crashed on the living room couches. The next morning they left around noon, and I decided to nap a little longer. The house was clean enough. There was nothing urgent pulling me back to my own small, ordinary home.

I woke up around 4 p.m.

The entire place felt wrong.

Not “haunted” wrong. Not “there’s a ghost behind you” wrong. Just… off. Like the light itself had decided to be stingy. The day outside was cloudy, and the huge glass windows turned the world into a cold blue painting. The pool looked like a sheet of steel. The city skyline in the distance seemed muted, as if someone had turned down the saturation on reality.

I was supposed to leave.

But then I saw the board on the table.

And I did the stupidest thing you can do in a horror story: I told myself it would be fine because I was alone.

I sat down as if I were challenging the universe to entertain me.

“Is anyone here?” I asked.

The planchette moved.

Yes.

My skin prickled immediately. The rational part of my brain screamed that I must be unconsciously pushing it. The emotional part of my brain—the part that still remembered the word “Mom”—went completely silent.

I asked if it had been there the night before.

Yes.

I asked a few messy, teenage questions about a girl I liked who had been at the gathering earlier with a guy she was seeing. The answers were vague. The kind of answers that could fit anything if you wanted them to.

That should have been my cue to stop.

But I was fascinated.

There’s a dangerous kind of curiosity that feels like courage until the second it becomes survival.

So I asked the question that changed the temperature in my body.

“Are you here as a spirit… or physically?”

The planchette slid without hesitation.

Both.

I laughed once, short and sharp, the sound of someone trying to trick their lungs into normal breathing. I asked how long it had been there.

A long time.

And then—upstairs—a door opened.

Slowly.

So slowly it felt deliberate.

I froze so hard I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears. I’m not ashamed to say I ran. I didn’t grab my bag. I didn’t take the board. I just bolted out of that beautiful house like it had suddenly turned into a trap.

When you’re scared like that, you don’t think of logic. You think of distance. You think of oxygen.

A few days later, I returned during daylight, telling myself I had overreacted. Doors open in big houses. Air pressure shifts. The wind is a sneaky jerk sometimes. I walked room to room checking things like I was conducting an inspection for my own sanity.

The board was still there.

Exactly where I’d left it.

I hated the fact that seeing it made me angry instead of relieved. Like it had been waiting for me just to prove a point.

I tucked it away upstairs in a drawer, in a room I barely even entered. I didn’t want my father or brother to stumble on it if they stopped by to check the place. My father wasn’t superstitious. He was the type who believed fear is a human glitch you can fix with reason and a good lightbulb.

Then I got a call.

It was my brother, and his voice was too high with panic to be casual.

“There’s someone here.”

I asked what he meant, already grabbing my keys.

“Someone upstairs. We heard footsteps. We saw something run past.”

My father was there too, stubborn and ready to investigate. My brother begged me to hurry.

I drove like the world was ending.

When I arrived, both of them were on the staircase, pale and hesitant, listening to a sound that made my stomach drop: a door upstairs opening and slamming. Opening and slamming. Opening and slamming.

Not once.

Not twice.

Like a tantrum.

We stood there listening to it slow down. The final slam was softer, as if whoever—or whatever—was doing it had finally gotten bored.

We went up together.

The room was the one I had chosen without thinking. The one with the door I had left slightly open.

I pulled the drawer.

The board was gone.

My father was right behind me when we turned to leave and stopped dead.

It was sitting on the bed.

Like someone had placed it there carefully, just to make sure we understood who was in control of the story now.

I couldn’t lie anymore. I said everything. The late-night gathering. The moment alone. The door opening. The board answering “both.”

My father yelled in a way I had never heard in my entire life. Not because he was angry at me for breaking rules—that was part of it—but because fear makes adults furious when they can’t protect you from something they don’t understand.

We took the board and threw it into a filthy vacant lot piled with trash. I half expected it to reappear in the house like some cursed boomerang.

It didn’t.

But the house never felt the same again.

My aunt later told me tenants still moved out quickly. Complaints about noises. About doors. About a feeling of being watched, even in daylight. She said it like gossip, like an unfortunate business problem.

I heard it like an echo.

I stopped volunteering to watch the place.

I thought I was done.

Then the third experience happened, and it was the one that made everything feel less like a string of unlucky coincidences and more like a pattern I didn’t want to understand.

This one involved my mother’s house.

For a while, two of my cousins stayed with us. We were all close in age, more like sisters than relatives. My best friend from the neighborhood came over almost every day to help them through some personal chaos they were dealing with. The house felt alive in a way it hadn’t in a long time—laughter in the kitchen, late-night talks on the couch, the comforting noise of girls being young and messy and together.

One afternoon someone jokingly suggested finding a Ouija board.

We laughed it off because we didn’t even know where to get one.

Then life did that weird thing where temptation shows up right when you mention it.

A friend of my best friend posted a picture online playing with a board. She asked to borrow it. He agreed.

A few days later, she arrived with a bag that looked too small to hold the amount of trouble inside it.

We waited for my mom to be out. We set the board up. We tried three times before it responded.

And then it became a routine.

We talked with something that called itself by a name. It told us things about our lives. The kind of small details that felt impressive when you’re young and desperate for meaning. It talked about its own story with a confidence that made us lean in.

We started to believe it in increments.

That’s how people fall for dangerous things.

Not all at once.

But one of my cousins began getting sick.

At first it was subtle: fatigue, headaches, a pale kind of quietness that didn’t match her personality. Then it got worse. The kind of worse that makes you start Googling symptoms at 2 a.m. and pretending you’re not scared.

The night everything broke, my best friend asked the spirit directly if it had anything to do with my cousin’s illness.

Yes.

The room went still.

She demanded to know what else it had been hiding.

It answered in riddles—saying it had left enough clues for us to realize it had been around even when we weren’t playing. That we had heard it. That the only thing left was for us to see it.

I asked angrily if it had lied to us.

Yes.

My best friend asked if it was good.

No.

We asked if it could hurt us.

Yes.

We asked if it was real, if it was here.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

And then we heard the sound of knocking.

Not polite knocking.

Not “someone forgot their keys” knocking.

It was a heavy, repetitive pounding at an upstairs window like someone was trying to force their way in.

We screamed.

We heard a car approaching and thought it was my mom.

We rushed outside to meet her.

But she wasn’t at the curb.

She wasn’t pulling into our driveway.

She was stopped in the street near our back neighbor’s house because our neighbor—an older woman—was crying and shaking and begging her to help.

That woman later told us what she had seen from her window.

Her house looked directly onto ours through a narrow corridor behind the properties. She had noticed my cousins had moved in and that our home suddenly had more movement than usual. Then she noticed something else.

She had seen an elderly woman inside our house.

Very old.

The kind of old that makes you reconsider how someone even walks without trembling.

The neighbor assumed she was a relative helping with the family situation. She thought maybe my mother had taken in an older aunt or grandmother. She’d seen the woman lingering around my mother’s room, pacing, staring out the window.

One afternoon, the old woman stood at the glass with her hand raised.

The neighbor, confused but trying to be polite, waved back.

The woman didn’t wave.

She held her hand up stiffly and stared with a kind of anger that made the neighbor step away from the window.

Later, the neighbor saw her again in the back area of our house. Closer. Too close.

At night, she began noticing movement in the corridor between the houses. A figure wandering slowly as if looking for something.

The final night—the same night we heard the pounding upstairs—she said the woman came to my mother’s window and started striking her head against the glass.

Over and over.

Not hard enough to break it.

Hard enough to terrify someone watching from the other side.

That was the moment our neighbor ran outside and ended up stopping my mom’s car before she could even pull into our driveway.

When my mom told us what the neighbor had said, my cousins and I looked at each other in the way people do when there’s no safe joke left to make.

We didn’t own any elderly relatives who could have been in that house.

We hadn’t seen any old woman.

But we had been inviting something in every night, trusting it with our attention, our fear, and our belief.

After that, the board disappeared.

Not with magic smoke or theatrical flair.

It was just gone the next morning.

We tore the house apart looking for it. We checked bags, closets, under beds, behind furniture.

Nothing.

My cousin eventually got medical help for what she was experiencing, and I won’t pretend I know exactly what was connected and what wasn’t. I’m not a doctor. I’m not a paranormal expert. I’m just someone who has lived long enough to understand that fear can be a physical force.

But I know this: the energy in our home changed permanently after those nights. Whether that was grief, stress, suggestion, or something darker, the result was the same.

We stopped seeking answers from things we couldn’t verify.

We stopped daring the universe to perform for us.

I look back on all three experiences now with a strange mix of embarrassment and awe.

Embarrassment because part of me still wants to be the rational girl who can explain everything.

Awe because the timing was too sharp, too cruel, too well-edited like a story someone wrote to break a group of teenagers into believers.

People love to argue about Ouija boards online. Half will say it’s nonsense. Half will say it’s a door you should never open. I’m not here to preach, and I’m not here to pretend I have the final answer.

But I am here to tell you that I learned something the hard way:

Sometimes it’s not about whether the board is “real.”

It’s about what you risk letting into your head, your house, your relationships, and your peace.

Because even if it’s all psychological, fear is still real.

And if it’s not all psychological… then you have even more reason to be careful.

I still can’t forget the moment a cardboard board spelled an illness before a phone call changed my friend’s life forever.

I still remember the dead quiet of that luxurious house when the upstairs door opened in response to a word I didn’t want to see—“both.”

I still hear the pounding that made us run outside into the arms of a neighbor who swore she’d seen an angry old woman in our home.

Maybe these were three separate coincidences.

Maybe they were my brain connecting dots because humans are wired to crave patterns.

Or maybe we really did knock on a door we had no right to touch.

All I know is I haven’t played since.

And I don’t think I ever will.

So tell me honestly—if you had lived these nights with me, would you call it chance… or would you also be terrified of hearing a door upstairs open when you’re sure you’re alone? 😔