True Ouija Encounter & Ouija Historian Robert Murch
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There were some strange occurrences which took place in our duplex… One night my mind was racing due to the stress of not being able to find a job. I struggled to achieve independence and at times found it hard to acknowledge my self-worth.
I was facing the wall next to my bed and, due to my restlessness, I was moving around a lot. I had moved my arm and placed my hand in a spot of my bed that felt strangely ice cold. I moved my hand to get comfortable and found it strange that this one specific area of my bed was so cold.
I rolled over to view the cold area of my bed and saw someone lying their head on the edge of my bed staring at me in the moonlight from my window. I became very startled and panicked to turn on my bed lamp. However once I had, the face was gone. I slept facing the wall next to my bed that night and didn’t dare look away.
The next morning I asked my mother, “Do you think our place is haunted.”
“I’m not sure…” she replied. “Why? Did something happen?”
I told her what happened.
“That’s creepy,” she said. “I called out to Grandpa the other night.” She was speaking of my grandfather on her side of the family. “I asked him if he was looking over us and I saw him for a moment and he gave me the nod he always used to give.”
I wondered if our house was haunted in a sense. Not in the way where a spirit is stuck inside a home, but rather in a way that our home had an abundance of spiritual energy. Maybe the home had a portal to the spiritual realm within it.
As I grew older I had overcome my fear of the experience I had with the Ouija board my sister and I used. Soon after we moved into our duplex, my friends were interested in using a Ouija board with me, so I decided to surprise them and purchased one.
I called one of my friends to tell him and soon I received a couple more phone calls from friends excited to try it with me. I took it with me to one of my friends’ homes that evening and we immediately started using it.
The results that evening suggest that one or more of my friends were moving the planchette themselves. It became obvious when I could see a friend who was rather narcissistic at times using more hand activities than the others and the answers we received were typical of his fictitious stories he’d share. I’ve always known him to exaggerate the truth to satisfy his own portrayals of self. I often suspected that he just wanted to be relatable to the other friends in our group.
When I went home that evening, I put the board away and didn’t concern myself with it until the next day. Out of curiosity, I started to use it and ask questions. However, no matter what I asked, the planchette would repeatedly got to the letters A and J for the first while.
I eventually asked, “Is that you name?”
The planchette moved to YES, then to J-O-H-N.
“You mean my grandpa?” I asked.
The planchette moved to YES.
My grandfather had not passed away at this point and was in palliative care. We knew his time to perish was coming soon, so I was curious and wanted to prepare myself for the death.
“Do you know when he will pass away?” I asked.
The planchette moved to YES.
“Will it be over a month?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Will it be next week?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Will it be the week after?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Will it be the week after that?” I asked.
The planchette moved to YES.
“Monday?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Tuesday?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Wednesday?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Thursday?” I asked.
The planchette moved to YES and the light bulb above me flickered for a moment.
Curious, I took note of the date which was twenty-one days later. Twenty-one days passed and the next morning my mother woke me up to tell me that my grandfather had passed away. I found it strange but I didn’t let it upset me. He was in palliative care and we all saw it coming in the first place.
I kept the fact that the prediction came true to myself for a long time. I had more questions and wanted to know what this force was which happened to know when my grandfather would die. However the Ouija board creeped me out a fair bit after that and I didn’t want anything bad to happen like in stories I had heard before.
Eventually I burned the Ouija board in our back yard fire pit but later resorted to an internet forum with many people who claimed to have psychic gifts. I simply told them what had happened and that I didn’t know whether I should be communicating with this spirit. Shortly after I received a reply from a woman who seemed to have some answers.
She told me that AJ was a spirit guide or what I like to call a Guardian Angel. She told me that it was AJ’s face who I saw that night in the moonlight on the edge of my bed and that his actual name was spelt “Aijai”. According to her Aijai was trying to tell me something but because I was frightened, he stopped appearing to me. Also that eventually he would send a blue bird when he would like to tell me a message again. She mentioned that Aijai was blocking negative energy which may come from using the Ouija board and that I should never fear using the board because he is always with me.
Now for some information on a new supporter of mine. Thanks for all of the support Robert!
I was facing the wall next to my bed and, due to my restlessness, I was moving around a lot. I had moved my arm and placed my hand in a spot of my bed that felt strangely ice cold. I moved my hand to get comfortable and found it strange that this one specific area of my bed was so cold.
I rolled over to view the cold area of my bed and saw someone lying their head on the edge of my bed staring at me in the moonlight from my window. I became very startled and panicked to turn on my bed lamp. However once I had, the face was gone. I slept facing the wall next to my bed that night and didn’t dare look away.
The next morning I asked my mother, “Do you think our place is haunted.”
“I’m not sure…” she replied. “Why? Did something happen?”
I told her what happened.
“That’s creepy,” she said. “I called out to Grandpa the other night.” She was speaking of my grandfather on her side of the family. “I asked him if he was looking over us and I saw him for a moment and he gave me the nod he always used to give.”
I wondered if our house was haunted in a sense. Not in the way where a spirit is stuck inside a home, but rather in a way that our home had an abundance of spiritual energy. Maybe the home had a portal to the spiritual realm within it.
As I grew older I had overcome my fear of the experience I had with the Ouija board my sister and I used. Soon after we moved into our duplex, my friends were interested in using a Ouija board with me, so I decided to surprise them and purchased one.
I called one of my friends to tell him and soon I received a couple more phone calls from friends excited to try it with me. I took it with me to one of my friends’ homes that evening and we immediately started using it.
The results that evening suggest that one or more of my friends were moving the planchette themselves. It became obvious when I could see a friend who was rather narcissistic at times using more hand activities than the others and the answers we received were typical of his fictitious stories he’d share. I’ve always known him to exaggerate the truth to satisfy his own portrayals of self. I often suspected that he just wanted to be relatable to the other friends in our group.
When I went home that evening, I put the board away and didn’t concern myself with it until the next day. Out of curiosity, I started to use it and ask questions. However, no matter what I asked, the planchette would repeatedly got to the letters A and J for the first while.
I eventually asked, “Is that you name?”
The planchette moved to YES, then to J-O-H-N.
“You mean my grandpa?” I asked.
The planchette moved to YES.
My grandfather had not passed away at this point and was in palliative care. We knew his time to perish was coming soon, so I was curious and wanted to prepare myself for the death.
“Do you know when he will pass away?” I asked.
The planchette moved to YES.
“Will it be over a month?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Will it be next week?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Will it be the week after?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Will it be the week after that?” I asked.
The planchette moved to YES.
“Monday?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Tuesday?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Wednesday?” I asked.
The planchette moved to NO.
“Thursday?” I asked.
The planchette moved to YES and the light bulb above me flickered for a moment.
Curious, I took note of the date which was twenty-one days later. Twenty-one days passed and the next morning my mother woke me up to tell me that my grandfather had passed away. I found it strange but I didn’t let it upset me. He was in palliative care and we all saw it coming in the first place.
I kept the fact that the prediction came true to myself for a long time. I had more questions and wanted to know what this force was which happened to know when my grandfather would die. However the Ouija board creeped me out a fair bit after that and I didn’t want anything bad to happen like in stories I had heard before.
Eventually I burned the Ouija board in our back yard fire pit but later resorted to an internet forum with many people who claimed to have psychic gifts. I simply told them what had happened and that I didn’t know whether I should be communicating with this spirit. Shortly after I received a reply from a woman who seemed to have some answers.
She told me that AJ was a spirit guide or what I like to call a Guardian Angel. She told me that it was AJ’s face who I saw that night in the moonlight on the edge of my bed and that his actual name was spelt “Aijai”. According to her Aijai was trying to tell me something but because I was frightened, he stopped appearing to me. Also that eventually he would send a blue bird when he would like to tell me a message again. She mentioned that Aijai was blocking negative energy which may come from using the Ouija board and that I should never fear using the board because he is always with me.
Now for some information on a new supporter of mine. Thanks for all of the support Robert!
Robert Murch is the world’s foremost collector, historian, and expert on Ouija and Talking Boards and serves as the Chairman of the Board for the Talking Board Historical Society which he founded. His bizarre relationship with Ouija began after watching Kevin Tenney’s Witchboard in 1986, a century after the talking board made its debut. Murch purchased his first antique Ouija board in 1992, and became obsessed with unraveling the mystery of its origins. Since then he’s devoted his life to researching the history of the Ouija board and its founders, with Murch often traveling the world to track down descendants of all those involved with the introduction of the mystifying oracle.
Murch showcases his research and knowledge on his web sites robertmurch.com and williamfuld.com, having collaborated with Hasbro, Winning Moves, USAopoly, TCG Toys, and ToyCo (producers of the Ouija board today), the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and on various films including Ouija, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Ghost Team, Inherent Vice, What Lies Beneath, Sugar & Spice, and Drive-Thru. He’s also consulted on or appeared in numerous TV programs featuring Ouija, including Fox’s The Exorcist, Investigation Discovery’s True Nightmares, UKTV W’s Celebrity Haunted Hotel Live, Destination America’s Exorcism: Live!, Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures and Mysteries at the Museum, ABC’s Castle, TNT’s Rizzoli & Isles, CW’s Supernatural, A&E’s Storage Wars and Paranormal State, Showtime’s Bullshit!, Smithsonian Channel’s My Million Dollar Invention, HGTV’s Who’s Lived in my House?, CBS Sunday Morning, and 30 Odd Minutes. Numerous periodicals including the Smithsonian Magazine, TIME Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Baltimore Sun, and Inventors Digest consulted Murch for popular articles on Ouija boards and featured him and his research on the topic while reddit tapped him to host an IAmA on all things Ouija.
Murch is a returning guest on Coast to Coast AM and an accomplished international lecturer, speaking at museums and conferences around the world. He was named guest curator of the Baltimore Museum of Industy’s groundbreaking Ouija exhibit Let the Spirit Move You, often collaborates with the Strong – The National Museum of Play, and through the Talking Board Historical Society, organized OuijaCon 2015 which celebrated Ouija’s 125th Anniversary with the city of Baltimore. Murch is currently collaborating with Brandon Hodge to create a book on the definitive history of spirit communication. Ever the pioneer, Murch was one of the first same-sex couples legally married in the United States and lives with his husband, Gary Halteman, in Denver, Colorado. What’s next for Murch? You’ll just have to ask the Ouija board! For more information, please visit TBHS.org
He first became interested in the Ouija board in the mid 1980's after the release of the movie Witchboard. He is a regular practitioner of the Ouija board because he speaks at paranormal conventions and people generally want to try, although it's usually just for fun.
The Society was started in 2007 as a loose group of collectors and people interested in the history of the Ouija board. In 2014 they became a registered nonprofit group. Their first association was the placement in 2008 of the Ouija gravestone for Elijah Bond, one of the founders of the Talking Board Company. It’s one of the most requested gravestones in Green Mount Cemetery. People often take pictures with it.
By collaborating with so many different groups of people, all of the different Baltimore organizations such as the Maryland Archives and the National Archives, they’ve been able to write its history and show what an amazing force William Fuld and his family were. They were just incredible marketers and no one would be talking about the Ouija board were it not for their ability to both market the board and keep it current with each new generation.
Murch has explained that there are three ways that people hold that the movement on the board actually happens. Scientists posit it is the ideomotor response. which is the marrying of the small muscles in your hand that don’t want to stay still, and one's subconscious which when it sees things, sees everything. A conscious mind can’t function that way, so it absorbs things that are unimportant but it maintains them in your head. When one uses a Ouija board, scientists say those small movements in your hand become fluid because one wants the board to work. One feels like it’s moving beyond their control, when it’s possibly them who are moving it. While psychics believe that when you sit at a board with other participators is that they’re making some type of telepathy and that there is a genuine psychic connection. Thus a huge segment of the population believe that the talking board parts the veil to the other side, and the messages you get are from those who have passed on. That’s where they come from, and make no mistake about it, even though the talking board has been sold as a toy, it came out of the spiritualist movement. Its intention was, originally, to talk with the spirits.
After the Civil War, when death became such a part of everyone’s lives, individuals went off to war and never came back, leaving people wondering what happened to their loved ones and how they died. The Ouija board became popular as people asked questions to the Ouija board that couldn’t be answered in any other way. People had so many questions in this uncertain time, thus the Ouija board fulfilled that for them. Now, 125 years later, there's have a hit movie which has introduced the board to an entirely new generation.
The spiritualist community were the first to turn their backs on the Ouija board. In 1886, there was a report that the talking board phenomenon was sweeping across Ohio. Then in 1890, the board received its name and everyone wanted one. Why would the spiritualist community be upset? Because for a dollar, you could buy a board and have a seance anytime you wanted, in the privacy of your own home. Up until that point, you were paying mediums. So whose business was being hurt? The mediums!
Then people began saying things like, “Ouija boards are dangerous; you are opening doors you can’t close. You need someone with experience like me to guide you through this unseen land.” This kind of talk has lived on, and we’re hearing those same things today. But the sense of danger; of the unknown; the possibility that you might be able to part the veil is what causes people to still "play". Loss and death and how we deal with those things has changed over the years, but the fact that it happens hasn’t changed. What keeps us the same is that we all die.
People like Murch are bringing the Ouija board back to pop culture as it's becoming more popular than ever before. There were many different spirit communication devices which were used to talk with the other side, but the amazing thing is that very few of them have survived. The Ouija board has maintained its popularity through many generations, including this latest one. Maybe that is because the first text messages were sent through the Ouija board.
Murch, although a skeptic of the board, says if it is possible to speak with the dead, then why wouldn’t a Ouija board work? The question is, can you speak to the dead? He likes the idea that it gives him the opportunity to say goodbye to someone who has already passed, or to apologize for the last thing he said to them, closure. Or maybe just to prove that his life is worth more than the 80 years he figures he'll have on this earth.
At Ouijacon, people will say they believe they have contacted a demon named Zozo who basically ruined their lives. People all over the internet believe they have contacted Zozo through the Ouija board. They’ll also have someone in psychology who basically believes that by using the Ouija board, you are talking to your higher self; your subconscious. People are getting in touch with this higher information that is already inside of them. Murch and his people want it to reflect the very diverse beliefs behind the Mystifying Oracle.
Ouija has always captured Murch's imagination, and uncovering the story behind its inception and the people who brought it to us has always been key to him. People give the Ouija board an incredible amount of power that we do not give any other spirit communication tool. Or, any paranormal investigative tool, such as an EVP recorder or K-2 meter. When those devices go off, no one says the devices are bad, but when that happens with Ouija board, then the board gets the blame. He likes to call people Ouijastitious, because legends have been built around the Ouija board.
The wonderful thing about the Ouija board is it is basically just a telephone. It is just a device you are using to conjure; to call. Alike if someone had an argument on the phone and horrible things are said before we hang up. Would you then take your I-Phone and throw it out the window and say, “I’ll never use one of these things again”? Of course not, but that is how it ends with a Ouija board.
Sources:
Becoming the Devil They Fear by Ryan Willey
http://www.robertmurch.com/bio/robert-murch/
http://www.tbhs.org/team/board-of-directors/robert-murch/
http://baltimorepostexaminer.com/ouijacon-an-interview-with-ouija-board-expert-robert-murch/2015/04/17
Images:
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http://ww1.prweb.com/prfiles/2015/10/07/13010498/OuijaConTBHSTwitterProfile2.jpg
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ASK GENE ORLANDO IF HES EVER GOING TO COME TALK TO MY SON??? hahaha Ask him to show evidence that he's ever faced what's behind a board? Especially a board with a documented history that has made a direct portal to hell in my home! And even made itself a carving in my son's clothes chest sealed with blood to lock itself out of the board. I can give you all the details on how I was conned out of a vintage board and led to them told this...
ReplyDeleteDEAR Mr. Orlando,
Sir, I know I've drive you crazy, but sir, yesterday child services took my younger kids because of my son's actions. Then today they show up and ask for the board and the address it came from. I told them I sent it away. I didn't give them your info until I ask u first? What the H3LL???? I'm sorry to keep bothering you.
On Aug 4, 2017 4:55 PM, "Gene Orlando" wrote:
Sindie,
OK, so I think we are done. Your Ouija board is gone and I don't have the skillset to handle your other problems if they continue.
Best of luck,
Gene
My email is open for any questions.... sindieboo2u@gmail.com