Documented Instances Of People Who Became Possessed From Ouija Boards

We all remember those nights leading up to Halloween when our high school goth friends would convince us to bust out the Ouija board in their basement. The thrill and excitement that tingles up our arms as the cursor flows over the board, seemingly on its own. The chills wave down our spines when the spirit on the other side of the board happens to know some hidden detail about us. And, of course, we all have that one friend who would — aaaah! – scream out of nowhere just to watch the shocked horror on our faces while we try desperately not to embarrass ourselves. Ouija boards can be fun. They can also be terrifying.

Most of us buy into the psychological explanation that it's our own minds causing the cursor to spell out our names or tell us Fluffy the Deceased Puppy is happy at "the farm," but what we know as a game has been used by many as a spiritual tool throughout the ages. Those with a strong religious nature tend to believe Ouija boards can contact the dead and serve as portals that allow evil to enter our world — demons and devils capable of inflicting torment or even possessing the board's users. Maybe the seemingly innocent Hasbro "board game" isn't as innocent as we were led to believe.

Of all the things you'd expect to find in the mainstream news cycle, a piece about possessed teenagers probably isn't on the top of your list, but in 2014, a story out of Mexico made enough noise for news outlets, including Cosmopolitan, to write about it.

Three young American relatives were in San Juan Tlacotenco, Mexico, playing what they thought would be a fun little game with a board that has been used by occult practitioners to contact spirits for centuries. You know — just good old-fashioned fun. Something went wrong. Alexandra Huerta fell into a trance-like state and began convulsing. The director of public safety for the town of Tepoztlan, Victor Demesa, says that Huerta's brother and cousin, who were also participating with the board, had bizarre symptoms as well, including "feeling numbness, double vision, blindness, deafness, hallucinations, muscle spasm and difficulty swallowing."

The trio was rushed to the hospital, and officials refused to say one way or the other whether the kids were victims of possession, but it remained a possibility. Later, it would be reported by the Daily Mail that Huerta wasn't trying to play a game at all, but was rather trying to contact her deceased parents. To do so, the young woman took a drug known as Brugmansia, which in large doses can cause all of the symptoms the group exhibited.

A different case of possible Ouija-related possession comes out of Peru, and it takes a modern twist. Instead of using the traditional board and cursor which the occult world has been using for ages, 18-year-old Patricia Quispe settled for a downloadable cell phone version. (There's nothing in the rules that says a digital Ouija board won't work as well as the genuine thing.) It's October 2015 in Lima, Peru, and Ms. Quispe is hanging out with her friends for the weekend. With October being the start of the spooky season, the group didn't have anything better to do than try to contact the spirit realm, like any other normal teenagers. Being involved in a horror plot is obviously better than watching one on TV, so they busted out the phone app and did their thing. Then Quispe went home.

Upon her arrival, Quispe's parents noticed she wasn't doing too well. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the girl's parents called an ambulance after she started foaming from the mouth and convulsing. It wasn't long after Quispe made it to the hospital that those around her drew the conclusion that she was possessed by demonic spirits. In a video taken of Quispe at the time, she shouts "666" and demands to be released. The medical team also reported that this 18-year-old was obscenely strong and difficult to control.

The Ouija board, according to Psychology Today, has become a popular way to pass the time in South and Central America over the years, which may explain why they have the most cases of "possession." Some of these cases involve massive numbers of people.

In 2014, around 35 students in Bolivia were taken to the hospital when they fell into trance-like states. The students exhibited mental confusion, became agitated, began to sweat profusely, and their pulses elevated. Guess what game they'd been playing at the time? That's right: Ouija.

Compared to other cases, 35 students may sound like an obscene number, but it has nothing on our next case. Imagine, if you will, an outbreak of Ouija-related affliction that spans an eight-month period within a Catholic boarding school. The symptoms include headaches and such difficulty walking that students could only amble about with the help of a friend. This is supposedly what happened at the Girlstown School near Mexico City from November 2006-June 2007. When the school was investigated by psychiatrist Nashyiela Loa Zavala, she diagnosed the occurrence as mass hysteria and traced it back to one student contacting spirits with a Ouija board to win a basketball game. Surely, using demons to increase your rebound average counts as "inappropriate conduct," right? And nothing to mess with, ever.