Entry tags:

growing up, kerala, metaphysics, ouija board, paranormal

My Experiments with Paranormal and their Truth
If you are offered a choice between a free course in Paranormal Studies or a free course in Evolutionary Studies, each with hands-on projects, which one will you pick? I'll go for the Paranormal (Normal with a prefix usually offers some scope of excitement.) I am guessing most women/girls will do the same. Women being the natural adventurers they are wouldn't want to waste time on a dud subject like Evolution which has been done to dust already. I could be wrong, there might be women out there looking for that extra shot of adrenaline before they take on Intelligent Designers and a course in Evolutionary biology might be just what they need.

Men on the other hand, when offered the same choice, I am pretty sure, would like to steer clear of the Paranormal BS(as they'd call it.) They are simply not wired to yield to the paranormal, the extra-sensory, the sixth sense, the fourth dimension and the like, that easily. For men it is like asking directions. They cannot get over the crushing fear hard-coded into their Y chromosome that someone might get it right and it might not be them. Nor can they really commit to the idea that they are indeed interested in "unexplained mystical" phenomena as Miss Cleo or Moon landing. Imagine what a beating their male egos would take if the mystics/occultists turned out to be right? Finally there is no bigger shame for a man than being caught red-handed by their Beer Brotherhood while coming out of a seance-joint frequented by female imbeciles.

But if you ask me, I believe most people are closet meta-physicists because the mysteries of death and the great beyond have not given into physics as easily as thunder and lightning had. It begs for the 'meta' add-on. It's hard to resist the temptation to explore the unknown if an opportunity presents itself - like Jimmy Neutron offering you a ride in his space-ship or your neighbor conducting an exorcism right in the line of sight of your telescope. If someone tries to open the doors of the unknown when they are at their vulnerable and exploratory best, you should cut them some slack, especially if they are teenagers, which leads me to my story.


Teenage is when you overestimate your potential. Your days are crowded with experiments. Your mind is busier than Los Alamos lab cooking up the first A-bomb. When I was sixteen or seventeen I decided to take part in a so-called paranormal experiment under the influence of a friend who had become an authority in Ouija-board in a short span of days.

Conversing with spirits sounded infinitely more interesting than having meaningful conversations with my peers who were affected by giggling fits after every full-stop. Moreover spirits came with a bonus - they'd predict the future, not theirs(what kind of future can you have when you are in eternal limbo) but ours. Sweet deal, right?

I was on. We got out our antique Carrom board - Ouija board of choice in our part of the world. A carrom board of such advanced vintage could have easily been harboring any homeless ghosts who were looking for a cozy abode in the neighborhood. Once the perfect flat surface was found, we wrote our A to Zs and 0 thru' 9 along its four edges with chalk and marked a round circle in the center for the resident spirit who would be the fortune-teller for the session.
For all those unfamiliar with carom board, a copyright-free wikipedia image.

Three of us - mediums du jour, my friend the expert, I and my sister - novice trainees, put our forefingers on an upside down steel tumbler(in its commoner incarnation it was used to hold our daily cuppa) placed purposefully on the center circle and waited. For four hours. A epic lesson / achievement in patience for any teen.

Almost when we were about to throw up our hands in despair and abort the mission, the tumbler started moving in fits and starts. After the initial apprehension its movements became more furious, making fast concentric circles on the board like Lance Armstrong on overdrive. Our friend - the COBP(Certified Ouija Board Professional) commanded the spirit to stop, go to the center of the circle and wait for our questions. To our surprise the hysterical steel tumbler calmed down immediately and did as it was told. At this point you might question the credibility of our guide, the COBP. How can we be sure she was not making the tumbler move?



Wait, don't jump the gun. Honestly, it didn't feel like anyone of us was making it move, the tumbler seemed to have a life of its own. Our first question was about our future professions. "What will be X's profession when she grows up?" We asked loud and clear. No rules there, you can ask in unison or just one person, doesn’t matter for spirits have pretty good hearing. Then the tumbler would move to different letters and make up a word, say 'PILOT'. Good enough for us. After a few questions, we asked our friend COBP to remove her finger from the tumbler and both of us(my sister and I) went on with the QA session. The tumbler still moved, giving us one word answers to our eager queries about the future. We swore that neither of us made the tumbler move and I trust my sister.

We had great fun the rest of the night. We found the places we'd settle down as grown-ups were as far and away as Netherlands and Germany. Thankfully these were all attractive European countries. Not for us the poverty-ridden Africa or the over-populated Asia. One of us was going to be an ambassador to a foreign country, another a pilot and another one an engineer - nice cushy jobs. The spirit told us we were all going to have 'love’ marriages' (the other option in India is an arranged marriage. I am guessing around 80% of all marriages are 'arranged') with the men we will choose and it even gave us the names of our prospective husbands.

I don't remember about others, but mine started with N, it was a synonym of N's real name but not his exact name (probably a coincidence, 1/26th of a chance for predicting the first letter right, way better than the odds of winning Powerball or getting struck by lightning(1:244,000.) Meeting N was still three years into the future.

At the end of the session we were three satiated teens. The most vexing questions about our futures were resolved. We just had to make sure that we'd go on living and be at the right place at the right time. Since the spirit had already shown us the flight plan of our lives' journeys with exact verbal clues about destinations and people we'd eventually meet, we could engage the auto-pilot, sit back, relax and enjoy the sights.

Fun? Not so much. After a few days we were all struck by the same sad thought, the thrill of anticipating the unknown was gone. I liked Switzerland better than Germany and would have loved to live in a chalet, but now I was stuck with Germany. We hit the Ouija board again to see if the spirit had changed its mind about our tomorrows. This time, sneaky as I was, I tried to interfere with the spirit's answers. I'd concentrate real hard and think up an answer I'd like to get and the tumbler would get confused, it'd make non-sense words. I found that if I was the only person interested in getting a particular answer the so-called spirit would spit it out without any problem. But if my friend or my sister had their mind set on another answer and I was concentrating on a different one, the tumbler would go haywire, flying over the letters. Funny thing was none of us felt we were physically exerting any force on the steel tumbler.

We had few more sessions with different friends. By then, the time required for a spirit to arrive was reduced to 30 minutes or less. I also realized the more eager and less skeptic the participants, the earlier the tumbler would start moving. A veteran of half a dozen Ouija board sessions, by then I was convinced that there was no spirit anywhere near us except the bottle of rubbing alcohol in the cupboard. We or our muscles were making the tumbler move, but our brains refused to register it. I felt it was kind of like self-hypnotism mainly because 'the spirit' was giving us the answers we already had in our minds. A hard-headed skeptic even back then, what I lacked was the right words and / or the intellectual capacity to give a convincing explanation. There was no way I could prove to anyone that it was just us and the ghost world had better security levels than let a bunch of bored teens in just for fun. After sometime like all teenage crazes 'communing with the spirit' craze also found its way out of our busy schedules.

I had to wait for more than a decade to find a satisfactory answer to the phenomenon. Google arrived into our clueless lives at the turn of the century and from then on it has been a journey of enlightenment. On this voyage of information and discovery, the truth about Ouija board was also divulged.

Silly, it is called the Ideomotor Effect. It was quickly recorded and posted away in the Resolved Questions section of the brain, until last week when it resurfaced.

I came across this blog post at Digital Bits Skeptic which explains Ideomotor Effect in detail and how it applies to various paranormal techniques such as Ouija Boards, Dowsing, Table Tipping etc. I realized it was time I came out of my blogging winter and told the world about that summer long past when we had accidentally stumbled upon the truth about life, existence, death and the netherworld, almost.

This is what Digital Bits Skeptic says about Ideomotor Effect (in a nutshell) : "The ideomotor is the mechanism which makes your reflexes kick in when your knee is tapped gently with a doctor’s hammer. But in this case what happens is, due to you focusing so much mental power on something, your body makes it physically happen. You may not think you are doing it, but you are, and the more you are convinced it is going to happen, the faster it happens. Which is why a Ouija board 'works' better for people who use one more often."

It is an interesting post. Please read or listen to it(podcast) if you are interested and have time.


If you can’t get enough of the paranormal, life and life after death, these are some movies that come to my mind on similar subjects (minus ghost movies.)

****Flatliners,
****The Sixth Sense
****Poltergeist
***Final Destination(The whole series)
***21 grams
**What Dreams May Come
And the original B&W Twilight Zone TVseries.


Fading out...for the time being.