The Devil went down to Jersey

A spooky-ooky story from a long time ago.

Since the time of our most holiest season is at hand, rather than expending five paragraphs on a subject most of you don’t care about (and you’re right not to, I shouldn’t either!), I thought I’d share a holiday-appropriate story from my childhood, and why I don’t fuck with Ouija boards. I’ve performed a version of this story in front of an audience as part of a storytelling class, and had no less than Kevin Allison of the State and the Risk! podcast tell me that it was “very funny.”

If you’ve listened to Kill by Kill, you’ve probably heard me mention that I had a uniquely Gen X childhood, in that my parents didn’t really believe in “parenting.” My schoolwork was rarely monitored, I subsisted largely on bologna sandwiches and Chef Boyardee ravioli, I had no set bedtime, and I was allowed to read and watch just about anything I wanted (save for Three’s Company, which my father deemed “too dumb”). I watched stuff no young kid had business watching, like Halloween and Salem’s Lot, and while in the long run horror became one of the great loves of my life, it also inarguably exacerbated an anxiety disorder that I had been struggling with for as long as I could remember. 

I was a nervous, fretful child, who believed in vampires, the Boogeyman, and alligators in the sewers, all at the same time. So convinced that there was a monster hiding both in my closet and under my bed, I kept both areas cluttered with toys and other junk. I collected superstitious beliefs like other kids collected stickers or baseball cards, careful not to step on sidewalk cracks and making sure to close my mouth whenever I passed a cemetery, lest a wayward spirit enter my body and possess me¹.

Eventually I became a nervous, fretful adolescent, though I knew better by then than to inform my classmates that a cracked compact mirror would result in seven years of bad luck, lest I somehow become even more unpopular than I already was. By that point, though, I had picked up another seemingly counterproductive habit, which was treating horror like someone holding their hand over an open flame. I would actually go back and reread, or watch a second time, scenes in horror books and movies that had frightened or disgusted me, to see if they had the same effect. There were movies at the video store that I knew I would never watch because they seemed too much for me to take, but I always looked at the box cover art anyway. Maybe it was a weird drug-like rush to my weird little developing brain, hitting those same “I shouldn’t look, but I must” buttons as when someone stumbles across a stash of porn. Either way, it was a personal dare: how scared could I make myself?

Seventh grade brought with it a new classmate, Jamie, who was from the South. Not specifically anywhere in the South, just “the South,” which she mentioned with all the gravity of someone announcing that they were from Narnia. Jamie treated having to move from what was presumably a genteel southern mansion to suburban New Jersey as a grave injustice, complaining about it with a “my land, get me my fainting couch” lilt. Speaking of living in our town like it was being sentenced to a gulag didn’t exactly endear Jamie to our classmates, particularly when it was discovered that when she said she was from “the South,” she meant further south in New Jersey, a little town on the way to Cape May called Goshen. Her Blanche Devereaux-esque accent was a put-on, as were her fussy mannerisms that suggested she was constantly preparing for a debutante’s ball. A junior Anna Delvey in the making, she had taken the concept of remaking herself for a new audience just a tap too far.

I wasn’t bothered by it. In fact, if anything I admired the sheer balls it took to try to con our classmates, faking an accent like she was Chico Marx wooing a daffy heiress. Plus, our shared status as undesirables was as good an excuse as any to hang out together, even though I don’t know that we particularly liked each other. Not letting a little thing like mutual indifference stop a beautiful friendship from blossoming, we mostly spent lunchtime together, as well as ducking away from errant dodgeballs in gym class. 

Once, Jamie invited me to her house after school, which seemed like a big deal, a tacit acknowledgment that (maybe? perhaps!) we were real friends after all. Like my house, there were no adults around when we got there, or siblings. We watched TV for a little while, then Jamie announced, in a huffy, offended tone of voice like it was my fault (even though it was her house) that she was bored². I took that as my cue that I should probably be leaving, and then she followed it up with “Have you ever played with a Ouija board?”

She might as well have asked me if I had ever seen a unicorn. I knew what a Ouija board was, and I knew that using one never resulted in anything good, as seen in The Exorcist and Amityville 3-D. Nevertheless, I had never seen or even heard of anyone using one in real life, and the fact that it was sold as just another game along with Monopoly or Yahtzee was beyond my comprehension. We were also at the height of the first Satanic Panic, when any whiff of engaging in the dark arts was greeted with suspicion and fear. Jamie, a petite blonde who often wore matching vest and culottes sets, didn’t strike me as someone who communicated with spirits, malevolent or otherwise. It was a frightening concept. It was also deeply enticing, in the same way that looking at the VHS cover art for William Lustig’s Maniac was.

“No,” I said.

“You wanna try?”

“You…you have one?”

“Sure, hang on a sec.”

She disappeared into another part of her house. Part of me wanted to quietly sneak out the front door, but another part had to see this thing in action. Nearly a teenager, I no longer believed that everything I saw in horror movies was real, but the idea that maybe it was possible to open a door to the spirit realm was fascinating. As long as we did it the “right” way, maybe we’d just contact a nice old lady spirit, or one that directed us to a secret stash of gold in Jamie’s backyard. I had to know.

Jamie returned with the Ouija board box in hand, and we set it up on the coffee table, sitting on opposite sides. Even though I had an idea of how it worked, I let her explain it anyway, if for no other reason than to reassure myself that she knew how it worked. She pointed out that one of the planchette’s feet was missing, but that it didn’t matter. We placed our hands on it, and the seance began.

“Is there someone with us?” Jamie asked.

The planchette stayed still under our hands.

“If there’s someone here, speak now.” Jamie’s voice sounded confident and authoritative, further reassuring me that she had, in fact, done this before, and evidently nothing bad had happened (unless it was the Devil who gave her the idea to fake a Southern accent). Still, the planchette didn’t move.

Jamie called out to an unknown someone a couple more times, with no response. Then, with another huffy sigh, as if once again implying that it was my fault, she announced “It isn’t working,” and began putting the board back in the box.

And then, from out of nowhere, a storm rolled in.

When I say “from out of nowhere,” I mean it was a perfectly calm spring afternoon, without a cloud in the sky. Within what felt like a space of seconds, the sky went dark, thick, slate gray clouds appeared on the horizon, the wind picked up, the temperature felt like it had dropped nearly twenty degrees, and it began pouring rain. It was as if some sort of otherworldly switch had been flipped. Jamie and I looked at each other in fear. Was this “someone” announcing their arrival?

She hurriedly finished putting the Ouija board and planchette back in the box, as if it would somehow contain the evil, but the storm showed no sign of letting up. Now there was thunder and lightning, and the lights in Jamie’s house began flickering. I desperately wanted to leave, but it was more than a mile to my house, and I had to walk to get there. I regretted everything up to that very moment, agreeing to play with the Ouija board, coming to Jamie’s house, being casual friends with Jamie, meeting Jamie, ever going to school, being born, all of it.

“What do we do?” Jamie asked, the panicked tone in her voice perfectly matching the rising panic I felt. “What do we do?” I wanted to ask. “You’re the one that called Captain Howdy, you figure it out!” But the truth was, I did know what to do. Finally, my expertise on a subject was required. Watching dozens of hours of horror movies had prepared me for this very moment.

With the same kind of confidence and authority Jamie had spoken with earlier, I said “We need to perform an exorcism.”

The problem is that an exorcist is useless without his tools, and we had almost none of them. There were no crosses in Jamie’s house, and though she thought her parents might have owned a Bible, she didn’t know where it was. That scarf thing³ that Father Merrin wore in The Exorcist was right out, and obviously, unless Jamie’s father was a vampire hunter, they weren’t likely to have bottles of holy water laying around. Our only recourse was to try to make holy water. All I knew about it was that it was “blessed,” which I assume meant saying a prayer over it, but what prayer, I wasn’t sure. This was a time when the internet would have come in handy, but it was the 19th century, and neither the internet nor computers had been invented yet.

The storm continued raging outside, and, absolutely convinced that a portal to Hell would open up and suck us into it any minute, we filled a glass with tap water and said the Lord’s Prayer over it. Huddled together for safety, Jamie and I walked around the house, dipping our fingers into the water and flicking it around, shouting the one thing I knew for certain would work:

“The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!”

Now, the funny thing is, it didn’t actually work, not in The Exorcist, at least. In fact, considering Father Merrin died in the middle of it, it’s safe to say that it actually made things worse. What it took was Father Karras beating the Devil like it owed him money to get it to leave Regan’s body. But, eh, details. The Devil was coming, and it was as good a solution as any at that particular moment.

“The power of Christ compels you!” Flick. “The power of Christ compels you!” Flick. “The power of Christ compels you!” Flick. Every time we flicked the “holy” water, I braced myself for a hissing sound, or an unholy shriek. Nothing like that happened, but after a minute or two of flicking water and invoking Jesus Christ’s name, the storm rolled out, just as quickly as it rolled in. The sun immediately returned, and, other than it reflecting off the raindrops on Jamie’s lawn, it was as if nothing happened. Jamie and I looked at each other in shocked silence for a moment, before I pushed the glass towards her and muttered something about having to get home before dinnertime, even though it was at least three hours before my family usually ate dinner. I quickly returned to my house, convinced that I would vomit, shit myself, or faint (if not all three at the same time) before I got there.

I’d love to tell you that this is an “and that’s how I met my best friend” story, but, upon returning to school, Jamie and I avoided each other. We seemed to have an unspoken agreement that not only would no one else know what happened, but we would not discuss it (or anything else) with each other either. Rather than form a lifetime bond, like the Losers Club in It, we never spoke again. It wasn’t a huge loss – after all, it was mostly a friendship based on no one else wanting to hang out with us in the first place. I barely knew anything about her, and we didn’t seem to have a lot in common. Her family moved away before the end of the school year⁴, presumably because her father got a job somewhere else, and not because the portal to Hell opened up again, causing black goop to run down the walls of their house, or ghost pigs to appear outside Jamie’s bedroom window. It was the last I ever saw of her.

In retrospect, I regret not asking Jamie if she thought anything supernatural really happened that afternoon. I could look her up on Facebook now and ask, but I assume she’d greet such a message the same way one would a message from an old classmate asking if they’ve ever considered starting a business selling scented oils or overpriced skincare products. All I can say is that if she wasn’t really scared, I hope she got into acting, because that was a hell of a performance. Also, it was her Ouija board, and she spoke like she was comfortable using it, so clearly she thought something was happening, supernatural or otherwise.

As for me, I definitely thought we had made a huge mistake, even though we did nothing at all, just the spiritual equivalent of knocking on someone’s door to see if they were home. We called no one specific, and had no plan in mind for what we would do if someone answered. But, given the intensity of the storm, whoever we had woken up was very, very angry about it.

Now, with time and logic on my side, I’m more inclined to believe that it was just a coincidence, and that you can’t just dial up a random demon like calling a plumber. The storm probably would have rolled in whether we were playing with the Ouija board or not.

Probably.

Just in case, that was the first and last time I’ve touched a Ouija board. I like the imagery, but won’t play with one, and I definitely won’t have one in my house. It’s not exactly that I believe they actually do anything, but I know me, and I know my inability to resist peering into the darkness to see if anything is looking back at me. That day in Jamie’s house, it was terrifying, but exciting at the same time, and if I had a Ouija board in my house, I don’t know that I wouldn’t try it again. You know, just to see what happens. Probably nothing. But I enjoy the little shiver I feel when I think about the slight, tiniest possibility that if I call out, maybe if I listen closely I’ll hear a voice in response saying. ”It’s been a long time. I was hoping I’d hear from you again.” 

And if you got through all that, here’s a treat for you:

1. I’m not even sure this is actually a thing other people believe, or if I just made it up myself.

2. You’re probably wondering “Gena, how could you possibly remember something that happened when you were 12, roughly 150 years ago, in this much detail?” Well, all I can tell you is that, while our memories are fallible, I am quite certain about 90% of this is accurate. I even remember Jamie’s real name. Can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I remember that.

3. A stole. I didn’t know that’s what it’s called at the time.

4.  I wondered if Jamie tried another accent in her new school, maybe a broad Texas drawl or something a little Pepe le Pew Francais.