The Séance
The artistic director of the theatre company I was directing for was a jolly, rotund gent by the name of Joel Meriwether, who was also deeply interested in the supernatural. Joel had just recently opened himself up to channeling spirits, or going into a trance-like state and allowing the spirit of some deceased entity to speak through him. Of course, this can be an extremely risky and dangerous practice—but none of us really realized it at the time.
One night after the show, a group of actors, Joel, Brittany, and I decided to go back to my condo and get out my old Ouija board—maybe have a séance to see if we could get the spirits to tell us what was going on in the music institute. I always hoped that Patience might show up and help out, but sometimes that happened and sometimes it didn’t. I had learned in my Wicca course about casting a protective circle with sea salt around the area to be used for any ritual and to ask for guidance and protection from the God and Goddess before doing anything. So armed with salt, candles, and Wicca 101, I felt confident we were going to get some answers.
Balancing a few invisible spirits just didn’t appear to me to be that big a deal. So I cast a protective circle around my kitchen table, and six of us sat down to have our séance. For whatever reason, Patience was missing in action.
We asked to speak to a spirit who could tell us what was going on in the music institute. Mostly all we got were bits and pieces of useless disjointed phrases and threats from several entities claiming to be demons or even Satan himself. Frankly, to me this just seemed humorous. But nothing physical happened. No flickering candles, no rampaging furniture, no voices from beyond. Just some seemingly lame threats, and no information about the music institute other than a warning of not to go back there or we’d all be sorry.
Since we felt the Ouija board had failed to give us any useful information, Joel volunteered to try and channel a helpful spirit. We figured we didn’t have anything to lose, so why not? He took deep breaths and after a minute seemed to pass out. His head slumped onto his chest. I had seen him channel before at a cast party, so I wasn’t afraid he was incapacitated or anything. Sure enough, after a couple of seconds, he looked up as if he’d never seen any of us before and smiled a huge Cheshire cat grin. I believe he said he was a spirit from the ancient civilization of Atlantis. But there was no useful information, other than a prediction that Brittany would marry a hockey player. After nearly three decades, numerous boyfriends and an ex-husband, I have yet to see a hockey player.
Joel came out of his trance none the worse for ware, and things started to wind down. So with nothing much to show for it, our séance came to an end. The teenagers were getting sleepy, and several of the adults had had a bit too much to drink. It was getting late, and we all had to get up and do a Sunday afternoon matinee. But although the séance had been apparently non-productive, I would come to believe in less than a year that perhaps we had stirred something up with the Ouija board that night in my kitchen. We had received seemingly harmless, even bogus threats from entities claiming to be demons. Frankly at the time, I thought it was funny and said so. But our contact with this negative energy may have led to more serious incidents about to slap my family in the face. I guess I’ll never know if there was a connection, but from that evening forward, my family noticed a discernable, slightly ominous gloom in my innocuous little condo.
The First “Love of Her Life”
Brittany would have a string of boyfriends—the first being a guy named Chase she met at school that fall. Chase was a very intelligent, talented musician, almost painfully quiet and shy. I can’t really attest to his character, because he’d usually clam up around me. But Brittany was positively smitten with him. He was her first boyfriend, and she was convinced that she was madly in love.
One of their favorite activities was trying to contact spirits on the Ouija board. Neither of them had a car, so all their dates were either at my house, his parent’s house in another suburb fifteen miles away, or at Sheila’s house. Sheila did not own a Ouija board, but at my house Britt had apparently retrieved the Ouija board from underneath my bed and taken it to her room—but honestly, at the time I wouldn’t have cared.
My own contacts with Chase were limited, but I remember one Saturday afternoon when I was painting the inside of the condo. Chase’s mother brought him over to help us paint. I believe I saw him take a few swipes at the living room wall with the brush I gave him, but it wasn’t long before he and Brittany disappeared upstairs to her room. I could hear them talking up there, giving me evidence that he actually could speak.
“I played Ouija with Chase almost every time he came over,” she eventually explained. “We talked to things over and over again claiming to be the devil, claiming to be a demon. I guess I opened a door to let them in with that thing. I was obsessive over it. I wanted to do it all the time, even if it scared me. I was enthralled with it.”
Whenever Brittany and Chase asked to communicate with a spirit, they would usually get an entity answering teenage questions about love, school, and friends—often claiming to be able to predict the future. What high school kid could resist the allure of such an omniscient entity with apparent keys to their future? Nevertheless, there were telltale negative signs left by the entity/entities that even a couple of fifteen-year-olds should have picked up on.
Brittany says the “nice spirit” would always, eventually, turn the floor over to something of a much nastier nature. This one would claim to be a demon or even Satan himself when pressed for an identity. When asked what exactly it wanted from them, it would answer: “your soul” and assert that it wanted to see them “burn.”
There is infinite good in the universe, but there is also lurking evil. The kids didn’t know that, and I didn’t even know they were playing with the Ouija board. But by making their consciousnesses available to other dimensions via the Ouija board, they may have literally opened themselves up subconsciously to something very bad indeed.
Safe, Happy Ouija Makes for a Safe, Happy User
I know now that tampering with metaphysical implements like the Ouija board is not a harmless pursuit. It can be extremely dangerous, perhaps even life threatening. But in 1999, I was convinced that involvement in spirit communications was all about managing who you spoke to. The few times I had encountered negative (or even self-proclaimed evil) entities, there were no significant repercussions—mostly just blustering threats. Ouija was just a fascinating game and a great topic of conversation.
I was wrong and very naive in my attitude about the Ouija board. Spirit communication can be harmless and fun, and it can be beneficial. But it can also lead to very, very negative and even evil things. But all this I had to learn the hard way.
Use of the Ouija board opens up a portal or gateway to the astral dimensions for spirits to come in. Communicating with spirits via the Ouija board can be a useful tool if the proper precautions are taken. Since my primary objective for writing this book is to help other families avoid the trauma my family went through as a result of Ouija board misuse, here are some easy precautions I’ve learned. This should ensure that you reap the benefits of spirit communication while avoiding the potentially dangerous pitfalls.
Before using the board, draw a circle around it with sea salt. Other protective methods include placing quartz crystals around the board to cleanse and maintain energy. Also, hematite or obsidian stones placed at each corner can be used for protection. Some authorities recommend burning lavender incense to attract good spirits. Frankincense, myrrh, or dragon’s blood incense are also thought to protect against evil spirits, as is burning sage.
A protective prayer may be the best thing you can do to protect the individuals involved and the environment itself, for example: “I clear this space of all negative energy, and of all the negative energy of spirits who do not belong in this household. I ask that the clearing be positive, and that all of the energy be returned to its source.” Cleansing the board after use with incense or sage is also recommended.
Eileen and I never took any of these precautions in New Orleans. Neither did I for the following twenty-five years. But we were lucky—or perhaps Patience was always there to protect us from the “ithers.” But when my daughter started experimenting with the Ouija board as a teenager, no precautions were taken—and I suppose Patience wasn’t always there to protect her.
Brittany Plays Betsy Bell
In the fall of 2000, Brittany was cast to play the part of Betsy Bell in a stage production of my friend Joel’s original play The Bell Witch of Robertson County, which he was also directing at the Nashville Music Institute (yep, that same theatre building where Britt had encountered the apparition of the spirit of a judge, or at least something pretending to look like one). Joel had long been fascinated with the legend of the Bell Witch, just as I had. He’d written quite a nice dramatization of the nineteenth-century haunting of the John Bell family. In Joel’s version, Betsy had been sexually abused by her father, John, and this abuse could have had something to do with triggering the supernatural phenomenon that became infamous throughout the U.S. and Europe.
Joel is a masterful showman, so I expected this to be a first-rate community theatre performance. Britt was extremely excited about being cast in such a large role. In Joel’s Bell Witch, Betsy Bell is essentially the lead, and Brittany really put her heart and soul into the part of Betsy Bell.
During their rehearsal period, Britt and I went up to the old Bell Witch farm in Adams, Tennessee, and took the tour they offer tourists. The early 1820s home where the haunting took place has long since been torn down. But there is a museum with a tour available of the wooded property upon which the Bell farm was headquartered. The tour meanders through the thick forest where Betsy and her brothers and sisters played and where many of the incidents in the 1890s M.V. Ingram book about the haunting took place.
These are the woods where the Bell family supposedly saw the spirit of a little girl dressed in green velvet hanging from the branches of various trees. Of course, if anyone attempted to communicate with her, she’d vanish. There were also numerous sightings of a very large black dog with red eyes, snarling and threatening Bell family members and chasing slaves who’d venture too far from their cabins late at night. On the numerous occasions when John Bell would fire his musket at the dog, it would disappear into the mist. When Britt and I were there, the guided trek ended up with a tour of the Bell Witch Cave, where several incidents in the legend took place and where folks in Adams say the spirit resides to this day.
The middle-aged couple running the museum and tour live on the property in a brick home built over a hundred years after the haunting. They claim that not a night goes by they don’t hear footsteps in the hallway outside their bedroom, accompanied by unexplained noises—the most dramatic of which is the oft repeated sound in the dining room of dishes being hurled from their china cabinet and dashed to the floor. The crash is so loud, you’d think they would find the hardwood floor covered with shards of broken chinaware and glass. But upon inspecting the carnage, nothing is ever amiss. After having their sleep interrupted by nightly dashes out of bed to inspect the supposed damage, they finally just learned to live with these paranormal audio effects. Now they just roll over and go back to sleep.
The tour guide will point out spots where events in the haunting were said to have taken place and generally creates an ambiance of foreboding and dread—without going overboard, because there are usually children along for the wooded romp. The day Britt and I took the tour, we were the only customers, so the guide poured the possibilities of impending supernatural presences on pretty thick. But during a lull in the guide’s narrative as we rounded a bend in the leaf covered pathway, Brittany jerked her head to the side exclaiming, “Ow!” She looked genuinely startled and more than a little annoyed. I asked her what was wrong, and she said she felt like her hair had been pulled. The tour guide rather nonchalantly said, “That happens sometimes with women on the tour. They sometimes feel like someone pulled their hair.” I knew from reading numerous accounts of the Bell Witch that one of the spirit’s favorite tricks to play on poor Betsy was pulling her hair.
At the time, I took that as another sign of the psychic awareness Laurel had been telling me for years Brittany possessed. Objectively, it could also have been an overly active imagination fueled by her knowledge of the legend or even the tour guide’s shtick. But her reaction to the feeling of having her hair pulled was immediate and spontaneous. The moment wasn’t anything we dwelled upon, and before long we were again immersed in the tour guide’s banter.
During the production of The Bell Witch of Robertson County, Britt didn’t report any paranormal sightings of apparitions at the music institute or any other worldly events going on during rehearsals. The show was successful, got great reviews, and Britt gave a tremendous performance—and I was especially proud of her for wanting to go to Adams and see where the real Betsy Bell lived as preparation for her role.