The Closet
When I was around eight or nine I played with a group of kids that lived on my street. One day we were goofing off in one of the kid's houses across the street. One of the boys that lived there pulled out a Ouija board from his sister's room.
We messed around with it for awhile. The board sure did seem to misspell a lot of words. We quickly grew bored at which point someone said that we should try it in the closet.
The infamous closet he was referring to was located in a guest room where his grandpa had committed suicide two years previous. Grief stricken over the loss of his wife and apparently heavily intoxicated, he hung himself with a belt.
We all went upstairs and approached the closet. It was a fairly large walk in closet filled with old coats, boxes, and other nicknacks. There were five of us there and no one wanted to enter it. One of the kids dared me to do it and unfortunately for me, the others joined in making chicken noises, trying to egg me on.
In hindsight it was a stupid thing to do, but then I was a naive kid and having only just moved into the neighborhood two months previous, I had something to prove. One of them handed me the Ouija board and told me to walk into the closet and sit facing the far right wall, where the suicide had taken place. They said that all I had to do was ask the board one question.
I sat down, placed the board upon a box in the corner and tried hard not to think about what had taken place two years previous in that very spot. I took a deep breath and set the planchette down on the board.
My so called friends then immediately slammed the closet door. There was no light in that space, the house having been built in the mid 1940's. It was pitch black and I literally lost it. The door wouldn't budge and I pleaded to be let out. I couldn't force the door open and expected that any moment I'd feel a ghostly hand grab my shoulder.
I screamed and wailed until I began to hyperventilate. Between my sobs I thought I could hear scratching coming from behind me. I honestly thought I was going to die from fright in that closet.
I was locked in that thing for nearly 15 claustrophobic minutes. Finally the kid's mother came in from watering the back yard and heard my frantic cries. I fled that house as soon as the door opened.
That night the kid whose mother had helped me escape came to my house to apologize.
“Mom said I have to say sorry,” he said.
I just nodded my head, having recovered somewhat.
“What did you do to my sister's Ouija board?” he then asked.
I replied that I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Well, there are tons of scratches all over the board.”
A couple weeks later his sister showed me the board saying that I'd ruined it. The board had dozens of circular scratches across the top, some of them deep going past the varnish into the wood itself. The surface of the board itself had warped slightly and was layered with a crusty film, almost like the finish had been heated up and was pulling away from the wood. The feet on the bottom of the planchette had been completely rubbed off so that it sat flat upon the board.
That's when I remembered the scratching noises I'd heard coming from behind me while I was in the closet.