I have lost count of the number of sessions where the story begins with an evening that everybody present treated as a joke.
A Ouija board (or a talking board, which is the older and more honest name) is a piece of wood with the letters, the numbers and a yes and a no painted on it, plus a planchette that moves across the surface to spell things out. That is the whole apparatus. There is nothing in the object itself.
That is the part people get wrong in both directions. The sceptic says “it is just a bit of wood” and is correct about the wood. The frightened person says “the board is cursed” and is wrong about the board. Neither has identified where the risk actually sits.
What Chen says the danger actually is
The board does nothing. The people around it do everything.
What a session with a talking board amounts to is a group of people deliberately opening themselves, announcing an invitation, and specifying no conditions whatsoever about who may accept it. Chen’s objection is not that this is supernatural and forbidden. His objection is that it is unaddressed.
You would not stand in a doorway at three in the morning calling into the dark, offering to let in whoever answers first, and then feel reassured because you had used a polite tone of voice. That is, in essence, the procedure.
An open door is not a bad thing. An open door with nobody watching it is a different matter entirely.
Why it goes wrong more often than people admit
Three things stack up, and they usually stack up together:
- Nobody present is shielded. Most people who try a board have never done any protective practice at all. They are entirely porous at the exact moment they issue the invitation.
- Almost everybody is drinking. Boards come out at parties, at Halloween, at sleepovers. Alcohol and drugs loosen the connection between the spiritual and physical selves, which is the precise gap that gets used.
- Nobody closes it afterwards. The group gets bored, or frightened, and simply stops. The board goes back in a cupboard. What was opened stays open, because nobody knew there was anything to close.
That third one is the real problem. The great majority of the harm I see is not from what came through during the session. It is from the months and years afterwards, through a door nobody shut.
What tends to follow
People rarely connect the two events themselves, which is why I ask about it directly. What they describe, usually starting weeks or months later, is the ordinary attachment picture: sleep that breaks at the same hour, exhaustion that rest does not touch, thoughts in a tone that is not theirs, a change in temper that other people notice first, and often one room in the house that has gone wrong.
Sometimes it is the person who was most sceptical on the night. Being unconvinced is not the same as being protected.
If you have already used one
Then please read this part rather than the rest.
You are not cursed, you are not beyond help, and this is not a permanent condition. It is one of the more straightforward things I deal with, precisely because the origin is known and dated. Knowing when a door opened makes it considerably easier to close.
- Do not do it again to try to fix it. Going back to ask what came through is the single most common way people make this worse.
- Get rid of the board. Not because the object is dangerous (it is not) but because keeping it maintains the association, and the association is doing real work in your head.
- Start shielding daily. The golden bubble and the salt cost nothing and will hold the situation while you decide what to do.
- If the symptoms have persisted for months, get it looked at. A health check will tell you whether anything is actually attached, including if the answer is no.
And if you are considering trying one
Don’t. Not out of superstition, out of the same instinct that stops you giving your address to a stranger who rings up and asks for it.
If your interest is genuinely in contact rather than in a Friday night, there are structured, protected ways to do it, and we teach them. How to connect safely to your spirit guides is exactly that lesson, and it starts with closing procedures rather than opening ones.
Related teachings
Read next
What drugs do to your energy field
The other half of this story, and the warning Chen repeats most often.
Are magic rituals dangerous?
Spells and ceremony, and the difference between intention and invitation.
Psychic protection
Seven techniques you can start tonight, free, whether or not anything is wrong.