When you were a kid, what did you do during Halloween? You were probably in a cute or scary costume, telling ghost stories with a flashlight and, best of all, going from door-to-door to get free candy. There was something both frightening and magical in the night air.

Now that you’re all grown up, what do you do on Halloween? You’re probably going to dress up in a skanky or stupid costume (or not dress up at all), take too many shots and, worst of all, black out by chugging too many Keystone Lights. Well, I guess things change when you grow up, and you just have to go along with it. But the true spirit of Halloween — the imagination and the magic you experienced as a child — has vanished.

But for just a second, I want to bring back the true spirit of Halloween by telling you about the time I talked to the boy in the Ouija board. Now I know most people don’t believe in the paranormal. Stories of ghosts, possessions and haunted houses are all a work of fiction to most educated minds. Everything, no matter how abnormal, can be explained. Or maybe that’s what we want to believe. Sometimes, however, events happen that are too strange to be considered “just a coincidence.”

A few years ago, on my birthday, my friend brought over an old Ouija board that had been in her family for years. She laughed at me when I said I was afraid of getting possessed by Captain Howdy. I was being totally serious, too. I believed in such things, and The Exorcist scared the bejesus out of me.

“It’s a plank of wood and a crappy little piece of plastic,” she reasoned. “And it’s manufactured by Parker Brothers!”

She forgot the Ouija board at my house after the birthday party, and I stowed it away in a corner. A few days later, another friend came over, and we decided to give it a try. We gently placed our hands on the planchette and asked if anyone was there. We held our breaths, as the piece began to move across the letters and arrive at “YES.” I stared at her, she stared back, both equally amazed.

“Stop moving it,” I said.

“You stop moving it,” she accused.

After we both agreed that neither of us was consciously moving the planchette, we began to ask it questions. At first, they were silly questions, like when our birthdays were, who we had a crush on and who we were going to marry in the future. We started giggling because we were both amused and a little freaked out by the answers. My mom walked in when she heard us laughing and frowned when she saw the board.

“This really isn’t something to joke about,” she warned. “Stop laughing … don’t mess with what you don’t know.”

As soon as she left, the planchette started moving without any warning. It slowly spelled out the word, “laugh.” Our eyes grew wide, and for a moment, we stared at each other in fear. At this point, my friend started getting really angry at me, and she claimed I was trying to scare her. But I didn’t do anything — the board spelled it out on its own. We began asking who this “spirit” was, and the only answer we got was that it was a young boy. For a moment, we stopped to think about what else to ask, but then we felt the planchette moving beneath our fingertips.

“M-O-M,” it spelled. “M-O-M, M-O-M, M-O-M …” It moved back and forth, back and forth, between the letters until we finally asked, “Where is she?”

“F-I-R-E,” it said.

Finally, we decided we had enough and put the board away. My friend looked pale and scared, and I felt chills running through my spine. Over the next few weeks, strange things began happening in my house, and I would get an eerie vibe whenever I looked at the board. Finally, I told my friend to take it back to her house.

“Thanks for demonizing my Ouija board,” she said, laughing.

For a couple of years, she left it in the trunk of her car and forgot about it. But a few months ago, she finally put it back into the cupboard in her house, and strange things began happening there too. Doors started slamming by themselves, things started moving around and she started having vivid nightmares. Even the skeptic was convinced something just wasn’t right.

Maybe I just have an overactive imagination, and maybe we subconsciously moved the planchette to freak ourselves out. You can give me any number of scientific explanations for what occurred, but you can do that any other time of the year. But in the spirit of Halloween, just pretend I’m holding a flashlight under my face and take the ghost story for what it’s worth. It’s OK to be a kid again and to believe that there are some things that can’t be explained. It’s OK to pretend that there’s still some magic and mystery to our lives. Anyway, here’s the flashlight — it’s your turn to tell me a scary story.

Sandie Cheng is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. She may be reached at scheng@cornellsun.com. That One, Please appears alternate Wednesdays this semester.