Hand to God

“Where does it stop, where do you dare me to draw the line….”

The Hall and Oates song weirdly played in her head as she set out the Halloween candy. It used to be her favourite time of year…donning princess or witch costumes, skipping about the night collecting candy as the autumn wind blew hollow and cold…

As a child she was fanatic about communicating with the dead. Whether through séance, or the Ouija board, she was consumed by the constant seeking of a whisper from the dead…to guide her, reassure her life went on and total darkness would not be the end of the tunnel…or a wee hello from Grandma and Grandpa.

So Halloween was her favourite holiday – the time when ghouls gathered and ghosts grinned and the dead were all around. Not at all a scary time of year.

Until.

This is a true story. I tell it to my sixth grade school children to stop them going down the same road I was on.

Lori and I had turned off the lights and sat cross-legged in our usual positions, as we prepared ourselves to summon the dead in the middle of the day and our family room. We usually gathered at this time, just to see ‘who is out there’.

That day we learned.

We took out the Ouija board and placed it between us, hands barely touching the ‘cursor’. I forgot the question, but as the ‘cursor’ began to move untouched by us, (hand to God!) it stopped.

“Why?” we asked. “Why have you stopped?”

“He is here,” it painfully slowly spelled out, as we sat mesmerised.

“Who?”

Slowly, slowly: ”G…..O…..D”.

Which we thought was pretty cool, until we asked ourselves aloud, why couldn’t it answer if God was there?

Stupidly we continued, asking the question no sensible child nowadays would ask…

“Well then who are you?” A sudden wind blew out the candle and the sun dipped behind the clouds and all went eerily quiet.

Really. Now I know why the movies do it. It happens like that.

“S……A……T……A…..N.”

We screamed and instantaneously drew our hands back as if they had been burned.

From that day forward, I don’t get as excited about Halloween, I don’t watch scary movies, and the world of the dead remains happily out of reach.

Jasmin Webb