has anyone dabbled in this game? i have… a long, long time ago. and it’s safe to say that i’m not keen on trying it again. people in the west can get a commercialized version of this game, called the Ouija Board. our version is strictly DIY, where we take a large piece of paper/board, wrtie down all the numbers and alphabets. then we add a sign for ‘home’, ‘yes’ and ‘no’. we went an extra mile and drew a giant pentagram in the middle haha!

it was back is school in kuala kangsar, where people say it’s one of the most ‘keras’ (haunted) place in malaysia. this is due to the amount of black magic practitioners in the past. the small island of Sayong is said to be where people learn black magic, and where practitioners dump their magic when the want to go clean. the force of mystic malays is strong here… the fact that my school was used as a hospital during the japanese occupancy doesn’t help either.

we usually start by placing a coin in the middle of the playing board, put our pointing fingers on the coin and start our chant which goes like this, “spirit spirit of the coin, come play with me, please say yes or no”. pretty stupid chant. i don’t know who came up with that, but it was effective. after a few round of chants, the coin will start moving. some people say it’s a hoax. but we’ve tried many things to prove that it wasn’t. usually all of us participating will look away from the board, and another person will read out whatever letters/numbers/symbol the coin has moved to. and i can say that the thing answered a lot of my secrets correctly. i mean, i’m pretty sure no one else knows the answer to the things i asked.

me and a few friends have done this quite a few times, actually, and what we got was pretty cool. but this one particular night, we decided to play on the second floor of the Form 3 classroom, in front of the physics lab. that place was spooky. we started chanting, but nothing happened after a few rounds. so we got agitated and started cracking jokes. we told ourselves to be more serious, and concentrated on the chant. all of a sudden, the metal grill, railings beside the stairs and the railings along the whole corridor started vibrating! then they shook violently! as fast as the speedy gonzales i ran down to my classroom. i left my friend upstairs to fend himself against whatever demon that may be hahaha… our seniors experienced more terrible effects of the game. the supposedly released the spirit of a small child, and there were a few sightings of a child-like creature running around the dorm compunds. even one of the most gangster senior got a fever after an encounter with the ghost kid.

my experience in school wasn’t as spooky as when me and my housemates in USJ Court 10 played in our apartment. the thing said things like ‘REDRUM’, killing muslims, etc. and it just won’t go away. it turned malevolent, spinning round lika a crazed demon (which i think it is). after a few rounds of ayat kursi, it went home un-peacefully. but it left some horrible things behind. for 2 or 3 nights, doors would open and close by themselves, air would gush in from nowhere, and there was a general spooky aura around the apartment. my housemate Ilhan noticed something more sinister left by the thing. his Pearl Jam poster had one of the member’s (stone gossard) face disfigured. not much, but his face turned into this devil-like creature, with longer tongue and sharper jaw. maybe it was our own hallucination, maybe his face has always been like that, but stone gossard’s face in the poster gave me the ultimate creep. we spent the next few days reciting the Yassin around the house, and soon after that, the paranormal activities subsided.

padan muka kitorang. nak main dengan hantu lagi… luckily the bulk of my experience weren’t visual ones. i can stand hearing and feeling things, but i’m terrified of SEEING them!