From: devol@lims01.lerc.nasa.gov (WILLIAM DEVOL)
Subject: Seance you asked...
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Organization: NASA Lewis Research Center
Date:  4 Sep 1992 15:18 EST  


Here's how it was explained to me once by someone I thought might have a 
great deal of experience, but that's another story.

Getting out the Oujia (sp?) board or having a seance just for the fun of it 
at a party or slumber party isn't that great an idea.  Try Go Fish or Crazy 
Eights, but don't have a seance or fool with the aforementioned board.  
Ninty-nine times out of one-hundred, you won't scare (pardon me) up a thing
--it's that one time you have to worry about.

Every major religion has a concept of a place you go after you die.  Heaven
, Nirvana (Smells Like Teen Reincarnation), or many other places are 
advertised as perfect and paradise.  The argument goes that no soul that 
has made it to the perfect place would bother to hang around the Earthly 
plane and play slap and tickle with gaggles of drunks and teenagers with 
nothing to do.  Socrates said that the souls (spirits, if you like) of those 
that were too close to the bodies that carried them wandered around looking for a body to 
inhabit.  He thought that those spirits ended up in animal bodies or 
posseded bodies with weak souls.  Some folks believe that the only spirits 
able and willing to cater parties are BAD spirits, and the regular folks 
among us are advised not to antagonize such spirits.

A friend of mine lived outside of Athens, Ohio, in the late sixties.  She 
and friends shared a big farm house in the middle of nowhere near railroad 
tracks.  One weekend, the crew had nothing to do, so they decided to have a 
seance.  They asked for a "local spirit" that was supposed to roam the 
railroad tracks with a lantern (I wish I could remember the name of the 
spirit in the local legend.).  My friend said nothing happened during the 
seance, and the party disbanded.  All but one of the roommates, both male and
female, went back to Athens with significant others that night.

At about 2:00 a.m., according to my friend, the lone roommate called her at 
her boyfriend's apartment begging for help.  He said, according to my 
friend, that something was at the farm house and it wouldn't leave him 
alone.  He said he could hear a train circling the house, and the lights 
were flashing on an off.  He said he could hear screams and laughing; he 
had no car, and he was scared to walk through the dark into town.

My friend and her boyfriend went out after the poor guy, and my friend 
swears that when they got to the house they saw lights flashing on and off 
in the house and in the garage.  There were no switches for the garage in 
the house, and there was no one in the garage; they looked because they 
thought they were having their legs pulled.  The boyfriend beeped the horn, 
and the roommate exited the house on the dead run and dived into the 
back seat of the car.  They drove away and didn't return until much later 
in the day.

My friend tells this story, and then she mentions the graveyard that is 
nearly in the backyard of the farm house.  I've been out there in the day, 
and the cemetery (more than 50 graves and room for more) is right next to 
the driveway and about 75 feet from the back porch.  My friend says nothing 
ever happened like that ever again, but she always points out that none of 
the many cats and dogs that lived with the group ever spent any time on the 
cemetery side of the house.

______________________________________________________________________
Friends don't let friends go to Miami University.

WCD
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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories