My True Halloween Paranormal Experience: Red Hand Manifesting on Ouija Board

Ghia caught a lying spirit red-handed during a Halloween ouija board session when a red hand literally manifested on the board.

Once upon a time, my friends and I were messing with a ouija board and we summoned a dead family. I’ve been involved with the occult for for well over 15 years. I’ve seen demons manifest in ashes and faery orbs flicker around my circle. But in comparison to this experience, I’ve rarely seen spirits manifest as blatantly as this spirit did through the ouija board.

People seem to take Halloween and ouija boards lightly. For me, Halloween is Samhain, an important Pagan holiday upon which we honor departed spirits and practice magick. On this day, I do witchy things like divining the future and communing with spirits. As for ouija boards, they are tools used to facilitate spirit communication and can be especially helpful if one is not adept at communicating with spirits alone.

Remember: with ouija boards, the spirits who are nearest to the board and have the greatest desire to speak are likely to have unfinished business.

Not all of the most communicative spirits are necessarily the friendliest; nor do they intend to manifest in helpful ways. Based on my research and experience, ouija boards simply attract whatever spirits are nearest and have the most desire to speak. These spirits are likely to be spirits with unresolved business, hence why they’re still hanging around. For this reason, ouija boards invite negative spirits that aren’t as well-meaning as they are talkative. I do not think it was a coincidence that the spirit I encountered through the ouija board was a tormented one. This experience forever shut me off to any openness I might’ve had about incorporating ouija boards further into my practice.

It’s no coincidence that this happened on Halloween, the day when the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. In my flowing black dress, I returned home from wandering through the autumn-tinged roads of Sleepy Hollow, NY to find my roommates gathered in a circle in my college apartment’s living room. In the center, there was a ouija board. Knowing how sketchy ouija board spirits could be with inexperienced users, I decided to join their circle and supervise their seance to make sure nothing decided to overstay its welcome. Years of working with spirits and witchcraft made me capable of communicating with spirits without a ouija board, so I nestled myself a seat between them without expecting to see much. Clad in traditionally witchy attire, I had spent the day attempting to find a cemetery and didn’t succeed, so I was glad to be involved with this spooky spirit talk. So I lit a candle and instructed my friends to place their hands on the planchette and ask a question.

First, one of my friends asked the spirit when it was born. The planchette slowly made its way around the numbers section to spell “1917.”

Then one of my friends asked, “When did you die?”

The planchette slowly made its way from number to number as it spelled out “1919.” But there was something wrong, I saw the spirit in my third eye. The image was clear: The spirit was a middle-aged man and not a two-year-old child. In my vision, the scowling ghost’s hair was parted on the side with a buttoned-up blue shirt. He didn’t look like he was from the year 1917, nor did he look like he was two years old. It felt strange, seeing how my friends’ eyes remained fixed on the planchette, waiting on its every last twitch, yet they could not sense the spirit lying right to their faces. Not hesitating to help my friends, I immediately called the spirit out.

Spirit caught red-handed

“This spirit is lying,” I declared, my hands still placed on the planchette. “I sense the presence of a middle-aged man, not a child.”

Then the planchette went to the letter “A,” then to the picture of a sun on the board. It did this repeatedly. Then it started spelling something else repeatedly: M-A-L-A-K-A. The spirit kept spelling “malaka” over and over again. We had no idea what it meant, but one thing we did clearly comprehend was the small red handprint that appeared on the ouija board. It was exactly the size of a small child’s hand. The handprint stayed there as we asked the spirit other trivial questions, then slowly faded away before the seance was over. The ten minutes the handprint spent materialized felt like an eternity.

Afterwards, we were shaken up – After all, we literally just saw a blood-red hand materialize on the ouija board. None of us had seen anything like it. We felt the energy change in such a radical way, it was unquestionable that there was an angry spirit in the room. I remember the blank expressions on my friends’ faces as they encountered their first angry ghost without knowing what to do about it. A mutual silence pierced our hearts as our stomachs collectively dropped. Time stood still as we remain absorbed in a supernatural moment that felt like forever in the darkness, even though it was only 4 in the afternoon and still bright out.

It took me a moment to realize my mistake: The ghost was probably a father who had committed suicide after his son died. We later found out that “malaka” is Greek for “asshole.” If I had just spoken to the spirit myself, I could’ve found this all out. However, in the end, it was my fault for misunderstanding the spirit and accusing the spirit of lying when it was actually trying to communicate with us. Or perhaps the spirit’s intention was to deceive us and I blew up their act⁠—I’ll never know what the actual truth was.

Eventually, we bid a firm goodbye to the spirit and decided to cleanse the area to make sure the spirit didn’t leave any traces of energy behind. Plumes of smoke billowed into the air as I aggressively wafted nag champa incense into every corner of the room. Afterwards, my roommate solemnly put the ouija board back into its box and put it back into her closet.

This experience has made me wary of using ouija boards as I question what kinds of spirits are attracted to it. I would guess that perhaps it was my expectation that invited the spirit, but I was more fascinated by ouija boards than afraid of them. I wasn’t expecting a bloody baby handprint to manifest out of nowhere. But no matter what, I can always say that my friends and I caught a spirit red-handed.