do spirits sleep too?

H•E•J

"Mum!" I scream from the front hall, "I'm gonna walk over now!"

I hear a faint "Okay, see you there" from her bedroom as I shut the front door behind me in a hurry. I hop down the stone stairs that dress the porch and sprint to the neighbouring house, where my best friend Lauren is having her 9th birthday party. She invited all of her friends from school plus me, and I am beyond excited to meet them and have a great night.

"Well look who decided to show up," Lesley, Lauren's mother, says with a smile as she opens the door for me. "Where is your Mum?"

"Hi, Lesley" I reply, kicking off my black sandals and racing up the beige carpeted stairs, telling Lesley that she'll be late, as per usual. I pat Suki the cat on the way up.

"Lauren!" I exclaim upon seeing her in the playroom. She shoots me a smile and ushers me over to the circle her friends have created around a navy blue box with stars on it.

"We've been waiting, what took you so long?" Lauren asks, clearly anxious to reveal the contents of the rustic-looking box.

"Oh you know, my mom wanted me to look nice and all. The usual," I reply, unable to break my gaze on the box.

"Have you ever heard of a Ouija board?" One of Lauren's friends asks me, and as I answer no she giggles and pushes her curly brown hair out of her face. I don't like her.

"That's Madison, and these two are Jill and Sara," Lauren introduces me to her friends.

I sit between Madison and Lauren, totally oblivious to what it is we are about to do.

"So, apparently this board lets us talk to the dead," Lauren explains and I immediately knew that this box had something in it I will not end up liking.

So, accordingly, I ask, "Is it safe?"

The girls shoot glances at each other, as if safety was for the weakest. Lauren has a peculiar gleam in her eye; she is clearly blinded with curiosity and perhaps some rebellion to show off to her friends.

The girls took the fantastical board out of its starry casing, only to reveal that the board resembles the box identically, however now it has a golden alphabetical set of letters in the centre, with numbers lined neatly at the bottom. There sits a "Yes" and a "No" at the top two corners, decorated with a sun and a moon. At the very top centre, big golden letters spell out "OUIJA" in a chilling font.

They instructed me to place two fingers on a upside-down heart-shaped pointer, as they did themselves.

Next, we collectively moved the pointer in a clockwise motion three times, saying that chilling word in golden letters with each circle.

Lauren looks at me, the slightest bit of worry on her face, as she asks the board,

"Is anyone with us?"

For about two full minutes nothing has happened and I am both disappointed and relieved. I know now that Lauren got this board for her birthday and wanted it to work as she had heard it did elsewhere, but despite my lack of knowledge for what it could do, I have a dreaded feeling that it could go very south very easily. The board clearly would only contact the dead that have not crossed to the light and are stuck in purgatory, likely for varying bad reasons.

Just as I am about to get up from my spot, the pointer moves.

I do not know if it was one of Lauren's friends, more specifically Madison, but I felt a sudden and strong tingling in the arm connecting to the board, as if the spirit who toggled the movement is using my energy to do so. Lauren feels it too, as her face goes pale with fear and she looks at me in shock.

The pointer slowly moves to the word "Yes" at the top left corner, in a calm but strong glide.

I feel tears of complete bewilderment and horror drag down my face as I jump up from my spot, removing my hand from the pointer, and going to hide behind the doorframe facing the playroom. My entire body was shaking in fear uncontrollably.

"I-It's okay, Ness. Come back over, we need your energy," Lauren says to me, ignoring my obvious state of panic.

Not wanting to let her down, I suppress some of the fear and swallow my pride before entering the room again. I slowly seat myself back in my spot, looking blankly at the empty spot between Lauren and Sara, but I have no idea why I keep looking there, as if somebody was looking right back.

The rest of the session with the first character we contacted through this paranormal device gave us the acquaintance of "HEJ," a 5-year-old spirit girl who was very quick to shoot down any request to learn how it was she died and how long she has been a spirit for. She claims to have a pet emu and likes the colour red, and Lauren quickly grows fond of her. Lauren asks if she would like to attend her next soccer game before we asked if we were allowed to leave, and HEJ answered yes to both.

Rest assured, I was the first person to remove my hand.

I do not know how to react, or what to say. The other girls were so excited and felt so empowered by this experience that they ran downstairs and spilled the unbelievable encounter to their parents. I slowly made my way to my mom, and tried to explain what I had just witnessed.

"Really?" My mom says, smiling as though I am being fooled by Lauren's friends. "Go play."

I gain some confidence back after going about other social exchanges with some parents and friends, only to follow Lauren and her friends back upstairs to see who else we can contact. We sit back down in our circle, all placing our two ignorant little fingers on the plastic device, moving it in three circles and saying its name thrice as well.

"Is there anybody with us?" Lauren repeats, and I immediately feel a much stronger tingling sensation in my arm that touches the pointer. It, much faster than before, moves to "Yes."

We ask for the spirit's name, and this time the cursor spells out H-A-J, instead of H-E-J. Are these names some kind of code?

We ask it a few harmless and non-personal questions, like "How are you?" To which it responded "Yes."

It is when Lauren asks the board if it knows anybody else in the house that I look at her funny. I am not sure any other answer than "No" would be reassuring.

The pointer takes little to no time to move to "M", and then "A", and then "R". . .

The pointer perfectly spelled out my mother's first name that she never uses, Margaret. She only goes by Peggy unless it is for legal purposes, and it is when I jump up from the board and start crying that I realize that I should have asked for permission. The spirit no longer replied to Lauren's questions afterwards.

I barrel downstairs to tell my mom, only for further disbelief to be written all over her face. She recognizes the terror in my eyes but reassures that it was just one of Lauren's friends.

I am two years older than Lauren and her friends, and I still barely know how to spell Margaret and even find myself forgetting that it is my mother's full name. How could any of them possibly know her name, let alone how to spell it?

—

When I was about 5 years old, my mother carried a baby boy to term. He sadly did not make it two hours past childbirth, and if he had, he would have had a low quality of life due to certain disabilities he would have survived with. His name was Tyler.

I have a theory, and while it might be a product of the imaginative brain of a scared ten-year-old, I still believe it to this day. I believe that somehow, Tyler is spiritually attached to my mother. I've always felt hints of a paranormal presence in each of the six houses we've lived in, and maybe directing the fear I have towards that feeling into a more familiar presence is a coping mechanism, but regardless it makes me feel warmly about him. Maybe he grew up with me and my siblings; happy and in a more able state than he would have been had he survived.

I believe that the "HAJ" character we contacted through the spirit board was Tyler. I can't muster up any other answer to how it knew to spell Margaret. Maybe he had a few moments of life in the hospital room, maybe a nurse referred to my mother as Margaret and now he remembers her as that.

Or, maybe, it was Madison.