I’ve never cared to see tables or any inanimate object move of its own free will. That’s just too spooky for me. So, after the flying table at my grandma’s séance, I wasn’t interested in any more séances.
Nevertheless, when I was about fourteen years old, I got a “special request” for a séance.
It started when my mother and one of my sisters went to visit relatives in Savannah, Georgia. While there they attended a séance in the home of one of my cousins. It turned out that this particular cousin had a friend who was a medium, and she, my cousin, was eager for my mother and sister to see what this medium could do.
My mother and sister came back home to Louisiana and told me about the séance. To me, it sounded like the same kind of thing that my grandma had done. The medium had called on the spirits and they knocked, bumped, and clanked to answer questions. The spirit of my Grandpa Mac appeared on the scene, introducing himself to the medium. My mother and sister insisted they hadn’t mentioned his name to the medium, and my cousin said she hadn’t mentioned any names to her either.
Using automatic writing to get the message, the medium announced that Mac wanted to talk to someone named Gloria. Well, that apparently floored my mother, my sister, and my cousin, since none of them had mentioned the name “Gloria” either. The medium advised my mother and sister to have me use automatic writing to “contact Mac.”
My Grandma had told me about automatic writing, but I had never tried it, and I wasn’t exactly eager to try it. Yet, my sister talked me into it. One sunny afternoon we sat in my bedroom, I with some paper and a pencil on a table. My sister told me to hold the pencil as lightly as I could, so I did. I barely kept it upright as she started asking questions.
Nothing for awhile. Then the pencil slowly started drawing circles. I remembered my grandma saying the circles showed a happy spirit. Well, we certainly didn’t want any unhappy angry spirits coming around. The circles got larger and larger and faster and faster, and the pencil did seem to be moving on its own power and will. With questions and answers, “yes” and “no” sort of things, it seemed to gain strength.
Then someone asked, “What is your name?”
The pencil made a very definite and strong movement. It stood straight up. I moved my fingers just barely away from it, and it wrote out the name “Mac” very fast and powerfully. Everyone present could see I wasn’t touching the pencil as it wrote the name. It frightened us all so much that we all laughed nervously, and the pencil quickly wrote, without my touching it, “Don’t laugh!” Then it drew a long emphatic line all the way across the paper with such force that it ripped the paper from beneath my hand. Frightened even more, we laughed even more.
And that was that. I didn’t want any more of automatic writing or this ghost who wanted to write. I loved my Grandpa Mac, but for some reason I wasn’t so sure the spirit we had attracted was him. I didn’t want to take a chance of dealing with an impostor and inviting something harmful into my life. So that was the last séance I ever attended.
I think anyone who wants to get into the séance thing should do so only with the guidance of a professional, for I suspect that séances can go very wrong if those present are inexperienced or have the wrong motivation. As for me, I’m just an amateur.