When my family moved from New Hampshire to New Mexico, we stopped for
a visit with my wife's family in Oklahoma. As soon as we got in the door,
my sister-in-law, Karyn, said, "Oh, good! Now Ben can show me how to
work a Ouija board."
I didn't like that idea and said, "No, I'm not allowed to do that."
But I didn't feel right about it.
When I went to the bathroom, a thought popped into my mind, Why? She
asked, but I did not want to open this subject here, because I did not
want my in-laws to know how crazy I was. The same thought came again: Why
shut them out?
Finally, I jacked up my courage and marched back into the living room. I
told Karyn I was not allowed to work a Ouija board with anyone because the
signal came through me so strong the other person would have no choice but
to think I was just pushing the planchette around the board. I told her
I had stopped using the Ouija board--and discovered automatic writing. She
wanted to see how that worked. So did the rest of the family. I did not
want to try it in a group, much less this group, but the same thought kept
repeating: Why shut them out?
They all gathered around: my wife, father-in-law, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law.
I told them I don't do séances, and tried to explain the difference
between prayer and mediumship, but it didn't seem to matter. With large
reservations about what I was doing, and desperately not wanting to make
a fool of myself in front of these people, I went ahead with it.
The first communications were from the spirit-friends I talk with fairly
often. Ila asked them about some deceased friends of hers, and I received
answers, but not direct contact with her friends. Then the handwriting changed,
becoming very small and cramped: Lawrence, I will not forget my solo
flight, Oct 28, 1957.
Lawrence and Ila looked at each other and then back at the writing. Lawrence
got up and left the room.
I asked, "Who is this?"
My hand wrote, My name is Will.
Ila said, "That's my father. I recognize his handwriting."
I had never met him. I said, "But I thought his name was John."
"John William, but the family called him Will, and some of his friends
called him Bill. Can you ask him something for me?"
"Ask him yourself. I think he can hear you."
"Should we tell Mother?"
Don't scare the wits out of the old gal.
Lawrence returned with his father-in-law's private pilot log book. Will's
first solo flight was in the 1940's. Then someone remembered that he died
in 1952. They all turned and looked at me.
I was embarrassed, aghast at this obvious error, and tried to take myself
out of the loop: "Well, whoever you are that wrote this, it looks like
you missed."
My hand wrote, Did not miss. Check date, and slowly re-traced the
year: 1951. Apparently, I had misread the last digit, as a 7 instead
of a 1, probably because I don't write the number one with a little sloping
line on top.
Lawrence flipped through the log book. It was the date of Will's last solo
flight, during which he had fulfilled a boyhood dream by flying over the
old family farm and looking down on it from the air. Ila remembered her
father had told her how he used to lean back against a haystack, look up
into the sky, and day-dream of "Being up there, looking down here"--long
before airplanes were invented.