Chapter One

The Ouija Board

It came in an old nondescript box addressed to me.

A fan had sent it.

With a simple, "Here," a studio technician handed me the box just before I went on the air.

I had no idea what it was. Maybe it was a gift given in good conscience. Maybe someone sent it to me on a dare. I'll never know for sure. Whatever the sender's intention, the weathered and worn Ouija board inside the box ultimately took me to the very edge of reality, from which point I looked over the brink into an unfathomable black pool of chaos.

Why is it that such an innocuous piece of cardboard with its triangular-shaped planchette holds the threat of becoming a force for evil? This was not a question that came to mind that late-night in the KTRS studios in St. Louis as I was hosting Coast to Coast AM back in 2002, filling in for the legendary Art Bell.

I was taking calls, as usual, from listeners who had experienced their own encounters with the paranormal: ghosts of loved ones, voices offering help or consolation from the other side, cats or dogs whose behavior mysteriously foretold of danger, shadow people you could see just out of the corner of your eye, Big Foot, the giant bird, Mothman, UFOs of all shapes and sizes, and flying triangles. People were calling on open lines about abductions and other traumatic events that had shaped their lives. And then I told my audience about the Ouija board in the antique box. Should I use it on the air, I asked the listeners?

Calls came pouring in, jamming the switchboard, the first-time caller line, and all the wildcard lines: "Do it!"

I slid the Ouija board out of its box.

Now, for anyone who has never seen the inside of a modern radio broadcast studio, the sight of so many switches, dials, flashing indicator lights, and phone hookups, all set around a table festooned with standing and hanging microphones and computer monitors for reading e-mail can be intimidating. On those very few occasions when I have hosted in-studio guests, I always tried to let them get acclimated to the array of equipment well before we went on the air so that there'd be no dead time between questions and answers in an interview because the overwhelming presence of technology had distracted a guest's attention.

This amount of technology is comforting to me, because I know I'm hardwired into the rest of the universe. However, for every diode, switch, and electronic circuit there are probably a hundred things that will cause them to fail. That's why you have redundant and back-up systems and why you have a studio engineer as well as a producer backing you up and reading the dials to make sure the system's working the way it's supposed to. It's complicated, but it's only electronics. It's science.

For every equipment failure, there's a physical reason. And for every failure there's a fix. That's what you learn on the job. That's what your engineer signals to you when a piece of equipment goes dead and you stare blankly through a glass window at the producer. That's what you have to rely on when nothing is coming through your earphones.

On this particular night in St. Louis, amid the mass of electronics and blinking lights arrayed all around me like a nice warm security envelope, I unfolded the Ouija board and set it on the studio desk. I felt a hesitation. Should I or shouldn't I? The listener calls kept flooding in. Voices in my earphones were egging me on in front of a ten-million-person audience stretched almost 5,000 miles diagonally across the entire continent from Halifax in Canada to National City, California, on the Mexican border.

"Hi, George, this is Josh from Watertown. Ask it a question."

But I remembered The Exorcist, as well as countless other movies, when the person about to become the innocent victim finds that the pointer is out of his or her control and the demonic voice speaks through that person's fingertips. Sure I hesitated. Who wouldn't?

My audience was insistent.

"I have a question, George."

"Can it talk to the dead?"

A truck driver phoned in from somewhere along an interstate outside of Lawrence, Kansas. He, too, had a question begging for an answer.

I took the planchette out of the box.

Okay, I thought, maybe just once. I told the audience what I was doing, placing my fingertips lightly on the planchette so as to let whatever force was present guide the reader across the letters laid out along the board. Ask a yes or no question, the planchette will direct you. Ask for a name or a word, and the planchette will spell it out. Remember every B horror film you've ever seen where the camera does a close focus on a pair of hands being guided by something out of their control, and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.

"Okay," I said to the audience. "I'm ready. Call in with a question and let's see what this baby can do. The numbers again are . . ."

Darkness, sudden and terrifying. Not even the diodes were blinking.

Before my eyes could adjust, the lights came on again. The back-up generators had kicked in and the studio came alive.

"What was that?" I heard one of the engineers say through my earphones.

"You're supposed to know," another voice said. Maybe it was my in-studio producer, Howard Morton. "Are we on generators?"

There was a lot of background chatter as I stared down at the planchette on the Ouija board. It was pointing to "No."

"Hey, George, I got a question," a caller's voice crackled through the earphones. He was on a cell phone, I could tell.

"Go ahead," I said. But just then my earphones went dead.

I signaled to my producer on the other side of the thick glass window that separated the control room from the broadcast booth, "Are we on?"

He gave me a thumbs-up back, but I still couldn't hear anything coming out of the earphones. I pointed to my ear and gave him the cut sign across my neck. Audio was dead to me. I could see him check his board and shake his head. Then the sound came back.

"So what do you think, George? Can you ask it?" The caller's voice said.

"Hey, my friend, you broke up out there," I said, hoping that it was his phone and not our audio. "Run that by me again?"

I looked down. The planchette was still sitting on "No," only this time it seemed as if it had moved a little. My hands were resting on it, but I felt nothing.

My caller began speaking when, as suddenly as the lights had gone out moments earlier, all the dials on the panels in front of me dropped to zero as if somebody had pulled the plug. I still had sound in my earphones, but none of the instruments were registering. And, again, I shot a what's up look to my producer, who only shrugged and then gave me a thumbs-up.

"We're having some difficulty here with the line," I said to my caller, who, by now, was getting impatient. "So I thank you for dialing in." And I cut off the call.

"Why?" I could lipread my producer through the glass.

I shrugged again. I didn't know. It was as if some poltergeist were playing tricks with the equipment. But I went back to the Ouija board as another call came in with a question, this one really spooky, about, "Who was the spirit attending to the board?"

"What do you mean?" I asked the caller.

"The boards have spirits sometimes," the caller said, assuring the audience that she had used Ouija boards many times and had communicated with spirits speaking through them and guiding the planchette over the letters. "You can ask it a question and it will identify itself."

My producer's attention was riveted on the caller as she explained that I had to concentrate my full attention on the board and ask the board to spell out the name of the spirit.

As I began to focus, the entire studio went black again and, this time, even the computers lost power. I could hear a multitude of voices in my earphones, lots of yelling, and the frantic sounds of engineers shouting to technicians. Then the auxiliary generators kicked in, the lights came up, dimmed, and then went out again. The studio was dead.

Next thing I knew, amid the darkness that seemed blacker than a moonless night, the door from the control room burst open with a crash and in flew Howard Morton, my producer.

"Give me that damn thing," he said, without even telling me what he meant. But I sensed it anyway.

He took the Ouija board out of my hands, stuffed it back in the box, threw the planchette in after it, and folded the flaps closed.

"Now I'm getting this thing out of here."

And he tossed it through the control room door to another technician.

The lights came up. I could hear the hum of the generators' winding motors, and suddenly the dials on the panels in front of me shot up to their nominal levels. Diodes and LEDs began to flicker, and I heard the soft sound of the computer hard drive heads engage. We were back.

"You know what, caller from Texas," I said into the mike. "We just got rid of the Ouija board. It was the darndest thing you ever saw."

"I copy that," the caller said. "I was gonna warn you about it but you beat me to it." And with a click the caller was gone into the vast great link of people who comprise the Coast to Coast audience, invisible except for their presence over the phone.

The rest of the show, all three and a half hours of it, proceeded as if nothing had happened. It was normal—if you can call my shows normal—as any other night with callers talking about ghosts, aliens, creatures like Big Foot, and other paranormal encounters. Truckers phoned in from the road about mystery truck stops that served home-cooked meals at 1950s prices with real homemade mashed red-skin potatoes and then couldn't be found again on that same stretch of highway when the truckers went back to look for them. And other people talked about angels. My guest that night talked about the ancient pyramids and the theories of the Sphinx, and my producer performed as he did on every other night. And at four in the morning when we signed off, he handed me the Ouija board in its box and told me, in very specific terms, to keep it out of our studio. He never wanted to see the thing again. And I told him that's exactly what I would do.

It was close to five in the morning by the time I got back to the house, and even though it was still dark in St. Louis, I could hear the first trills of birds in the trees near the house. Early traffic—food trucks, and newspaper delivery vans—was already on the street. But for me it was time to go to bed.

Doing a late-night talk show is just like working a night shift. You're going to bed as the world is waking up. And St. Louis, like Detroit, Chicago, and other industrial cities, is a town of early risers. So, if you have to catch your requisite sleep to be sharp for the next night's show, you have to learn to sleep through the noise of trucks backing up outside your house, car horns blaring because someone was too slow to jump through a light that's just changed to green, and the crack-of-dawn trash pickup that clatters garbage can lids across the pavement.

This was a skill, sleeping through a cacophony of morning noise, that I had honed over the years as the St. Louis "Nighthawk." But this morning, with the Ouija board still on the backseat of my car, every little sound got me up. I turned over, pulled the covers up over my ears, told myself to go back to sleep. But at the next sound I was up again, noticing through the window that the sun was edging up to its 9 a.m. position. This was going to be more frustrating than it was worth. So I got up, cleaned up, and headed down to the KTRS studio. They had the best tea in town, anyway.

I had a disquieting feeling that I couldn't shake off, a feeling that I had peeked over the edge of normal reality into another world. I had a sense that there were things out there, bad things, that were bouncing against the closed door of our reality, looking for a way to slip through a crack. It was the Ouija board, I was sure of it, that had become a crack. Had I let something in last night? Had the individual who sent me the board in the old box tempted me with a Trojan Horse to bring something potentially lethal into this world? And had something escaped, which was now linked to me?

Then my rational voice took over. Ouija boards had been around for over a century. And this one was just a piece of cardboard. Look at the box. It had a manufacturer's trademark on it. It was printed somewhere in Illinois, not in Styx or in Hades. It was a Ouija board, nothing more. But it brought back memories of other times I'd looked over the edge of the world into an abyss of mystery, like the time I first realized there was another reality.

I was eleven or twelve when it happened.

I think I must have had a fever at the time. But all I remember is that I felt very tired and was on the verge of sleep. I felt my body vibrate strangely and I couldn't move any of my muscles. Then when I opened my eyes, I was on the ceiling looking down at myself.

I had no feeling of levitation. No sense that I was moving. No sense of the passage of time. One second I was lying in my own bed, I felt a shaking, and the next second I was looking down. There I was, in two places at once. I was on the ceiling and there I was on the bed, a little kid with a face like the comedian Buddy Hackett.

"This must be a dream," I told myself as I saw myself on the bed below. But it felt like no dream I'd ever had. And even now, remembering it, I cannot call it a dream.

But human beings do not normally float in air except in dreams. So when the realization struck that I was actually outside my body looking down, in an instant, I found myself back down in my own body and was looking up at the ceiling again. There was no sense of movement and no feeling that I had awakened from sleep. I was one place, then I was in another. Life had returned to normal, or so it seemed.

It would have been easy to have written this off as a dream or a kind of hallucinatory state between waking and dreaming brought on by either a fever or just plain fatigue. And for a few seconds after I realized what had happened, that's just what I tried to do: deny it had happened. Call it a dream and pack it up. But I couldn't shelve it that easily, and it has stayed in my memory ever since just like a warning light, telling me that there was something beyond the four walls, an existence outside of one's own body, a piece of personal evidence that human beings can float in the air, can fly, can look down at their own three-dimensional bodies and acknowledge that there is another state of being.

At that moment I was not bound by the limitations of gravity because I was on the ceiling looking down. I was not bound by the physical limitations of my own body because I was outside of it, looking at it. I was not even bound by the limitations of time because I seemed to be outside of it as well. It was only when I was aware that I was looking down that I floated back into my body. Maybe those old Road Runner cartoons had it right when Wiley Coyote runs over the cliff, stays poised mid air, then looks down and plummets to earth. This ultimately became a life-changing experience for me, an introduction to a reality in which what was supposed to be was not.

I do believe that it was my momentary out-of-body experience that launched me on the quest to find out about the other reality that I had experienced. And, the lure of the other reality was so tantalizing that decades later, when I was on the radio, I decided to try an experiment, one with the dark side that taught me a lesson I almost forgot when I opened the Ouija board box.

This exercise in the transmission of negative personal energy, what I call the "dark side," took place in St. Louis about a year and a half before I received the Ouija board from a fan. I can't say for sure what made me play games with forces far more powerful than I, but even though my intentions at first were noble, it turned into wanting something so badly that I was willing to gamble with my own health to get it. It was honor, I thought at first, which then became love for a very beautiful woman. But in the end it was really an infatuation that suckered me in. We're all human, you know.

The escapade began simply enough with a desire to protect a young woman from a group of lounge lizard vultures, all of whom were behaving very badly. But as I became more deeply involved, I became possessive. I became so attracted to this woman that my emotions turned me around until my means became my ends. And when I finally achieved what I was after, it brought me no pleasure, only an empty feeling of triumph that quickly faded.

It all started one night at a party when I first spotted a gorgeous woman surrounded by a bunch of guys. She was petite, blond, and very young. She was as bright as a candle in a darkened room, and around her like so many birds of prey were the typical guys that populate the outer fringes of the entertainment industry. I recognized some of them: ad guys, promo guys, a couple of nerdy types, and a few rock band hangers-on: people around the periphery of top-40 radio. They hung on her like a blanket. But this young woman was poised. She ate up the attention she was getting. And yet I thought she needed my protection because she couldn't possibly know what these guys wanted. At least that's what I believed. So I was St. George, these were the dragons, and she was the damsel in distress.

I moved in on the cluster of guys, chatted her up, and then became part of the queue of men around her. And as I stood there, volleying with the conversation and fending off other guys getting their two cents in. I became just one of the group. Couldn't she see that these were guys after only one thing and I was protecting her from them? My intentions were honorable. Theirs weren't.

I felt territorial at first, natural male hormones at work. Then I got possessive. I was her knight in shining armor. Then I got angry that the guys around her didn't back off. It wasn't a hot anger and my blood didn't boil. Worse, it was a cold anger, cold and calculating and revenge-seeking. And it was self-serving, too. I got her name that night and, of course, knew who the other guys were who were trying to score a few points with her. And then I settled in to figure out what to do about them. Maybe put a white circle like a halo around her so that she would be enveloped in my protection. But my emotions took over.

The idea I came up with, in good faith at first, but calculating and possessive at the end because I'd given in to anger, wasn't very smart. But it was very effective. And it's not something anyone should do on his or her own because—and I say this from firsthand experience—it is sure to backfire. I located myself in a darkened room where I settled into a thick-cushioned easy chair with a high back and nice padded arms. I closed my eyes and focused on each of the men I wanted out of my way. I repeated each one's name to myself as I saw his face in my mind. And then, with all of the power I could muster from the depths of my psyche, I sent out the most evil thoughts I could imagine, specifically aimed at the individual. And this was not just a one-time exercise. I repeated it each night, deliberately and with the full understanding of what I was doing.

I willed evil to befall each individual. I conjured up each face as I closed my eyes and sent the most negative thoughts I could directly to the person represented by his face. I'm not proud of this.

I told myself at the time it was only an experiment, an answer to a question: If I sent negative thoughts out, would I achieve my aim? Then this became a nightly ritual, and soon the results began to pay off. Some of the men lost their jobs, others incurred severe financial reverses, and still others began to suffer medical problems. And the more I heard stories of the success of my negative energy, the more it fed on itself. One of the individuals got himself into a bizarre traffic accident. Still another began to have back pain so severe that it laid him up for over a month without any doctor being able to treat it because the reason for the pain was undiscoverable.

And as for the young woman, I sent out thoughts to influence her as well, isolating her from friends and family in the hopes that she would turn to me. In part, what I tried to do was based on a story I heard from another sailor who told it to me when I was in the Navy years and years earlier. This sailor, on a night we were swapping stories, told of a friend of his in college whom I'll call "Doom" and who practiced dark rituals in his dormitory room. It was the kind of story I would have had on Coast.

Doom was a sad but foreboding character, not the kind of guy who could walk up to a girl and ask her out. He was so introverted that it was almost impossible to pry him out of his shell. He simply walked along the halls, made his way to class, head hung low, eyes on the ground, and interacted with no one. But that didn't mean he didn't have feelings, deep urges about the girls in his classes to whom he was too shy to speak. Every so often, this sailor told me, he would see Doom pick up his head and eyeball a real cutie as she floated by him. If she were animatedly talking amid a flotilla of boys, a look of evil would cross Doom's face. But on the surface he would do nothing. And woe to the girl who befriended him or innocently flirted with him. And that's the point of this story.

There was one young woman in a history class with Doom and my friend from the Navy who, because she was very outgoing and spoke to everyone, thought nothing of engaging Doom in conversations now and then. She was a popular girl, who dated lots of guys and was very visible on campus. And she was very pleasant to look at, my friend told me. Doom, he said, confided to him that he had a plan to win her affections, but it was not something he would talk about. And shortly thereafter, this young woman began showing up in class with bruises, black-and-blue marks, and, one day, a burn on her arm. Over the course of the next few weeks, she seemed less animated, more subdued, and even had a brooding demeanor about her. Her smile had vanished and she was no longer the outgoing creature who had been the center of attention at the beginning of the semester, as if she had been wearing a halo of gold. By Thanksgiving she looked as bleak as the winter landscape in central Ohio where my friend had gone to school.

She was seen once at a party with Doom, very unhappy and withdrawn, and not at all like the person she once had been. Doom, on the other hand, appeared happy, triumphant even, as if he were proud of some accomplishment. But they were only seen together one time, and soon the young woman had disappeared completely. My friend found out months later that she had left school, gone home to her parents, after having had a serious accident in a gymnastics class. In a very simple exercise on the low horse, an exercise she had performed countless times, it was as if she had lost concentration, fell, and broke her leg. Months later, in a moment of rare disclosure, my friend said, Doom told him that she had been his conquest, the object of his focus. He had performed incantations, Doom said, nightly rituals in which he broke her confidence by visualizing her having accidents and becoming demoralized. And when he perceived that his magic was working, he befriended her, asked her out, and took her to at least one campus party. When she had tried to break away because Doom was freaking her out, he turned up the wattage on the mental energy he was projecting and, he bragged, forced her to have an accident. That was the story my friend told me when we were in the Navy.

I believe it was this story that played through my mind as I focused my mental energy on the young woman whose affections I wanted to win. And for a time it worked. None of the men I perceived as competitors came around anymore. Most of them had faced such serious reverses in work or in finances that they were unable to compete. Others had simply disappeared. I was alone with her in a circle of ruin that I had created around her. The negative thoughts I had projected to destroy the competition and demoralize the young woman had worked. But now it was time for me to experience what I had done.

It had begun with a simple accident, spilling tea water from the pot onto my hand instead of into the cup. But it started a chain reaction of calamities that morning from spilling the coffee onto my clothing, all over the kitchen counter; to short-circuiting the pot in the sink when I forgot to unplug it; to winding up blowing a breaker and crashing a computer that was connected to the same line; to realizing I was late for an appointment because I had spent too much time cleaning up the mess; and for just missing a collision when I ran a stop sign because I wasn't paying attention to my driving. It was an expensive ticket.

These kinds of falling domino mornings don't just happen. There is no coincidence in the universe, only unseen causality. I know that now and should have known it then. But I was putting it all aside because I was enjoying the company of this woman. I was her guardian, I told myself, protecting her from a world of predators and feeling my oats. But I had fallen victim to my illusions and wasn't putting two and two together.

My morning calamities soon became regular occurrences, accidents on top of accidents. They were just nuisances at first: spilled drinks, broken glasses, a rotisserie chicken or two that somehow managed to walk off the kitchen counter and onto the floor. But soon I developed a backache that wouldn't go away. Aspirin didn't help. Sit-ups, which normally help because they work out sore muscles, didn't help either. It wasn't a debilitating pain, but it was persistent and annoying and forced me to think about the pain whenever I moved. Bed rest and therapy helped it and told me there was nothing medically wrong with me, but it caught my attention.

Then I caught a cold, or so I thought, that wouldn't go away. Aspirin, cold medicine, lots of fluids, more bed rest, and the largest bowls of chicken soup you ever saw didn't make it get better. A blood test told me there was no flu. There wasn't even supposed to be a cold. The doctor just shook his head with an "I dunno" expression and told me to go back to bed. I felt miserable.

The cold got better, but I suddenly became accident-prone, banging my head, my elbow, and my legs against things that seemed to leap out at me from wherever I went. I was extraspecially careful, but I still managed to get bruises one after the other. And that was the least of it. My mind, in those times between waking and sleep, was flooded with dark thoughts and anxieties. I was fearful about the smallest of concerns. Molehills, not even, became mountains as I became awash in dark visions of ominous futures and catastrophes too big to wear down to manageable sizes.

What was the source of this fear, these visions? Why was my mind a playing field for demons? Were these perceptions of reality or my own creations? And if creations, why was I indulging myself in these self-destructive thoughts? Yet, at the same time, I was persisting in sending negative thoughts toward the guys I believed stood between me and the young lady whose honor I was protecting. Stories came back to me about the catastrophes befalling them while I was struggling with the dark thoughts pinning me to my bed in the early morning when, in the midst of a self-created fantasy of my own future undoing, a reality crashed in like a brick falling in through a skylight. There was nothing in my feelings of defeat that was real. No demons were after me. No enemies were seeking my discomfiture. I was the one creating this reality. The dark thoughts were coming out of me. Could I be the source of all of this?

I examined my own behavior as if I were under my own microscope. I was the one sending out the dark thoughts to engulf others. Regardless of my motivations—honorable at the beginning, I told myself—my means had ultimately defeated my motivations. Embracing the dark in order to achieve the light, although it had seemed like a benevolent experiment at the time, had become completely malignant in its results, a lesson I saw at once in stark relief. And, I discovered, the simple act of sending waves of darkness to flood the minds and lives of others had a reverberating effect. They bounced back to flood your own life and mind. It was as if I were living the old Yiddish story of the Golem in which the protagonist invoked a monstrous creature to wreak vengeance on its enemies only to find that monster eventually turned its demonic wrath on the one who invoked it. My own Golem had turned its attentions on me.

What had I done?

What to do?

Out of the pit of my own misery, as William Ernest Henley wrote in "Invictus"—"Out of the night that covers me,/Black as the Pit from pole to pole"—I remembered something I was taught by my father one night when I was very, very young, looking into a darkened room. My dad simply struck a match and held it up. Whatever shadows lurked there within the darkness disappeared. He said, "One candle all by itself will dispel the darkness around you." He said, "The darkest night is defeated by the flicker of a single flame."

Light defeats darkness just as a solitary good deed will create an angel who will stand up for you at the end of days. I remembered this. So I wondered, would the dark thoughts I was sending to others and that were flooding back onto me evaporate if I bathed my objects in a white light? Just as I experimented with the dark side, would I be able to pull myself back out of this hole if I simply switched off the negativity and consciously and meticulously replaced every dark thought with a bright one? It's not as easy as it sounds because the dark thoughts had become a matter of habit, like a muscle you use over and over again. It would mean a kind of mental and spiritual retraining to bring unused muscles back into use. But because I was falling deeper and deeper into the pot of gloom and was experiencing so many real-world accidents, I was game for any amount of work. So I concentrated on the light just like I had concentrated on the darkness.

It was a process. I said to myself that if I engulfed the woman of my intentions and her admirers with a bubble of white, evanescent light, representative of my best thoughts, nothing would happen to anyone. I did exactly what I had done before, sat in a chair in a room with subdued light, closed my eyes, and focused. Soon, this evening ritual became a form of yoga. And soon things began to change.

I noticed that within the ensuing days, I was becoming less clumsy in the kitchen. I moved slower and with more deliberation and, as a result, there was less crashing into things. I felt better. My persistent cold seemed to dry up. And, most important, the terrors that plagued me in the early morning hours disappeared. Clearly, the reverberations from the black thoughts I was sending out had stopped and had been replaced with positive thoughts. If you had told me in advance that there was such a direct and simultaneous correlation between projecting dark thoughts and dark consequences that befall you I would not have believed you even though, I realize, I remembered the inscription that fourteenth-century English knights wore on their sashes, "Honi soit qui mal y pense," or, loosely translated, "Evil comes to him who thinks evil."

There will be many, many people who believe in the power of thought and prayer, but would love to have some physical reality to attach it to. I knew my dark thoughts were working, but I didn't know why. It wasn't like gravity or anything like that. Wouldn't it have been great to know that there was an actual physical event taking place as a result of all of my mental projections, something measurable and definable as if it were on a scientist's workbench, an objective correlative that you could latch onto, hold up, or even photograph? Now I know that there is just such a manifestation, and were I to have seen it years ago, it would have terminated my projections in less than a heartbeat.

What I did not know then, but know now, is that the experiments of Japanese researcher Dr. Masaru Emoto just about prove that projected thoughts have a real-world physical manifestation. Dr. Emoto developed a photographic technique to capture the crystallization of water just as the water freezes. To test out whether emotions and projected feelings have any effect on water, he focused his intention on a sample of water as it was crystallizing and then photographed the result. He discovered, and you can see the photographs themselves in his book The Hidden Messages in Water, that prayer and good focused thoughts result in perfectly symmetrical harmonious crystalline structures. Dark and hateful thoughts result in ugly, chaotic structures. It's as clear as the difference between black and white.

Why is this important? Think about this: our bodies are made of water. Water covers three-quarters of the planet. Water is the universal solvent and is an element in most everything in existence. In other words, water is everywhere and in everything including ourselves. Therefore, how our emotions affect water is how our emotions affect us. Thoughts, good and bad, have a physical presence in the universe, a materiality to them that can make us sick, make us well, make us feel at peace, and make us feel at war. Projecting hatred is not only a display of emotion, it has a physical effect and a bounce-back effect on the actual chemistry of your own body. It leaves an impression on the essential element of our own bodies. Thus prayer has an actual, measurable, physical shape. The more prayer there is in the world, the more harmony there is. The more hatred there is in the world, the more the physical nature of the elements themselves is disrupted. Read Dr. Emoto's book and see the photographs for yourself. It will certainly show why a hurricane coming ashore and heavy with rain can actually be affected by the combined prayers of millions of individuals who want to weaken it or divert it from populated areas.

Memories of my experiment with projecting dark thoughts percolated through my brain as I drove to the studio the morning after the Ouija board incident, a reminder of the near disaster that had occurred the night before. It was the second time I had gone to the very edge and looked over into the world of misery where those who allow themselves to be taken over will find themselves.

I pulled into my parking space at the studio. It was still very early for me, but there was activity all over the studio. FedEx and UPS trucks were all over the parking lot, at least two U.S. Mail trucks were unloading, and equipment was coming in and going out on dollies. I took the Ouija board box out of the car, tucked it under my arm, and brought it back into the studio. I half suspected that the whole place would go down as I crossed the threshold of the doorway, but no such thing happened.

I took the elevator up to the broadcast studios floor and went over to where John, our morning-man, was holding court at his phone bank, batting high-energy callers back into their cars as they challenged him on a whole range of social issues. John uses lots of humor, in a way that makes his callers laugh, and that's what's made him a popular morning host. He saw me outside the glass, pointed to his wristwatch, and pretended to faint from shock. I held up the Ouija board box and he waved me in. This was another experiment. I figured that if the bad stuff the other night was coming out of me, the board would have no effect on Gaglia.

"And guess who's here?" John said into his microphone. "It's George Noory, and he's brought me a present. A present for all of you, too."

He paused and took the box out of my hand.

"Hey George, you're up early, no UFOs last night?"

He laughed into the mike and opened the Ouija board box.

"Whoa, folks, you'll never guess what George Noory brought in. It's a Ouija board. Get your questions ready."

I waved my hand and moved toward the door.

"Looks like George is heading home, folks, so its just the thousands of us here in the studio this morning. Ask me anything, folks and my Ouija board will answer. Hi, caller, where are you from?"

I was walking down the hall when the lights went out. I just kept on walking, didn't even stop at the office, got into my car and drove out of the parking lot. The wooden gate was frozen in the open position. I was barely halfway down the road to our local breakfast mom and pop restaurant when my cell phone rang. It was a furious ring, too.

"You can take this back," Gaglia said without even announcing himself. "My producer took it right out of the studio."

"That's okay," I told him. "Just toss it in the dumpster." And I snapped the phone shut and contemplated a buttermilk pancake breakfast.

Copyright © 2006 by George Noory and William J. Birnes