The at first seemingly harmless “game” of Ouija board has grown to become one of the most well-recognized, spooky instruments of the paranormal there is. The subject of countless reports of the strange, as well as fictional TV shows and films, these relatively innocuous boards of cardboard and their plastic planchettes are purportedly much more than they seem to be, for they are said to be a powerful window between worlds, portals even, through which forces from beyond speak to us, communicate with us, and even reach out to grab at us. While Ouija boards are certainly spooky and have their share of creepy lore, there are some cases that go beyond merely the odd to propel themselves firmly into the realm of the sinister. It seems that in some cases, whatever mysterious entities and forces allegedly lie beyond the veil between our world and the next are not merely content with speaking with us, and are more interested in doing us harm, even inflicting death.
One of the earlier and most well-known so-called “Ouija board murders” began its life in the fall of 1929, when two Seneca Indian women from the Cattaraugus Reservation in western New York state, near Buffalo, in the United States, sat down for a rather spooky session with a Ouija board. One was a 66-year-old traditional tribal healer and herbalist named Nancy Bowen, and the other was 36-year-old reservation schoolteacher Lila Jimerson, both of whom were very curious as to what lied behind the mysterious death of Bowen’s husband, another tribal healer named Sassafras Charlie, who had died recently under strange circumstances. During the session they would later claim that the spirit of Bowen’s dead husband had actually made contact with them, and asserted that he had been murdered by a woman called Clothilde, and that the alleged spirit even went so far as to give a physical description of his killer and the address where she lived at a house on Riley Street in Buffalo.
The name was familiar to Jimerson, who said that she was the wife of a gifted sculptor from Paris named Henri Marchand, who lived on the reservation studying the culture of the Natives. Marchand was well-known for his incredibly detailed dioramas, which were life-like three-dimensional miniature scenes from nature or history crafted from various materials and wax figures that were arranged and encased in glass. Indeed, Marchand, who had studied in Europe under the famous master sculptor Rodin, was very well respected for his lush dioramas that depicting Iroquois life, which had been very popular at the New York State Museum in Albany, and he had been commissioned make more to to be displayed at the grand opening at Buffalo’s Science Museum in 1929. It was for the purpose of researching these dioramas that Marchand and his family, which consisted of his wife Clothilde, who was an accomplished painter herself, and his four children, had arrived at the reservation in the first place. Jimerson claimed to not only have known Marchand for nearly 10 years, but to have worked with him personally in the capacity of a model for his work.
In the days after this Ouija board seance Bowen began to receive mysterious letters from a person calling herself “Mrs. Dooley,” who elaborated more on the death of Sassafras Charlie and claimed to know secrets about what really had gone on. The series of letters spoke of witchcraft, hexes, black magic and murder, and suggested that Clothilde was in fact a witch, and that a dark curse had been leveled at both her husband and Nancy herself. One of the mysterious letters said:
I know something Secret. I decided that I’d better tell you and help you out. What I can. This is what I know Charlie Bowen is killed by a witch in this City of Buffalo. It was from a French woman…She killed Charlie because he have good medicine to sell in the city. Her witchcraft didn’t work so good so she decided to kill him…She kill many, many that way, Indians & white. But let me tell you more. She said she fixed another doll the same this doll is his wife Nancy.
By all accounts Bowen took these letters very seriously, and became convinced that not only was Clothilde responsible for the murder of her husband, but that the evil woman planned to come for her next. The idea that the Frenchwoman was a witch was further engraved into her mind by the fact that Clothilde was well known to collect mushrooms in the forest, which was a common practice in Europe but strange and alien to the Natives, with Bowen referring to them as “strange hellish vegetables.” Partly out of a revenge-fueled rage and partly out of fear of what would happen if nothing was done to stop the witch’s evil, Bowen then went out and purchased a hammer and a batch of chloroform before setting off to where the “witch” lived with the express desire of extinguishing her life and putting an end to her sinister curse. When the oblivious Clothilde went to answer the doorbell on March 7, 1930, she was met with the sight of an elderly Native woman she did not know, who pointed to her violently and proclaimed her to be a witch. Bowen then brutally killed Clothilde with the hammer and shoved a chloroform soaked rag down the dead Frenchwoman’s throat just to be sure.
The body was found by Clothilde’s horrified 12-year-old son, Henri Marchand, Jr., when he returned home from school, and he immediately ran to the nearby Buffalo Museum of Science to inform his father of what had happened. When authorities arrived to investigate they were able to ascertain that two Native women had been hanging around the area before the attack, one older one and a younger one, perhaps casing the house and assessing the situation. They also soon learned of Henri Marchand’s connection with Lila Jimerson, and it came out that the two had been having an affair, which Marchand at first denied but was proven by a cache of lover letters that was discovered. When Jimerson was brought in as a suspect, she told police of Bowen’s involvement and Bowen was arrested as well, when it was found that she had the rather damning evidence of bloodied strips of clothing and earpieces of glasses that she had kept from the dead Clothilde. Additional questioning showed that on the day of the killing Jimerson had called Marchand and asked him to take her for a ride in his car, during which time it was assumed that Bowen had gone about her dark deed.
The story of the “Ouija Board Murder” became a media sensation, with the news referring to the two women as “untamed squaws,” and to Bowen as “the hex woman.” The media went through great efforts to really play up the back magic angle and talk of witches, as well as to emphasize the involvement of “Indians.” Indeed the news seemed to be laced with ethnic slurs and racism, almost an attack against the Iroquois people themselves as much as it was on the women involved. Authorities practically invaded the reservation looking for evidence, during which time they performed illegal, indiscriminate searches of people’s homes and showed very little respect for the Natives living there.
During the resulting trial Bowen claimed that she had been compelled by supernatural forces from the Ouija board to kill the Frenchwoman, and she said had at first tried to use hexes and black magic to bring her down. When the black magic failed, Bowen had taken it upon herself to finish the “white witch” off for good with the hammer and chloroform. The trial also saw Marchand come clean about his affair, and indeed he said he had had many lovers amongst the Native women, which he arrogantly described as being a “professional necessity” for his work as a diorama modeler. He also claimed that his wife had been fully aware of his dalliances, but had consented to them. Jimerson’s lawyer attempted to present her as a victim of jealousy and rage, painting her involvement as a crime of passion. As for Bowen, she was seen as being merely a pawn in Jimerson’s game and was claimed to have been too caught up in “Iroquois witchcraft,” even having used traditional weapons reserved for evil spirits in the attack, to have been fully aware of the gravity of her actions.
It all culminated in being deemed a mistrial when Jimerson, who was now being known in the media as “Red Lilac of the Cayugas,” suffered a respiratory condition related to tuberculosis and collapsed in the courtroom. Although she confessed to second degree murder while in the hospital, she later recanted this plea. The second trial commenced about a year later, in March of 1931. During this second trial, Jimerson’s defense claimed that she had not been responsible in any way for the murder and had not compelled Bowen to carry it out. It was claimed that Marchand had been imploring several Native women to kill his wife because he was “tired of her.” Meanwhile, Marchand had unbelievably moved off to Albany to remarry, this time with his 18-year-old niece. In the end, Jimerson was acquitted, Marchand was not charged or prosecuted with any crime, and Bowen was found guilty of manslaughter but given a sentence of time served.
It is unclear just what forces may or may not have been working through the Ouija board to influence the murder of Clothilde, but it is certainly not the only time such dark orders to kill have allegedly emanated from one. On November 8, 1933, Dorothea Irene Turley and her 15-year-old daughter Mattie sat down to have a session on a Ouija board at their home in Prescott, Arizona. Dorothea was reportedly a regular user of and firm believer in the power of the Ouija board, having consulted it for a wide range of purposes ranging from financial advice to the location of a secret stash of buried gold. During this session, at some point the planchette hovered about the board to clearly spell out instructions for Mattie to kill her father when he was finished milking the cows. Dorothea apparently was all for this, and even encouraged her daughter to do it, claiming that “the board could not be denied,” and the board even assured them that no one would find out about the crime. The two even allegedly went as far as to contact the murderous spirit with cards to confirm the command.
When her father, Ernest Turley, came in from milking the cows, Mattie obediently took a shotgun and blasted her father two times in the back as he went about some other chores. Although he would hang onto life at first, Turley would die two weeks later at the hospital. The mother and daughter were soon after arrested for the barbarous crime, and for her part Mattie claimed that it had all been an accident. She told police that she had been walking about 30 feet behind her father when she had tripped and the gun had accidentally gone off. Authorities were not convinced, in no small part because the father had been shot twice in the same spot, from close range, and from an angle that made the girl’s claims doubtful at best. Mattie finally buckled and confessed that the board had ordered her to kill and that she could not resist its dark power. Dorothea Tuley was also arrested, and it came out that she had perhaps wanted her husband dead in order to run off with another man. In the end, Mattie Turley was sentenced to a state reformatory school for attempted murder, receiving parole three years later. Dorothea Turley was convicted of assault with intent to commit murder, for which she got a 15-years to life sentence, but this sentence was overturned in 1936 by the Arizona Supreme Court and she was freed.
Another bizarre case occurred in 1987, ending in the murder of a Vietnamese immigrant, 25-year-old Ngoc Van Dang. It starts with a groups of friends in Florida bound in their beliefs in Satanism and a fascination with the occult; 25-year-old Anthony Hall, his girlfriend 16-year-old Bunny Dixon, 24-year-old Daniel Bowen, and 18-year-old Elizabeth Towne. Although the group were involved in regularly casting Satanist spells and carrying out rituals, it was Dixon who was most involved with using a Ouija board to contact demons and other evil spirits. She claimed to her friends that one such spirit was that of a 10-year-old boy who called himself David, and who had instructed her through the Ouija board to go on a road trip, as well as to sacrifice a motorist along the way for funds.
This story was apparently good enough for everyone involved, because they set out to prowl a street in Orlando before a planned journey to Virginia, where they had been commanded by the spirit to join a carnival. The two women, Towne and Dixon, walked along the road pretending to be hitchhikers to lure victims into their insidious plan, and one unfortunate soul who decided to help them was Ngoc Van Dang. When Dang pulled over, the two men Hall and Bowen jumped out of hiding to rob the frightened man of $120 at gunpoint and then bound him and shoved him into the car trunk to drive him to a secluded area north of Daytona Beach. When they arrived, Dixon allegedly carved an inverted cross into Dang’s chest with a knife in order to mark him as a sacrifice, after which Hall and Bowen shot the man a total of 7 times in the head, neck, and torso, killing him. They then stuffed the body back into the trunk and dumped it in a secluded wooded area off of Interstate 95.
Bowen and Towne would shortly after perhaps feel a sense of regret in what they had been part of, as they contacted authorities and admitted that they had witnessed a grisly murder. All 4 were arrested and Dixon would deny being the one who had cut Dang’s chest. Bowen stated that Hall and Dixon had carried out the shooting, denying any involvement. Hall, who was suspected of being the one who actually was responsible for shooting Dang, claimed that Bowen had held him at gunpoint and forced him to shoot, and that he had only taken place in the whole scheme at all because he had been under the influence of a dark, Satanic spell woven by Dixon and her Ouija board spirit. This, perhaps not surprisingly, did little to convince authorities or the jury, and the group was convicted of crimes including kidnapping, robbery, burglary, and murder, which earned Hall a death sentence, Bowen life in prison, Dixon 50 years, and a 17-year sentence for Towne.
Satanism played a role in another Ouija board mandated murder in London, England, in 1995, when two young men, 19-year-old David McCallum and 16-year-old Pierre Antoine participated in a gruesome killing they claimed to have been forced to act out by evil forces. The two men had long dabbled in black magic and Satanism, having constructed a demonic shrine in a room in McCallum’s south London apartment decorated with images of Satan and torture, heavy metal posters dripping with demonic imagery, the numbers 666 scrawled everywhere, various books on serial killer Charles Manson, and complete with a candle-lit altar to Satan and a Ouija board. On December 2, 1995, McCallum and Antoine invited two neighbors, Michael Earridge and Stephen Curran, both 15, to the flat to have a session on the Ouija board amongst the arcane imagery of the shrine.
At one point the board spelled out the word “KILL,” and that was when a spooked Earridge decided he’d had enough and got up to leave and go home. As he was about to exit the flat, Antoine then allegedly forcefully stopped him from going and after an altercation struck the younger boy in the head. That was when McCallum suddenly produced an 11-inch long hunting knife and proceeded to viciously stab Earridge 11 times in the head, neck, and chest while the shocked and terrified Curran looked on in horror. Curran was then forced to put his fingerprints on the knife and released on the condition that he not tell anyone, lest he be implicated in the killing. The body was wrapped in bedding and then unceremoniously stashed between the 7th and 8th floors of the apartment building.
It did not take long before Curran came forth to tell McCallum’s father about what had happened, and authorities quickly rushed to the apartment to find a smiling McCallum who immediately confessed to the killing. Under questioning McCallum stated that he had made animal sacrifices to demons before, but that this was the first time he had killed a human. He also claimed that he had been forced by the demons from the Ouija board to carry out the slaying and therefore had no control over what he had done, which he attributed to what he called the “demon madness.” McCallum himself would say of the strange, bloody incident:
All of a sudden, I started attacking him. A voice in my head said, `Kill him’. The ouija board told me to buy the knife and the Demon Madness told me to kill him. The glass spelled out the words KILL.
Due to this belief that it was not in fact him who had committed the murder and that he had been influenced by demonic powers, McCallum would only plead to a lesser manslaughter charge, denying that it had been a straight murder. During his trial it also came to light that McCallum and Antoine had drunk several bottles of wine before the murder, although how much this had to do with the killing could not be ascertained. A psychiatrist testified that he believed McCallum to be mentally disturbed, suffering from severe schizophrenia, and that he could not be held fully responsible for his actions. While not as sensational as being in thrall to Satan, it was partly for this reason that he was found to indeed have diminished responsibility, and he managed to avoid prison time, instead being sentenced to life at Broadmoor Mental Hospital.
A more recent case of a Ouija board ordering someone to kill come to us from 2001, when on the night of February 11, 53-year-old Carol Sue Elvaker was using a Ouija board with her daughter, Tammy Roach, along with her two granddaughters, aged 15 and 11, at their home in their home in Minco, Oklahoma, in the United States. Elvaker apparently then received a message from the board that Tammy’s husband, 34-year-old former mayor of Minco Brian Roach, was corrupted by evil and had to die. The order was so demandingly compelling that the woman fetched a knife and went to another room where Brian was sleeping to stab him once in the chest, after which he bled to death, all the while futilely calling out for help while the others let him die.
Roach’s death was apparently not enough to satisfy Evaker’s bloodlust, as she then apparently turned the knife on her own 10-year-old granddaughter, frantically trying to kill the girl before Tammy Roach managed to stop her and get the knife away. All of them then apparently got into the car and drove off in a rush, with Tammy wanting to help her mother to escape her crime and Evaker behind the wheel, who promptly tried to kill them all by intentionally plowing the vehicle into a sign post. When that didn’t work, Evaker, who had suffered two broken ankles in the crash, tried to shove her 15-year-old granddaughter into oncoming traffic. When this also failed, the injured Evaker hobbled off into the woods nearby, stripping down naked as she did so.
This was the bizarre scene that the no doubt baffled law enforcement officers arrived at, and they quickly found the murderer hiding in the woods. Evaker would eventually be charged with first-degree murder in the death of her son-in-law, sentenced to time at a psychiatric hospital, and Tammy Roach was convicted of being an accessory to murder, although this charge was later dropped. In the aftermath of the whole odd and bloody affair, authorities would find that Evaker had had no history of mental illness or strange behavior, and it was also found that there had been no sign of drugs or alcohol in Evaker’s system at the time, nor could any history of substance abuse be turned up at all. Additionally there had never been any sign of domestic problems in the household and they all seemed to be a perfectly functional, happy family. Was a mysterious command from a Ouija board enough to send this normally peaceful grandmother on a deadly rampage? Grady County assistant district attorney Brett Burns would later say: “It’s amazing how the grandmother was able to let this Ouija board consume her life.”
Even more recent still is a case from Christmas Eve of 2014. On this night a Paul Caroll, of Consett, County Durham, of the United Kingdom, was spending a perhaps rather nontraditional Christmas Eve evening of playing with a Ouija board trying to contact the spirits of the dead. It was then that he claimed an evil spirit emerged from the board to physically possess the family dog, Molly. Truly believing that the dog was now inhabited by wicked demonic forces, Caroll did the only thing he thought he could do; kill and dismember it and then dump the chopped-up carcass in a drain behind a pub. Caroll was charged with animal cruelty after the dead dog was discovered blocking the drain. As weird as this already is, it is only the beginning of the tale.
Just a few weeks later, in January of 2015, Caroll’s wife, 60-year-old Margaret, and stepdaughter, 37-year-old Katrina, used the very same Ouija board to try and make contact with their beloved murdered pet Molly, something they had attempted on numerous occasions, only instead of the expected communication with the dog’s spirit they were told by some unidentified entity that they were going to die. The very next day the mother and daughter took a cocktail of prescription drugs and then inexplicably set their house on fire. While the home was completely gutted by the blaze, Margaret and Katrina were found hiding in the backyard and were treated for injuries, as well as charged with arson. When questioned the mother claimed that the fire was caused by powerful spirits that had come forth from the Ouija board.
Are these cases of people who have simply lost their minds? Are these the grim actions of those haunted more by inner demons than anything that lies out there beyond? Do Ouija boards actually have some power to channel these hateful forces into our world and compl us to do horrific things beyond what we could have ever been capable otherwise, or is is this the result of the machinations of our own evil that lies deep down within us? Whatever one believes, as long as there are Ouija boards and the belief that they serve as conduits to some other mysterious realm through which spirits can talk or even bend us to their will, there will likely be such morbid cases that involve them. Are these simple boards just what they appear to be or something more? It all certainly gives one pause when sitting down to a Ouija board, and creepy no matter what one believes.
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