In early
February of
1998, I was a few weeks in to second semester at
Berklee. There was a girl, a friend of mine who was hardcore
Wiccan. Depsite her ealier bad experiences with
Ouija, she produced something called the "
Psychic Circle" one night at a dorm boozefest.
If you have any
sense or experience, you know that any sort of
Ouija activity usually leads to bad things. What we had in our midst was the equivalent of "Advanced Ouija 202" MWF 2:00-2:50. It was more powerful because, while still adhering to your basic Ouija
principles (
planchette, letters, numbers, contact), it had an extremely developed symbol system dealing with everything from the
Zodiac to the
Seasons. This device (which I have no doubt you can pick up at your local Wicca shop) was geared specifically towards
magick and the
Earth Mother and Wicca.
Everytime my friend had been around Ouija she'd gotten certain spirits that were
obsessed with her, made stuff fly all over the place... the kind of
manifestations I had never seen or been party to before. I just knew that it
creeped me out.
To make the long part of the first part of the story short, we played with it and she ended up getting one of the baddies on the horn. It wasn't very nice and
cut out on us. It said some freaky things, and although no one got possessed and nothing
flew across the room, we decided it was time to pack the
supernatural in for the night and to order a
pizza. Dealing with the
netherworld makes a man hungry.
So we call from my phone line in my room, give
Domino's my phone number and go down to the
lobby to wait. It's eleven pm.
For those of you familiar with how college
dorm systems work, each phone on campus and espcecially in the rooms has a different
extension. Mine was 6812. All extensions were unique. Get that down, it'll be important later.
So we wait in the lobby of the
270 Comm Ave building. We wait and we wait. No one comes in the lobby, it's just me and my pals and Rocco the
security guard. At eleven fourty-five I decide I'm hungry and pissed, so I call and check my voicemail and see if the delivery guy has called to say he got lost trying to find the only dorm in the
Back Bay on Comm Ave. I have one
message, from extension 0000, left at eleven-thirty. It's about 17 seconds of just smoeone breathing and then
hanging up. I'm a little spooked so I let the other kids listen to it. They're pretty sure it's just one of our
detractors playing a trick on us.
It's right about this time that Dawn the
RD walks in. She's been doing her job a long time so I thought I'd ask her. 0000 is an odd extension.
"Hey Dawn, I got a question."
"Shoot."
"I think I just got a prank message left on my voicemail. I was wondering if you could tell me where extension 0000 is on
campus."
Without batting an eye or stopping her advance to her apartment, she says, "It's that lobby
phone right there."
"Uhm, but that can't be Dawn. No one has even come into the lobby, let alone use the phone since we got here. We came down at what, eleven? It's ... it's
eleven-fifty and that message was left at half past."
"Don't know what to tell you.
Good night."
We go back and
listen to the message again. This time we can listen past the breathing and hear that there are
voices speaking in the background of the message.
When we listened the
third time, we figured it out:
those voices in the
background were ours.