The darkness that built around us had no words just a feeling. It echoed a blank face that your mind fills in. This darkness was a feeling in which my own mind conjured an image. My mind would fill in those blanks and that corner of evil, waiting for me at 13, was instead a tall thin man bowed broken against the angled ceiling. His head hidden by a large top hat. His gangly arms falling to his sides. He drooped like a blade of grass heavy under the weight of rain. I learned to ignore the shadows. To advert my eyes and wait for the morning as he stared intent on my own body.

For the woman, standing just outside our circle of light, she was older. I believed in evil. I believed in an other side. I was terrified that she would reach out to me.

"Are you the woman who helped tie my shoes?"

The wooden triangle moved and the anxiety rose. We were no longer conversing with wayward spirits but a malevolent one. She stalked the outer rings of our circle. I could no longer ignore the woman who hovered just out of sight in the small ring of light. Unsatisfied with our reaction my friend closed the game. We left our trio crossing campus, our petrified bodies warming in the heat of the dorms and the next day we continued with life. Trashing the board, we hoped to forget.

It was morning when my boyfriend and I picked up the board leftover from the night and placed it in front of my friend's dorm room. Laughing we went to lunch and left the planchette on hello.

Later that night that the feeling of fear began to eat away at me. The cold knife pressed against my back as the lights were turned off. The corners began to fill, devoid of anything and the shadows began to take shape. I tried sleeping. Nightmares playing in my head. Images of a woman in black chasing after me in forgotten neighborhoods replayed. I was unable to wake each time as I ran loops around old blocks. Terror fueled every step and my morning I was sleep deprived and my now fiance was as well. Without saying it, we both knew what had haunted our dreams.

The next day our friend burst into the room holding the Ouija board. She explained the board had reappeared in front of her door three times and demanded we stop playing.

The first time we admitted to. The second when her other friends placed it there as well. The third however was troubling. Nobody knew why the Ouija board was there. Everybody promised that they had placed it once there for fun. Nobody had placed it twice. My mouth dried as she asked who had placed it. Neither could answer. She laid the board flat and placed the planchette down for emphasis. The third position was left on the straight letters of:

GOODBYE.