Haunted Game in Real Life

The Board That Was Cursed From Its First Use: One Investigator's Account of What Happens When You Call the Dead

I've been investigating paranormal cases for years, and there's one object that comes up more than anything else: a flat board with letters printed on it, a candle, and a windowless room. People treat it like a party trick. It isn't. Not long after actor Sushant Singh Rajput passed away, a strange trend surfaced online — people claiming they'd summoned his spirit through planchette-style sessions and were asking him questions on camera. That's where this whole conversation started for me, and it's where I want to start with you too, because underneath that one ugly trend sits a much older, much stranger belief system that almost nobody bothers to learn properly before they try it.

Using a Dead Man's Name for Views

Here's my honest reaction to the Sushant Singh Rajput videos: it's exploitation wearing curiosity as a costume. His death is a fact. He is no longer in this world — that part isn't up for debate. Repeatedly provoking that fact, claiming his spirit is trapped or being tormented or dragged into black magic, without a shred of proof any of it happened, isn't fair to him or to anyone who actually cared about him.

And that's really my first objection to nearly everything in this space. Not that people are curious about death. Curiosity is fine. It's the performing of it, with zero evidence, purely for a TRP spike, that gets under my skin.

What a Planchette Actually Is

Strip away the mystique and it's almost insultingly simple. You sit in a closed room, no airflow, light a candle, and speak the name of someone who's died. That's the entire mechanical setup behind a huge chunk of what people call "spirit calling."

The danger isn't really in the ritual itself. It's that almost nobody attempting it actually understands it. They've picked it up from some third-party source who doesn't fully understand it either, and then they're shocked when something goes wrong.

Is Contact With the Dead Actually Possible?

I get asked this constantly, and my answer isn't a flat yes or no. If you genuinely understand energy — not casually, but deeply, along with the specific mantras and traditions tied to that energy — then yes, I think some form of contact is plausible. But here's the thing: it's possible without a board too. Without any object at all, really. Through a newly visited location, through sheer concentration in a dark room, through knowing the exact vidhan tied to your own tradition.

In Islamic practice, for example, that knowledge might center on specific Quranic verses, an understanding of jinn. Every religion carries its own version of this. Without that grounding, you're improvising in the dark, literally and figuratively.

I'll admit something most people in my field won't say out loud: I get scared. Every time. Before touching a cursed object, before starting an exorcism case, there's fear, and I don't pretend otherwise. Calling yourself a skeptic or an atheist doesn't switch that off. You don't get to opt out of your body's own reaction just by deciding not to believe in something — if a fall hurts, it hurts, whether or not you believe in gravity.

An Origin Story Almost Nobody Knows

Here's a detail that surprises even people who've used a Ouija board themselves: it was allegedly cursed from its very first use.

The design is the one everyone pictures — letters A through Z arranged across the board, "Sun" and "Moon" printed at the top, "Yes" and "No" below that, "Goodbye" at the very bottom. Nothing exotic about the object itself.

The story of its first use goes something like this. Someone called on the spirit of his own dead brother. A small pointer was placed on the board, one finger resting on it, while he concentrated on his brother's memory. The pointer moved almost instantly, straight to "Yes." He asked for a name, and it spelled it out, letter by letter. And here's the part that keeps showing up in every account of this ritual since — you're supposed to end the session by saying "goodbye," or the energy is believed to stay attached to you afterward.

Whether you take that literally or not, that "goodbye" rule shows up again and again across totally unrelated accounts of these games, treated less like superstition and more like an actual safety step — which, honestly, sounds made up until you notice how consistently people insist on it.

The Mumbai Case I Still Can't Fully Explain

Of every case I've worked, this one sits in my personal top three most disturbing. Just describing it still gives me goosebumps.

A call came in about a young man in Mumbai. Every night, without fail, he'd wake up, walk to his bathroom wall, and start banging his head against it. He was also harming himself in other ways. His body was breaking down from the repeated strain, and his family was terrified. That's how the case landed on my desk.

During the investigation, we found something at his home — a sheet of chart paper with a Ouija board drawn on it in pencil. Not a manufactured board. A homemade one, sketched by hand. That detail cracked the case open. It turned out four of his friends were showing the exact same symptoms, and all five of them had used this hand-drawn board together, one night, without any real understanding of what they were doing.

Here's the part that made my stomach turn: the symptoms didn't start immediately. They began exactly one year after that single ritual. A full year of nothing. Then, simultaneously, across five separate people, it all began at once.

hand-drawn Ouija board ritual paranormal investigation case Mumbai

By the time I got involved, the young man couldn't be transported anywhere. He'd vomit blood the moment he was taken outside. Doctors and psychologists had already thrown up their hands — nothing showed up on any test, nothing responded to treatment. So I turned to spiritual guidance, which is usually my last resort, not my first. A blind temple mahant, a man known for never taking a single rupee for his help, directed us toward a specific baba near Nashik, sitting under a tree, and gave us just enough detail to find him.

When we arrived, before we'd said a word, the baba told us exactly why we'd come. He even mentioned the hunger we felt from a rough train journey — something nobody had told him.

His explanation stuck with me. The five friends' combined will, during that one ritual, had become so powerful it manifested something new, forcing energies to bind into a specific shape. What answered, he said, was the spirit of an unborn or newly born child — someone around eight months old who had died.

What came next was oddly specific, and I'll lay it out exactly as it happened:

• The families were told to leave the city entirely, no explanation given
• The five men were seated in a circle, backs turned inward toward each other
• A box made of lead was placed at the center — lead is believed to block or insulate energy, a kind of natural shield
• We needed a fresh body of a child who'd died around eight months old, which took enormous effort to arrange
• The baba placed the child's body on top of the lead box and began reciting Saptabandhan and other Vedic mantras
• We were told to chant along and keep our eyes shut, no matter what we heard, until he said otherwise

After roughly ten minutes of chanting, he told us to open our eyes briefly, then shut them immediately after. What I saw in that instant was the deceased child sitting upright on the lead box, covered in blood. Right after we closed our eyes again, loud laughter filled the room — childlike, almost cheerful, deeply wrong given the circumstances — for another ten minutes before it cut off entirely.

When we finally opened our eyes for good, all five men had vomited a strange, slate-colored, almost black substance. And the child's body, which had been resting on the ground before the ritual began, with all of us holding hands the entire time, was now sitting on top of the lead box. Nobody present can explain how that happened. We placed the body back inside the box afterward and buried it far from that site, with proper rites performed. As far as I know, all five men have been completely fine since.

Bloody Mary and the Girl Who Never Looked Away From the Mirror

Bloody Mary is one most people already half-know. Stand in front of a mirror at 3 a.m., say the name three times, and tradition holds that her spirit shows up to connect with you. People have genuinely died attempting this — and most of them, as far as I can tell, had no idea what they were actually invoking.

There's a reason 3 a.m. keeps recurring across so many of these rituals. It's considered a peak window for negative energy. Staring into a mirror during that specific stretch, repeating words about yourself — often negative ones — again and again, is described as a genuinely risky combination, not just spooky theater.

One case stuck with me specifically: a girl in India died sitting in front of a mirror. Nobody could pin down exactly how or why. It later emerged she'd been practicing "tratak," a fixed, obsessive mirror-gazing meditation, for a long stretch of time. Tradition holds that her soul, her energy, got trapped permanently in that mirror's reflection, unable to return to her body.

The Ash Ritual, Charlie Charlie, and Games I Don't Take Seriously

Some of these deserve barely more than a sentence, honestly, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

One belief claims that if you take the ashes of someone who died and call out their name, their spirit becomes bound to your will. I'd call that a cheap shortcut version of something that, if any part of it is real, deserves far more respect than a two-minute video gives it.

Charlie Charlie falls into the same category for me. Say "Charlie Charlie" at 3 a.m., then hide. Get found, and tradition says you die. Stay hidden, and Charlie is said to grant you a wish before leaving. It's the kind of trend that spread across YouTube with absolutely no explanation of what it's supposedly invoking, or what to do if it goes wrong — which is exactly my problem with the current wave of these games. Not the curiosity behind them. The complete absence of any framework around that curiosity.

An Elevator to Another Universe

Quick one — I don't have much to add here, honestly. The belief is that you step into an empty elevator, press a specific, alternating sequence of floor buttons, and instead of stopping normally, the elevator opens somewhere else entirely — another universe, another version of reality. That's the whole legend, as far as I've ever heard it told. Take it or leave it.

The Midnight Man

Around 2010, a ritual called the Midnight Game spread fast, built around a figure often described as a boogeyman-type killer. The steps, as I've heard them repeated:

• Sit with a red book or notebook at 3 a.m.
• Write "The Midnight" inside it
• Call the name out somewhere between 10 and 15 times
• Tradition holds the "Midnight Man" then appears and chases you relentlessly until 3:33 a.m.
• Survive until then, and you're fine. Fail, and the belief is you don't survive the encounter at all

Notice the architecture. A summoning phrase, a fixed time window, a survival condition. It's Bloody Mary and Charlie Charlie wearing a different name.

Would You Actually Try Any of This?

Planchette, Ouija, Bloody Mary, the Midnight Game — none of it is as harmless as a viral video makes it look, whether or not you personally believe any of it holds real power. Every single case I've described shares one pattern: people who didn't understand what they were doing, doing it anyway. So here's my question for you — if you thought there was even a small chance the Mumbai case was real, would you still play?

Source: Adapted from an interview conducted by Rahul Chaudhary with paranormal researcher RJ Arsh Oracle.

People Also Ask

Is the Ouija board really cursed?

There's no verified evidence behind the claim. It's a belief passed down through paranormal folklore, tied to a story about the board's very first use, not a documented historical fact.

What happens if you don't say goodbye on a Ouija board?

Tradition holds that skipping the closing "goodbye" leaves the summoned energy attached to the person who called it, though this is a belief rather than something that's been proven.

Why do so many paranormal rituals happen at 3 a.m.?

Believers consider that hour a peak window for negative or spiritual energy, sometimes referencing it as the inverse of the "brahma muhurat." It's a recurring detail across Bloody Mary, the Midnight Game, and similar rituals, but it isn't scientifically established.

Is Bloody Mary a real ritual or just a myth?

It's widely practiced as a folk ritual, especially among teenagers, but there's no verified case connecting it directly to a death. Any deaths associated with it are anecdotal, not documented.

Can a Ouija board really cause physical harm?

Believers, including paranormal investigators, claim delayed physical and psychological effects can follow improper use, sometimes surfacing months or years later. These accounts are personal testimony, not medical or scientific findings.

What is planchette, and how is it different from a Ouija board?

Planchette generally refers to a broader, less formal version of spirit-calling — a candle, a closed room, and a spoken name — while a Ouija board is a specific manufactured object with letters, numbers, and a sliding pointer used for the same general purpose.