Be Scared of Everything
Horror Essays
Peter Counter
Invisible Publishing
Halifax & Prince Edward County
Ā© Peter Counter, 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Be scared of everything : horror essays / Peter Counter.
Names: Counter, Peter, 1987- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200289896 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200290088 | ISBN 9781988784564 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988784625 (HTML)
Subjects: LCSH: Counter, Peter, 1987- | LCSH: Horror in mass media. | LCSH: Horror filmsāHistory and criticism. | LCSH: Horror television programsāHistory and criticism. | LCSH: Horror talesāHistory and criticism. | LCSH: Horror. | LCGFT: Essays.
Classification: LCC P96.H65 C68 2020 | DDC 700/.4164ādc23
Edited by Andrew Faulkner
Cover design by Megan Fildes
Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Prince Edward County
www.invisiblepublishing.com
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.
On Nomenclature
The names and identifying details of the humans mentioned in this book have been changed to protect their privacy, with the exception of public figures and consenting persons.
The names of the demons mentioned in this book have remained unchanged. Read aloud at your own risk.
For my brother Nick.
For my partner Emma.
Do what thou wilt.
Content Notes
These content notes are made available so readers can inform themselves; some readers may also consider these notes to be spoilers. This book includes references to self-harm, suicide, gun violence, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Interviews with My Family Ouija Board
Celebration of Life
A World Made of Train Tracks
Please Add Me to Your Zombie Survival Network
The FBIās Basement Office
Too-Loo
Corporate Personhood
The New Necronomicon
The Shattered Teacup
On the Horror of Comedy
Manufacturing Mephistopheles
Beeps and Boops
Manifest Doom
Five Litres
Fighting Ghosts
100 Seconds to Midnight
Metaphysical Graffiti
Silent Ruins
Where the Creepypastas Are
Broken Nightmare Telephone
Fear of the Shark
Audient Void, Authorial Void
Extrasensory
On Madness
Cannibal Symposium
Wallpaper
Devilās Nostril
Santa Claus versus the Smoke Monster
When the Screaming Stops
Acknowledgements
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Interviews with My Family Ouija Board
Jackie placed a glass of tap water on the bookshelf, put a dark stone on the ledge, and I lit incense on the table behind us. Aside from the single naked light bulb above the old coffee table, the glow of a wood stove provided most of our light. The four elements, all in their right placesāwater in the north, fire in the south, air in the east, and earth in the westāwere supposed to protect us from what came next. Jackie joined my brother, our mother, Emma, and me, surrounding the Ouija board.
āIām sorry,ā said Jackie, my brotherās partner. This was her first Christmas with us in the small, lonely house on the bay. āThis is serious for me.ā
We took turns pairing off and conducting the ritual: placing two fingers from each hand at the base of a teardrop-shaped planchette, we rotated the cursor three times and asked, āIs anybody there?ā
Thatās how we got the first communications. Initials and ages for Jackieās dead relatives, something that called itself Frudmug, and an entity named Devur that told us about Devon who lives in Heaven and listens to you when āyou syn.ā
When I paired with my mom after those initial summonings, kneeling next to each other, something changed. She asked the first question, usually answered with a hissing slide of the planchette to the top left corner of the board where āYESā is printed, but instead the pointer moved directly forward, encircling the gameās title.
āDo you have a message for someone in this room?ā asked Mom.
Yes, said the board. Then it spelled her name.
āWhat is your message?ā
I will see you.
āWhere will I see you?ā
Where you wish.
āWho is this message from?ā I asked.
You.
The words were agreeable. At least, thatās how Mom read them. After the family seance ended, we disassembled the protective circle, and Jackie had us take a moment to offer silent gratitude for the elements. I later found Mom standing in the kitchen alone.
āIt makes sense the message was so strong and clear,ā she said. āI think it remembered me. It used to be my board, back in the sixties.ā
Fifty years before the board talked to her in Jackieās circle of protection, only a half-hour drive from where our ritual took place, Mom was a preteen at the Central Wire Christmas party. Her dad, my opa, worked for Central Wire as a diamond die polisher, and every year the tradesmen and their families celebrated the holidays at Farrell Hall, a community centre that was used for mass on Sundays. When Santa arrived at the party and passed out presents to the kids, he handed little Trudy Zegger, my future mother, a Ouija board.
Unwrapping her present and lifting the lid off the box, Trudy found a grey-brown particle board with a large sticker on its front to make it look wooden. The words āYESā and āNOā were printed in the top left and right corners, next to illustrations of the sun and moon that looked down on the alphabet, which was presented in two curved rows that arch above the numbers zero through nine. The bottom of the board said āGOOD BYE,ā and at the very top was the name of the gameāOuija.
My family Ouija board was made in Canada, but the name and its distinct markings are trademarks of the Parker Brothers Game Company of Salem, Massachusetts. I love this detail because it creates such a wonderful contradiction: an occult object used for divination linked by intellectual property law to a place synonymous with witchcraft, and industrially manufactured en masse by a company synonymous with the brazen commercialization of the 1960s board game industry. Itās not an ancient artifact, itās a toy freckled with copyright and registered trademark symbols. The planchette is made of beige plastic, with little felt pads under its feet. But that just makes it all the creepier when it works.
Trudyās initial attempts to use the board with her older sister failed to summon anything that knew how to spell. But eventually, the planchette started to answer yes or no questions.
āWhen I asked who it was, it spelled Rory,ā she told me, decades later. āAfter that, I often thought of Rory out there in the spirit world.ā
She played Ouija at pyjama parties, but as the late sixties became the mid-seventies, spiritualism gave way to plain old hanging out. Trudy loitered on Main Street, passing time in cars. She went to house parties and got really into skiing. By the time board games saw a popular resurgence in the eighties, she was in college, living on her own. Far away from the mystifying oracle stored at her parentsā place, she played Pictionary instead of talking to the dead.
I found the Ouija board in my grandmotherās attic a few months after she died from cancer. In life, she went by Corrie, short for Corinthia, but I knew her as Oma. Mom sat with her when she passed, in the TV room of her house deep in Ontarioās Lanark Highlands, where the human population is vastly outnumbered by gasoline-green hummingbirds and moths the size of your hand. On the phone, Mom described her own motherās moment of death as a gift. A rare experience of receiving every last moment of company Oma had before suddenly being alone in a room, acutely aware of the unseen exits surrounding us. On a sweltering June afternoon, my family sorted through all the belongings that hadnāt been catalogued in her will. Thatās what brought me into the crawl space.
A metal chain tapped against a lonely incandescent bulb dangling from the cramped roomās ceiling. I leafed through stacks of old newspapers and magazines, looking for anything with historical novelty, maybe a local newspaper reporting on the Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, or the Cuban Missile Crisis. Lifting a stack of stale yellow editions of the Perth Courier, I uncovered the board, sitting face up in its lidless box. The room seemed to dim. I heard a buzzing in my ears. Worried it was the beginning of heatstroke, I grabbed the board and turned to leave, only to recoil from the light bulb, now covered in bloated flies, crawling over each other and falling to the wood floor with a gentle tap-tap-tap-tap.
I kept the board. For years, it moved with me from apartment to apartment, never leaving the blue Rubbermaid container I transported it in, until one day, when I felt fully grieved over Oma, I unpacked it and hung the beautiful game board on the wall in my apartment.
āWhy are you doing this?ā asked Mikaela.
āIām not moving it,ā I said. āI wouldnāt do that to you.ā
Still, the planchette slid, hissing as it finished spelling the name of her long-time crush. The line of questioning was classic Ouija. After introducing itself as Oculus, the entity offered information about who Mikaela was going to marry. I met the guy once and knew it was complicated. Iām not a monster.
āLook,ā I said. āThe easy answer is youāre moving it but you donāt know it.ā
āItās your subconscious,ā said Emma, who prefers transcribing spiritual communications, since partaking in them causes her to become light-headed and nauseous.
The secular explanation to Ouija is ideomotor response. Essentially, itās a type of automatic writing powered by a feedback loop between your eyes, your subconscious mind, and the board. You ask a question with the expectation of having the answer spelled out and, as it is revealed letter by letter, your brain starts puzzle-solving and providing the subsequent characters. The effect is uncanny, and sometimes it feels like the board is reading your mind as the planchette drags your hands around the alphabet. At its best, the experience spurs self-reflection and an examination of the narratives we trace for ourselves. Self-improvement, contemplation, and contentment are the rewards of rationalist approaches to divination. Of course, many people believe it is a conduit to the afterlifeāan instant messenger for spooks, spectres, and ghosts that you can buy for twenty bucks at a toy store, appropriate for ages eight and up.
Three years later, Mikaela once again asked the oracle about the person sheād marry. The entity we contacted claimed to be older than names, and said within twelve months of the current Ouija session she would meet a man named Henry in a pet store and marry him. Looking at the seance transcripts side by side, the only consistent through line is the ongoing marriage story Mikaela brings to each encounter. She asks the same questions, gets different answers, and finds a personal truth by carrying the original narrative forward. Now, free of her previous fate of a complicated marriage to a complicated crush, sheās taking a second glance at every pet store she passes, hoping to meet Henry.
Regardless of your spiritual paradigm, Ouija is powerful. Playing the game can uncover forgotten truths. Some studies even show that the boards improve test scores when consulted on world geography assessments. Beseeching entities from beyond can imbue your life with meaning, change your behaviour, channel your obsession, and spur you to act...