Drugs, Not Demons

Last week I covered the story of three young women who were allegedly "possessed by demons" after playing with a Ouija board. A video widely circulated with the story shows one of the women growling just like Linda Blair in The Exorcist and then cracking up, as if she were trying to emulate a possessed character in a movie but having trouble doing so with a straight face.

The real story turns out to be more sinister than mere play-acting, but it also has nothing to do with possession, demons, or the Ouija board itself. It turns out that the three were given a tea prior to their session with the board made from Brugmansia or "Angel's Trumpet" flowers. Brugmansia is a toxic indigenous plant that contains scopolamine, hyoscyamine, and several other tropane alkaloids, powerful drugs that can induce auditory and visual hallucinations.

New details on the story reveal that Alexandra Huerta, the girl in the video, is 16 years old, not 22 as first reported. What’s worse, the drug was knowingly referred to her, her brother and their cousin by Maria Camaño, the girl’s legal guardian, who admits she was “helping” the orphaned girl and boy contact their dead parents. They boiled the flowers in a tea that they drank an hour before the session and its subsequent problems. Mrs. Camaño is the same woman who went to a priest first to perform an exorcism rather than getting medical help for the hallucinating teens.

Brugsmansia, also called Angel’s Trumpet for its poisonous flowers, has long been used in South American cultures as a topical remedy for pain relief, arthritis, infections and as an anti-inflammatory. All parts of the plant are poisonous and can cause death when ingested in large quantities, but it has also been used internally for spasms, pain and asthma. It is known to cause visual and auditory hallucinations and was traditionally given to misbehaving children who were told the visions they had were dead ancestors coming to scold them.

So rather than simply acting out, Huerta was actually under the influence of drugs, and for some reason her guardian decided that what she needed was an exorcism rather than medical attention - even though she knew about the Brugmansia and in fact supplied it. Why she expected an exorcism to resolve the situation is something of a mystery, though perhaps the real reason the priest refused to perform one was that he figured out something was up.

So no, Ouija boards aren't dangerous, some hallucinogenic drugs are - but we knew that already. Huerta and her relatives did recover once the drugs were out of their systems, but as the substances also induce amnesia she has no recollection of what she experienced under their influence or whether any of her behavior at the time was stereotypical acting-out.

More Studies Like This, Please!

Academic scientists who want to study anything associated with the paranormal face serious hurdles, both in terms of obtaining funding and maintaining their professional reputations. That's a real problem for anyone wanting to do formal scientific research in these areas, and in my opinion has a lot to do with how few decent studies ever are performed.

This story, though, shows that sometimes interesting work gets done anyway. Two years ago a Canadian research team made up of Dr. Ron Rensink, Helene Gauchou, and Dr. Sidney Fels set up a series of experiments involving the use of Ouija boards. The intent of the study was not to investigate the paranormal properties of the boards themselves. Rather, the experiment was designed to determine whether a person who believed someone else was using the board with them would be able to answer questions more accurately.

What the team found surprised them: When participants were asked, verbally, to guess the answers to the best of their ability, they were right only around 50 percent of the time, a typical result for guessing. But when they answered using the board, believing that the answers were coming from someplace else, they answered correctly upwards of 65 percent of the time. “It was so dramatic how much better they did on these questions than if they answered to the best of their ability that we were like, ‘This is just weird, how could they be that much better?’” recalled Fels. “It was so dramatic we couldn’t believe it.” The implication was, Fels explained, that one’s non-conscious was a lot smarter than anyone knew.

The robot, unfortunately, proved too delicate for further experiments, but the researchers were sufficiently intrigued to pursue further Ouija research. They divined another experiment: This time, rather than a robot, the participant actually played with a real human. At some point, the participant was blindfolded—and the other player, really a confederate, quietly took their hands off the planchette. This meant that the participant believed he or she wasn’t alone, enabling the kind of automatic pilot state the researchers were looking for, but still ensuring that the answers could only come from the participant.

It worked. Rensink says, “Some people were complaining about how the other person was moving the planchette around. That was a good sign that we really got this kind of condition that people were convinced that somebody else was there.” Their results replicated the findings of the experiment with the robot, that people knew more when they didn’t think they were controlling the answers (50 percent accuracy for vocal responses to 65 percent for Ouija responses). They reported their findings in February 2012 issue of Consciousness and Cognition.

Ouija Board Possession?

Does anybody here remember the film Witchboard? It was a horror movie from the 1980's about a woman who is possessed by a spirit she contacts using a Ouija board. The film has plenty of cheesy moments, such as when the board spins across the screen as one of the characters shoots at it (!), but in fact it was reasonably well-done given the subject matter. I'm not the only person who thinks so, either; the movie has some good reviews on imdb and overall rates a 5.7, which is actually decent for a genre in which most films come in at 3's and 4's.

Now one of the things the movie gets totally right is that earthbound spirits like to lie. The spirit the woman initially contacts claims to be that of a little boy, but is in fact that of a psychopathic murderer. What it gets fairly wrong, though, is that the board itself has no magical power, so you're not going to accomplish anything by burning or, say, shooting it. The problem with using a Ouija board is the same as what Aleister Crowley observed with regard to spiritualists - rather than following any sort of formal magical procedure, the operator opens him or herself up to whatever happens to be out there. Most of the time nothing will happen, but if her or she has a measure of psychic talent it's possible to contact something hostile or dangerous.

That brings us to today's story. Three American friends visiting Mexico were playing around with a Ouija board, and one of them was apparently "possessed" by a spirit. The video purports to show this, but honestly what it looks like to me is that she's doing her best to growl like Linda Blair in The Exorcist and then laughing when she can't keep a straight face. There might be some sort of spirit influence there, but it looks like much of it is probably play-acting. For one thing, it's way too similar to how it looks in the movies as opposed to real life.

Ouija Board Explained, Magicians Unsurprised

BBC has an article up today explaining how it is that Ouija board planchettes seem to move on their own. As I in fact mentioned back in 2009 in my novel Arcana, the explanation is simple - the board picks up small, imperceptible motions in your fingers and transfers them to the planchette. This is an observation that surprises absolutely no practicing magicians. It's obvious if you spend any amount of time working with a board that it's your fingers doing the movement. After all, there are some crazy stories and 1980's movies about planchettes moving on their own but I've never met anyone who's actually observed it. The article compares the use of a Ouija board with the motion of a pendulum, another common divination tool, and dowsing, which operates according to the same principle.

The phenomenon is called the ideomotor effect and you can witness it yourself if you hang a small weight like a button or a ring from a string (ideally more than a foot long). Hold the end of the string with your arm out in front of you, so the weight hangs down freely. Try to hold your arm completely still. The weight will start to swing clockwise or anticlockwise in small circles. Do not start this motion yourself. Instead, just ask yourself a question – any question – and say that the weight will swing clockwise to answer "Yes" and anticlockwise for "No". Hold this thought in mind, and soon, even though you are trying not to make any motion, the weight will start to swing in answer to your question.

Magic? Only the ordinary everyday magic of consciousness. There's no supernatural force at work, just tiny movements you are making without realising. The string allows these movements to be exaggerated, the inertia of the weight allows them to be conserved and built on until they form a regular swinging motion. The effect is known as Chevreul's Pendulum, after the 19th Century French scientist who investigated it. What is happening with Chevreul's Pendulum is that you are witnessing a movement (of the weight) without "owning" that movement as being caused by you. The same basic phenomenon underlies dowsing – where small movements of the hands cause the dowsing wand to swing wildly – or the Ouija board, where multiple people hold a cup and it seems to move of its own accord to answer questions by spelling out letters.