Pentecostals often seek to speak in tongues as a drug-like spiritual high, and when they do, they develop the same kind of openness as people playing with a Ouija board. The problem with Ouija boards is that you never know what is coming through–your unconscious, a discarnate spirit, a demon, etc. The dean of our school of education once asked me what I thought of such boards. I replied that demonic entities sometimes come through. The dean was disturbed by this reply because, the preceding night, the education faculty had been playing with a Ouija board at a party, when a demonic entity had taken over and begun talking about Hell. Pentecostals often pride themselves in their deliverance ministries, but these ministries often exorcise evil spirits that have possessed believers through their wrongly motivated pursuit of tongues.
Yet just occasionally, Ouija boards can be the means of genuine contact with the dead. Harvard professor William James is considered by many the father of modern psychology. He was a good friend of Prof. James Hyslop of Columbia U. Both men had studied parapsychology and pledged that whoever died first would try to contact the other from beyond the grave to verify that he was still alive. WJ died first and, since a year passed with no contact, Hyslop thought contact would never be made.
But then Hyslop was contacted by an unknown couple in Ireland. They had been playing with their Ouija Board, when an insistent message from a William James came through: “Find James Hyslop and give him this message: remember the red pyjamas!” The Irish couple had dismissed this message as too weird, but it was continually repeated and this made them curious enough to research the names. At first, Hyslop dismissed this message as nonsense, but then he recalled an academic conference he and WJ had attended in Paris. It was a cold wintry day when they arrived and Hyslop had forgotten to bring pyjamas. The only kind he could find were a gaudy red pair and WJ had mercilessly teased him about his loud taste. Evidently WJ had been trying for a year to communicate this to Hyslop because it was so concrete and therefore hard for Hyslop’s unconscious to distort. So WJ apparently succeeded where Houdini had failed to keep a promise of postmortem contact.