Like, with everything that was going on in our lives, John, Karen, and me had not done experiments in a long time. We did the temperature experiments and then John said we had to redo those experiments because we had a new ghost! And he said those don't count towards our deal because he was double-checking to see if non-poltergeists are the same as ghosts like me. Ugh! He is such a little cheater! So, yeah, we like, convinced Sara and Vic to join our experiments. It took so long to figure out how to get her to go. Jizzle says that ghosts are Anchored to specific spots and have a hard time moving from them unless they change Anchors, but that is just silly! Like, I can totally go wherever I want. I moved five hundred miles when I found John! Proof. He says that he thinks my Anchors are him, the doll, and the apartment because ghosts can change what they are attached to, just like any living person changes over time. Pfft. As if. I just want to go somewhere and I do. But he will not listen to that.

  So, like, anyway. John thinks Sara has two Anchors. Vic and their home. So, it took some work, but we got Vic, Karen, John, and me in the same apartment on the same night. John spent the night recreating some experiments and it looks like we were pretty close. There was some temperature variation. The problem with that is we spent, like, forever redoing all of those experiments. All to find out what we already knew. Boring! John and Karen both said it was good to confirm it. But then we got to do new experiments.

  John had bought several Ouija Boards a while back and we never really could design an experiment with them, but he finally had a couple of ideas. The first one was to see if any ghost could move the planchette, which is the little pointer thingie that comes with the board.

  “Alright, Lona, we'll start with you, since you can move just about anything. The first thing we will do is display that you can move things other than the planchette,” John said, in a dispassionate tone. “Stand in the middle of the room.”

  I did so. From outside of the camera's field of view, he threw an apple at me. I jumped and I caught it. I tossed it up and caught it again. From the other side, Karen tossed another. I caught that, too, but I had to fly into the air to do so. I did a flip and then started juggling the apples, grinning. John watched me and rolled his eyes. Sara watched me with a sad expression. I felt bad. She could not do that. I was about to stop juggling when Vic threw yet another apple at me. I had not juggled in a while, but I managed to barely catch it and keep the other two moving, adding the latest into the mix. I made sure I was in the frame and juggled for a little while longer then I stopped, caught them all, and tossed them on to each of my lovely assistants. “Okay, let's do the board now. This is going to be totally easy. Finally, a test I can ace.”

  John took the camera and made a big show of trying to allay any doubts that we were faking this somehow. Then he set the board down on the table, after showing the camera the bottom. We had bought two more cameras and set them up to film the bottom of the table to try and convince people it was not just some trick. But skeptics are ridiculous. They will not believe anything that they see. I could go right up to them and lift them up and they would insist it was wires, smoke, and mirrors. John was right about that. We had two of the cameras set to thermal and two set to normal vision, each right next to each other. I went to the table and got on my knees (tee hee). I reached out and hovered my hands over the planchette, waiting for John to give me the go-ahead. He was so persnickety about these things. Always making sure that, like, everything was just right. So silly.

  “Go ahead, Lona,” He said, after making some adjustments to the camera. I leaned in and put my hands on the . . . My fingers went through the planchette. I tried again, shaking my hands. My fingers sank through the piece of plastic again. This was just a cheap, Hasbro Ouija Board, and I could not touch it.

  “What's the hold-up, Loans?” Karen asked.

  “I . . . I can't touch it!” I shouted.

  “What do you mean you can't touch it?” John asked.

  “Like, what else could that mean, Jizzle?” I demanded. I lifted the board that the planchette was resting on and waved my hand under it. I could touch the board. John leaned over and poked the pointer piece and moved it with a finger after I put the board back down.

  “Huh, that's weird,” he said. Sara had come over, too, and poked it and it moved. John looked at her and said, “That's really weird.”

  “What is? What's going on?” Vic asked, annoyed.

  “Yeah, I'd like a little clarification on that, too. God, I wish I could see ghosts,” Karen muttered.

  “You and me both,” Vic responded.

  “So, for some reason,” John said, waving his hand in confusion, his face scrunched up, “Lona can't move the planchette. But Sara can. Even though Sara . . . Sara, have you ever been able to interact with any other objects before?”

  “I wish! Vic is always leaving lights on!” Sara said, exasperated. “I must've tried to flick the switch a thousand times.”

  “Ouija Boards . . . Aren't bullshit?” John asked. He sat down in a chair. I turned back to the planchette that Sara was moving around on the board, staring at it.

  “John, you got any idea what this means?” Vic asked.

  “Honestly, I have no fucking clue,” He responded, with his face in his hands.

  “Watch your language, boy,” Sara said, testily.

  “Of all the things I thought we would find when we started this, I never figured Ouija Boards of all things would be . . . Real. How in the world . . .” His voice trailed off. Sara had stopped playing with the planchette and stared at him, considering. I started trying to touch the planchette again and my hand slid straight through to the board. I tried again and again.

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  Of all of the things I can't touch! What the hell! I'm a ghost that can't do a Ouija Board! I thought to myself, anger building up in my chest and down my arms. I continued to try and move it, but my hand kept going through. I even tried slapping it. Nothing happened. The lights flickered and the table started floating. The board went flying off. But the damn piece of plastic stayed glued to its spot, just floating slightly above the table. I groaned in annoyance and the table collapsed to the floor and so did the planchette.

  “Whoa, what the fuck?” Vic said.

  “Victor!” Sara shouted and swiped at him, only to go through his arm. He must have heard her though because he flinched.

  “Sorry. But I never saw anything like that before. It was . . . Well, spooky. That sounds lame, huh?”

  “Yeah, but you ain't wrong,” Karen said. “Never saw anything like that before.

  “Yeah,” Vic muttered, as he was picking up the little piece of plastic. “And over this little . . . Holy shit!”

  “Victor!” Sara yelled again.

  “What is it?” John asked, raising his head from his hands.

  “I . . . I can see her! I can . . . I can see both of them!”

  “What?” Karen, John, Sara, and me all said at the same time.

  “I . . . I can see her. She really does look like the doll,” Vic said, unbelieving. “This is so weird.”

  “Lemme see,” Karen demanded, reaching for the planchette. Vic handed it over and she put it to her eye. She gasped. “OH! I can totally see her! Both of them. That's wild! John, do you want to try?”

  “Karen,” John said with that voice that let me know he was forcing himself to stay calm. “I can already see ghosts.”

  “Oh, right,” both of them said at the same time.

  “What if it does something to your vision, though?” Karen asked, thoughtfully.

  “That's . . . A good point. Let me see it.” He said, holding out his hand. Karen tossed it and he did not catch it. He picked it up and examined it, turning over it. It was just a cream-colored piece of plastic with a little piece of see-through plastic. Eventually, he held it up to his eyes. “I'm not seeing a difference. Well, at least that makes sense.”

  “Any of this makes sense?” Vic said, looking around at the rest of the group.

  “Well, it does have a kind of logic to it. Even if it's not something we'd expect,” Karen said, considering it for a moment. She broke out another planchette from one of the more expensive sets that we had gotten for this and held it to her eye. “This one makes it a little clearer. But still. Loans, try this bad boy.”

  She put the board on the table and the wooden planchette on top of that. I reached over and my hand passed straight through it. I sighed and sat down. Sara sat next to me and moved it. John watched, flipping his own in his hand. “Sara, try lifting it off the board.”

  She tried to pick it up and nothing happened. It would move across the board but never off of it. In fact, when she got to the edge of the board, she almost slipped as suddenly the planchette stopped but she did not. “That's odd. So, apparently, Ouija boards are real things, but they also create some kind of field that ghosts can interact with. Well, except for Lona.”

  “Why couldn't I interact with it?” I asked, looking at John.

  “Uh . . . I don't know. Maybe poltergeist fields are different somehow than other ghost fields. That might make sense. You can interact with capacitive touch screens and Sara can't.”

  “Capacitive touch screens?” Vic asked.

  “Phone screens,” Karen clarified. “We don't really know why, but Loans here can use a phone. Between Sara and her, they could run a sex phone line.”

  Vic and my Jizzle snorted, but Sara grimaced and shook her head, tsking softly.

  We tried the other two boards that we had and Sara was able to move each of the planchettes and I could not move them at all. After a while, John sat next to me and held my hand. I leaned into him and nuzzled him lightly. I had never found something that I could not touch before. It was the most dead I had felt since . . . Since I first passed through John.

  When we were reviewing the footage later, Karen made fun of John.

  “Hahaha! You just revealed yourself to be a ghost-loving pervert!”

  “What the hell are you on about now?” John asked, annoyed, bending over to look at the screen.

  “This,” Karen said pointing to one of the thermal screens. You could see a pretty warm figure, which I confirmed was John on the other screen. But there was a cold spot that stretched over him. You could even make out my fingers entwined in his. “You just outed yourself!”

  “Aw! That's cute. And good. Now everyone will know he's mine,” I said, wrapping my arms around him.

  “No one else wants me, Lona,” John retorted.

  “That's not entirely true. There are some thirsty comments online. I'm glad I didn't do the freezer challenge, otherwise, there'd be a bunch of weirdos offering to warm me up as they did for you,” Karen said, fast-forwarding to another part of the footage. We had an idea about how we might be able to get the cameras to see us. Karen had held the planchette in front of the camera lens, but even in the little camera, Vic had said he couldn't see anything. Karen confirmed that now. There was . . . Wait a minute. She slowed the footage down and then found a single frame where Sara and I were both visible. A little distorted, but visible. She searched frame by frame for a moment and eventually found a clearer one. There we were. For a single frame.

  “That's so fucking weird. Why would an individual frame catch it?” Karen asked.

  “I . . . I have no idea,” John said, scratching his head, face scrunched up. “Guess we'll just have to do more experiments and try to figure it out.”

  “Yay . . . More experiments,” I said, less than enthused. Then I thought about it for a little longer and realized something. I wrapped my arms around John and pulled him close, pressing his head into my chest. “Yay! More experiments.”

  “I should've seen this coming,” John said, trying to sound like he didn't love me. I could even hear the smile in his voice.