Our daughter found the Ouija board when we were clearing out my late grandmother’s waterfront house. 

Rick gave me a meaningful look. You never told me your grandmother was into that sort of thing. 

She wasn’t. Or at least I didn’t think she was. 

‘What’s it for?’ Becca pressed. ‘Is it a game?’

‘It’s a game for teaching children their letters,’ I lied. Becca discarded it disdainfully and Rick breathed a sigh of relief. 

Later we sat on Gran’s dock to watch the sunset and share memories about her. I told Becca and Rick that she taught me how to catch blue crabs by dangling chicken necks off this very pier.

‘Gross,’ Becca said, but the memory soothed me, restoring to me the Gran I thought I knew, who’d never dream of dabbling in the occult.

But that night my own dreams were haunted by a fiendish alphabet that swam bewitchingly around the shadowy underworld of my unexplored ancestry. The chickens were ritual sacrifices, the crabs charmed toward the spell they cast. 

The letters formed strings of words that tugged me to the surface. 

‘The point of a fish trap is the fish,’ they spelled. ‘The point of the word is the idea.’

I, too, was netted, and my grandmother was pulling me in. 

‘Once you’ve got the idea, you can forget the word,’ she said.* 

I emerged from the depths to the light of day, gasping for air as the Ouija letters tumbled into disarray.

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*Gran is quoting Chuang Tzu, from David Hinton’s translation of The Inner Chapters.

Would you like to know more about this story? I talk about it in Episode 85 of Structured Visions, ‘How spooky is language?’ Subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen.