‘Twas a dark and stormy night in the year of our Lord 1989, a time before such fripperies as the internet, the mobile telephone, and the ironic hashtag; a time when the only inspirational memes were on fridge magnets, and nobody – but nobody – photographed their dinner. ‘Twas an age without youtube and iPhones, when teenagers had to make their own entertainment. And, for some peculiar reason, the entertainment we chose – in my neck of the woods – in the autumn of 1989 was… the ouija board.

You can’t grow up in the Mormon church (as I did) without generous helpings of fear-mongering on a regular basis: while lots of this mongering (is that a word?) had to do with the perils of burning in hell for the rest of eternity for so much as a cheeky fondle, a lot of it also had to do with ouija boards. If the Mormon church were in charge, every Scrabble set would have come with its own hazard warning: Not to be used for Satanic purposes. There were tales about babies upstairs in their cribs being smothered by curtains – while downstairs their decadent Scrabble-abusing parents were drunkenly communing with Lucifer – and tales about devils appearing in mirrors, and demons seen perching on ouija-loving people’s shoulders, etc etc etc.

One day, religion will cotton on to the fact that warning sixteen year olds not to do something is one of the surest ways to make them do it.

So do it, I did.

To this day, I’ll never be sure if one of us was pushing. We sat down, the three of us, in the lounge of my friend Kim’s big old barn conversion (by which I mean her parents’, of course) out in the poorly-lit sticks, with a circle of Scrabble tiles laid out in front of us and a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ in the middle on two scraps of paper. We upended a wine glass. Her parents were out for the evening, her little sister asleep in bed. When the glass started moving we laughed. It seemed funny, this clumsy old thing that was shunting its way from one tile to the other. It liked to make jokes. It called one of my former boyfriends Mr Long (a not wholly appropriate nickname, it has to be said) and when asked: ‘Where are you?’ responded: ‘behind…’ (comedic pause, in which we all hunched a little further forwards) followed by ‘[name of absent friend: by which I mean ‘friend who had opted to stay at home that evening’ rather than ‘dead’]’. Cue telephone call (landline, naturally) to said friend, to make sure she stayed well away from the curtains.

It stated correctly the date on which I’d lost my virginity, a fact unknown to everyone present but me, and insisted that Toby read the poem he had in his back pocket (a poem declaring his love for Kim), which, thinking about it, Toby may, of course, have engineered (although the pure fear on his face when he had to walk to the bus stop later, alone, in the rural darkness, suggested otherwise). Kim’s little sister woke up and came down: ‘Little one, go back to bed’ the board insisted. By this time the clumsy old glass had gone all Formula One on us. We’d stopped laughing by then. ‘It’ was claiming itself as the ghost of a boy in our school who’d committed suicide, which was far from amusing. When, later, we asked for its name, it began to spell: L-U-C-I- Shit, we all thought. Kim ran upstairs for a cross and a Bible. We read a few verses aloud. Several hours had passed by this time, and we made some kind of bargain (I can’t quite remember) to get ‘it’ to leave: doing ouija boards is weirdly addictive. We could have gone on all night, I think, if we hadn’t got so scared.

Weeks later, we tried the same experiment with a sceptical German exchange student whose German, non-believey energy must have killed the vibe because, damn it, no matter how much we wished it to, the glass wouldn’t move. (It occurs to me now that Toby wasn’t there then. Hmm.)

A couple of years later, bored one night at uni, a few friends and I (once again, no Toby) decided – as you do – to set up a ouija board on the kitchen table. This time the ghost was a six year old girl. She complained that she couldn’t move properly on the sticky top of the table (this was a student hall, remember), so one of us laid out record sleeves to smooth her way (that’s something you can’t do with an iPod, kids…). ‘Where are you?’ we asked. ‘In heaven,’ she said.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Only children,’ she said. ‘And animals.’

‘Is there a god?’

She said, ‘yes’.

‘How did you die?’

‘I drowned.’

And then, people, she went on to tell us the borough of London in which her death was recorded. She told us her full name. Her full name. And now, of course, in the age of the internet, in a matter of seconds I could google those details and know whether our little girl ghost really did die of drowning, aged six, or was only ever a figment of our teenaged imaginations. There’s a reason, of course, that I’m not telling you that name or the borough of London, the same way I won’t tell the friends who keep pestering me for the information. It’s a long, long time since I believed in ghosts (a long time, too, since I believed in God), but there’ll always be a niggle, I think. I am happier not knowing. When things go bump in the night I’ll continue to know that it’s only the furniture creaking and settling.

Or is it…?

Mwa ha ha! Happy Hallowe’en.