A RAF! Like a RAT: All the same! The History of the Ouija Board!

Halloween always was and always will be my favorite holiday. When I hit fifteen years of age, I hit the brakes at one of my first teenage roadblocks that strongly suggested my costumed days would be over soon when the local neighborhood lush at the far end of the street stood at his doorway and peered at me through glazed and watery bloodshot eyes and uttered:"Aren't you a little old for trick or treat?" I guessed this meant no candy and I was right, but despite his drunken stupor, he did manage to score a bullseye critical to my presumed maturing process and that was: I was now too old for Halloween.

BUT! I do get to relive my childhood Halloween through MNOAOS Zachary, who at thirteen still digs the Trick or Treat scene. So, while Zach fabricates some kind of homebrew costume and grabs his big plastic Jack O'Lantern, I secure my official 1960's vintage MADE IN JAPAN metal and glass Halloween lantern and we both take it to the streets each Halloween just as the sun drops below the horizon, which even in a small city like Albany, happens very very fast.

Another avenue for returning to Halloweens come and gone is through my weekly Random Access Thought(or Random Access File) segment heard exclusively over This Week in Amateur Radio. In the late chilly autumn evenings during October 2005, I decided to produce a feature documenting the history of the Ouija Board. This was one of my first heavily researched RATs, making extensive use of the Internet for facts, figures and historical perspective. This is also where I learned that not all information may be so correct or accurate in presentation.

I harvested something like ten different webpage sites and found that facts such as years varied by as much as plus or minus two or three years, although elements such as names and locations were fairly consistent. Too, many of the ambiances and background sound effects like tolling bells, scary cemeteries and groaning monsters were sourced as free Internet downloads. This was in the time before the N2FNH Sound Effects Library had grown to its current mythic proportions. Someday I should publish this library for sale to sound effects fanboys! These effects tracks still reside somewhere deep within the hallowed hallways of the big vault.

The history of Ouija Board Random Access Thought also set the stage for the radio and podcast debut of Marilyn Munro(nee' Krasnov). In this performance, I offer the historical content while Marilyn intones gravely and in reverse echo the consequences of using such tools of the devil.

So download this week's This Week in Amateur Radio Ham Service and the TWIARi Broadcast version, or even better connect to http://www.twiar.org/n2fnh/RATParts
Look for file number RAF051021_R1.cab, right click and "Save Target As" to your hardddrive. Use your WinZIP or IZArc to extract the select RAF audio WAV file inside!