The Seance

On a family camping trip to the beautiful eastern Oklahoma hills when I was a teenager, my brother and I met some other kids who were at the campground for a family reunion. The older kids had been charged with looking out for the younger ones and I guess they were getting pretty tired of it.

There was a covered ‘pavilion’ in the campground. It was really just a large rectangular affair with poles on the sides holding a roof over a concrete slab. It did have electricity and a lone light bulb hung down in the center of it. One of the boys was tall enough to easily reach this fixture.

We arranged benches in a circle in the center of the shelter and filled them up with kids of all ages. It was dark by then and we decided to have a séance. The oldest boy stood in the middle of the circle and announced that since we had to try to contact a spirit that we would all be familiar with, we would all concentrate on John F. Kennedy. (This was in 1967 or ’68 so even the younger kids knew who he was.)

Tall Boy instructed everyone to be very quiet and think about JFK. He kept telling us that if we all thought hard enough, the spirit would make contact with us. Everyone got really quiet. You could hear crickets chirping and night birds calling but under the roof of the pavilion, not a sound was being made. Tall boy reached up to unscrew the light bulb which he had loosened earlier. Just as he touched it, it shorted out, creating a bright flash before going completely dark.

Kids screamed bloody murder and knocked over the benches in the their haste to escape. We older kids laughed so hard that it took us a few minutes to start looking for the little ones. I think little kids were being coaxed out from under cots and tables for the rest of the night. I’m pretty sure that all of them were found eventually.

Soundtrack for this post: Awake Ghost Song by the Doors