G.K. Chesterton's Ouija Board Experience and His Warning

G.K. Chesterton is known for his voluminous writings both fiction and non-fiction such as his well known apologetical books, Orthodoxy and Everlasting Man.  Currently, his cause for canonization is being pursued by the Society of G.K. Chesterton. No one who read their way into the Catholic Faith or studied any of his written works could deny that he was a brilliant man graced with angelic wit and wisdom. Written with his signature jovial charm, his books and essays have been the inspiration for an untold number of conversions. G.K. Chesterton was one of the most important lay Catholic voices of his time and ours.

Although Chesterton had been baptized in the Church of England, his religious upbringing was largely Unitarian. Chesterton, at age 48 entered into full communion with the Catholic Church in 1922 and his wife followed him in 1926. He gave reasons why he converted and it was due to mystical experiences he had in the Holy Land and when he deepened his relationship with the Virgin Mary. So the 'Apostle of Common Sense' had also a marian, mystical interior life sensitive to the supernatural and the spiritual. 

One of his first quasi-mystical experences with the supernatural world happened in his youth. When he was a child, he and his brother were  allowed to play with a ouija board. Here's an extraordinary account in his autobiography, chapter four titled, 'How to be a Lunatic'...

“What I may call my period of madness coincided with a period of drifting and doing nothing; in which I could not settle down to any regular work. I dabbled in a number of things… I dabbled in Spiritualism… My brother and I used to play with planchette, or what the Americans call the ouija board; but we were among the few, I imagine, who played in a mere spirit of play. Nevertheless I would not altogether rule out the suggestion of some that we were playing with fire; or even with hell-fire.”

Here Chesterton, who was drifting and doing nothing, seemed to recognize the truth in the saying, ‘idle hands are the devil's workshop’. He also realized that the supernatural world is real, like playing with fire and not just a product of the playful imagination of a child.

He goes on to say,

“I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify, with complete certainty, that something happens which is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but still human force, or by some powers, good, bad or indifferent, which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide. The only thing I will say with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies. The lies may be larks or they may be lures to the imperiled soul or they may be a thousand other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the other world; or for that matter about this world.”

Again, we see that the Apostle of Common Sense was aware that he made contact but he understood that it was a malevolent spirit of lies with whom he communicated. 

There was a time when I was a child and my siblings and I went to the Sav-on Drug store by my house to purchase a game to play during our long summer days of vacation at home. We were drawn to the ‘Ouija’ Game which Hasbro toy company markets as something cool and suitable for kids. Thankfully, as we approached the register to purchase the ‘game’ an employee stopped us and pulled us aside to ask whether we realized what we were getting into. When she became aware that we had no clue what we were doing, she very cleverly redirected our interest into the game Monopoly which we ended up buying that day. So, instead of dedicating our lives to dark arts and seances, one of my siblings became a successful real estate broker. The thing is, this total stranger had the wherewithal to see the danger we faced and diverted us away from it. To this day I am so thankful for her spiritual guidance claoked in basic adult supervision. Sadly, for young Gilbert there was no one watching out for him. 

What he shares next is a rather incredible deriliction of parental duty by his father and a dead give away that he was dealing with the demonic.

“My father, who was present while my brother and I were playing the fool in this fashion, had a curiosity to see whether the oracle could answer a question about something that he knew and we did not. He therefore asked the maiden name of the wife of an uncle of mine in a distant country; a lady whom we of the younger generation had never known. With the lightning decision of infallibility, the spirit pen said, "Manning". With equal decision my father said, "Nonsense". We then reproached our tutelary genius with its lamentable romancing and its still more lamentable rashness. The spirit, never to be beaten, wrote down the defiant explanation, "Married before". And to whom, we asked with some sternness, had our remote but respected aunt been secretly married before. The inspired instrument instantly answered, "Cardinal Manning".  

Let me pause here and ask, “What on earth was his father thinking allowing his boys to dabble in the occult?”. Geesh! Was his father not Christian? What he not aware of the first commandment? I am getting sidetracked here. As a father of four I take seriously the responsibility to be protector of the home. Ok, I had to get that out. Now back to Chesterton.

What the demon was suggesting here was that a prominent 19th Century English Catholic Cardinal who Chesterton admired, was guilty of secretly marrying Chesterton’s aunt! British religious leader Henry Edward Manning was a priest and archdeacon of the Church of England before converting to Roman Catholicism in 1851. He was later named Roman Catholic archbishop of Westminster and was consecrated a cardinal.

Come on demon! Didn't you know that you were messing with the great G.K. Chesterton? I mean they don't call him the 'Apostle of Common Sense ' for nothing. He very easily sniffed out that lie. What's more, by calumniating a Catholic prelate, the demon may have inadvertantly turned the young Anglican on to the credibility of the Catholic Faith and planted the seed of conversion. 

This seemed to verify once and for all that this demon inspite of his mistake was in fact evil and a dangerous liar who had the power to adversely harm Chesterton's mental health. 

“Whether this sort of thing be the pranks of some Puck or Poltergeist, or the jerks of some subliminal sense, or the mockery of demons or anything else, it obviously is not true in the sense of trustworthy. Anybody who had trusted it as true would have landed very near to a lunatic asylum.” 

Chesterton goes on to say that at this time in his life, shortly after the strange ouija board experience, he had a bout with depression. He seemed to imply that he may have opened a door that allowed demonic oppression to invade his life.

“But I have sometimes fancied since that this practice, of the true psychology of which we really know so little, may possibly have contributed towards the disturbed or even diseased state of brooding and idling through which I passed at the time. I would not dogmatise either way; it is possible that it had nothing to do with it; it is possible that the whole thing was merely mechanical or accidental. I would leave planchette (ouija board) with a playful farewell, giving her the benefit of the doubt; I would allow that she may have been a joke or a fancy or a fairy or anything else; with the proviso that I would not touch her again with a barge-pole.”

Chesterton was right to reject the terrible portal to the demonic disguised as a child's game. As the catechism says,

“All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one's service and have a supernatural power over others - even if this were for the sake of restoring their health - are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion. These practices are even more to be condemned when accompanied by the intention of harming someone, or when they have recourse to the intervention of demons. Wearing charms is also reprehensible. Spiritism often implies divination or magical practices; the Church for her part warns the faithful against it…” -CCC 2117 

His saintly and orthodox advice is to ‘Stay away from it!”  To anyone who owns a ouija board, and especially to all parents he would say in his English accent, "Throw it in the rubbish bin!"