One summer Lucy and I became fanatically obsessed Beatle fans. We owned every album, every movie, every documentary, every biographical book, and every photograph ever taken of them.
That summer our days were spent with Sgt. Pepper, Sexy Sadie and Mean Mr. Mustard, our evenings were spent with golden slumbers and gently weeping guitars. We went through a grieving period of about a week, where we mourned the loss of “Walrus“. Lucy felt it especially keenly. We languished around the house with silent tears in our eyes. We lit candles and held hands and swayed gently back and forth to ‘Imagine‘. Winnie never understood. She would come home and find us in a cheerless state of bewilderment and say, “I’m so sick of you two!, Number one you’re about fifteen years too late, and number two, I forbid you to waste one more minute on that godless hippie!” Winnie, was an all American, Beach Boys fan. Lucy and I found their ceaseless harmonizing… incommodious to say the least.
One afternoon, after eight rounds of black jack, Lucy said, ”Agnes, what would you say to us… calling John back from the dead?”
Obviously; a brilliant idea! The epiphany came at a very convenient time, as Winnie would be at a ’Preparing your family for the end of the world’ seminar for the weekend. Two problems arose. One, we did not own a Ouija board as Winnie considered them fiendish, playthings of the devil and two, we were unfamiliar with the how to conduct a séance. I felt it necessary to utilize both methods in order to make contact. With regards to the Ouija board problem I figured we could make our own, after all it was just a serious of alphabetic letters and an apparatus for the players to put their fingers on. A piece of card board would do. For the séance Lucy and I did some extensive research.
The first thing we had to do was create an “exclusive believers” only invitation list. The list included me, Lucy, Egg and Sue. I then set up a spirit friendly environment by lighting candles and dimming the lights. Lucy was to act as Medium which meant hers would be the voice to call on John to join us. It was decided that our make-shift Ouija board would be the back-up option if the séance didn’t work.
After offering a Divine blessing on the sin we were about to commit, we joined hands. In a few moments Lucy began. Using the soberest of voices she said “Our beloved John, we ask that you commune with us. We ask that you join and move among us. We will now all repeat the chant until we receive a response from him.” We all chanted together, “Our beloved John, we ask that you commune with us. Our beloved John, we ask that you commune with us.” We repeated it four times. “John, if you are with us, please wrap once on the table. “, Lucy said at last.
We listened intently. Then we heard not a rap on the table, but the sound of all the upstairs doors closing simultaneously! We were definitely not alone. I felt chilled and uneasy “Wait, wait, wait!” I yelled. “Lucy! We didn’t say his last name! All we said was John! It could be anybody! It could be John Wilkes Booth! It could be John F. Kennedy, or John the Baptist! We promptly snuffed out the candles, set fire to the Ouija board, turned all the lights on, and asked the Lord to forgive us. I felt I was forgiven but Lucy insisted for weeks after, that God was punishing her because she got the stomach flu and chipped her front tooth while vomiting in the toilet.
