Do you believe in ghosts?

I was told this by a roommate in one of the dorms I lived in when I was in college.

It so happened that the girls, my roommates, didn’t stay alone in the apartment. When one of them went out she would tell the others and when the second to last one was left then she would be accompanied by the last one. In short, they never were alone in the apartment.

I was the new tenant. They had known each other much longer, several of them were even from the same city and we were 6 girls, two for each room. All of us college students, young and very cheerful.

After hearing the same thing over and over again and seeing that it was always the same my curiosity was peaked. I decided to ask why they always did the same thing. They just told me that someday they would tell me, for the time being they decided to leave it at that.

As time went by, when we were all at home because there were student riots at the university, I went back to my question. It was then when they looked at each other and decided to tell me a story that remained engraved in my mind.

It’s the first time since they told me that I am going to tell it.

One afternoon when there were 5 girls and one of them had her boyfriend present, they decided to play a game with a little something called ouija board, I had already heard about it on other occasions and I never liked it.

You just place the cardboard on the table. This cardboard has some signs, numbers, letters and symbols printed on one end and on the other end two people take a coin and someone asks a question in the air.

I forgot to say that first they invoke the presence of free spirits wandering in the world to come forward and they are the ones who direct their hands to the answer.

They took the cardboard where the symbology of this mysterious game is printed and two of them took a coin and directed it towards the answer. After a while of playing the game for them, the inevitable happened.

What follows is that, supposedly, a spirit that hears when they are invoked comes and answers the questions by directing the coin towards the letters on the cardboard or towards the symbols.

Someone spells out the words and deciphers the symbols and says what the spirit wants to answer.

Apparently everything goes wrong. The supposed spirit did not continue answering the questions but took over the boy's body. It was one of the people running the coin, the boy began to tremble. His eyes turned white, and as he knelt on his knees, he spoke strange things, sweating profusely and foaming at the mouth.

The girlfriend was scared, just like everyone else, and started asking the young man to stop playing with them, but those who know him realize that something strange is going on. He had never sweated so much and he had never rolled his eyes like that.

They screamed, ran and didn't know what to do. The boy’s girlfriend decided to leave and go to a church, which luckily was no further than halfway down the block. They tell the priest what was happening. The priest listened to them and accompanied them.

When they arrived at the apartment they saw the young man still in the same position and with the same guttural sound coming from his lips and his eyes blank. The priest proceeded to perform a religious act and the boy collapsed to the floor and stopped shaking, his eyes returned to normal and he stopped making that horrible sound through his mouth.

The young man was tired. The priest admonished them all for what had happened, reprimanding the fact that this was a satanic game and that one should not invoke spirits because they do not know who is willing to take the body of a living being to manifest themselves. After the religious act and the scolding, the priest left.

The young man only told the girls that it was all a lie and that he was just playing with them, that he tricked them, but they realized that he himself didn’t realize it when that spirit possessed him.

First, nobody sweats like that in a place that looks like a refrigerator. It should be said that I am talking about a city where at night snow falls on the tops of its mountains and in the evenings the cold mist descends before the sun goes down completely.

We must be warm all the time, with clothes to cover us from the cold, but he was sweating profusely as if he were in the hottest city in the country and his eyes never did roll back until the priest did a liberating ritual.

Everyone was impressed and the worst thing was that from that moment on, inexplicable noises began to be heard all over the apartment, things were falling to the floor, closed doors rattled, as if they were open. So the girls realized that in addition to the spirit that possessed the body of their friend, there were more spirits loose in the apartment and so they decided to never be alone in there again.

I didn't know about these things that had happened, but I did notice that at night I would suddenly wake up as if someone was in our room. I got into the habit of sleeping with my bible and reading some chapter or psalm when my spirit was restless.

Thank God I moved out soon after, not because of that episode I was told about but because I ran out of money to pay the rent and went to live with a friend who took me in.

My dear readers, I don't know if you can believe this story. I am just telling you what I was told.

I remembered this while reading today the post that my friend @ARTicLEE published about ghost stories in college.

You can read here. https://read.cash/@ARTicLEE/the-locker-shaker-6ecc1c0e

Thanks for your comments, opinions and reading my posts.