I studied in an all girls school. My girlfriends and I (around 5 to 6 of us)used to organize activities such as staying over in one of our friend’s house or simply hanging around in someone’s house just for chit chat or telling stories etc. Being teenagers then, we were of course always looking for excitement and full of curiousity. Just like other teenagers, my friends started to play those spooky spiritual games i.e. pencil spirit, coin spirit. We had played that many times, in school. Well, we always wondered though whether one of us was pushing the pencil or the coin. Although we have some doubts, we still continued to play because it was interesting and scary.

One fine day, we went to one of my gf’s house. We gathered in her bedroom which was upstairs and lie on her bed, chatting, until one of my friend must had suggested playing pencil spirit. Since it was not the first time, everyone was quite willing and automatically know what to do. Everyone placed their fingers on the pencil which was placed on top of a paper with the relevant alphabets and chanted as usual. Now, I can’t even remember how the chanting was like then. Anyway, as usual, the pencil moved and answered some questions which my friends asked. Well, we were so used to this, we did not feel much shock or whatever. Maybe just a little spooked with the answers but that was all. Besides hey, maybe someone was moving her fingers to answer those questions huh. It was just another game to us.

Suddenly…we heard someone called out to us. No la…not ghost! It was my friend’s mother calling from downstairs saying that one of my friend’s father had arrived to drive us all back home. So, we quickly abandoned the “game”, packed and scurried downstairs. As we walked along the corridor to the stairs, we walked one by one. I was not the last few girls though. When we reached the gate, I heard 2 of my friends talking to each other. They were the last 2 girls who were walking at the back of us.

“Did you hear that?” one of them , Shirley asked the other one, Joyce in a tone with a little fear in it. “Yeah….” Joyce reluctantly whispered. “Ok…let’s not talk about it yet,” Shirley said and Joyce gratefully agreed. Some of us heard their conversation and got curious. We started to ask them what did they hear but both insisted that they were not going to talk about it until later. So we sensed something but we just kept quiet and went into the car. Everyone was quite queit, waiting for the 2 girls to reveal their story. The girl whose house we visited was not in the car.

“Can you now tell us about whatever you 2 were talking about just now?” one of my friend asked, breaking the silence. We were all Chinese, while the father of my other friend, Belinda was a Singh. So we could freely speak in Cantonese.

“Ok..” Shirley said, looking at Joyce. “you know…as I was walking along the corridor to the stairs, I heard…music coming from the musical doll in Angeline’s (the girl whom we visited)bedroom!”

Hearing that, we are stunned. All of us knew for sure nobody turned on that musical doll. We were walking out together and we didn’t hear anything. The musical doll was a girly doll with curly hair, big eyes, the usual doll la..it was placed on the stand just beside the bed where we played our little “game”.

Hearing that, we were spooked. Shirley said that initially she didn’t really want to believe what she heard. That was why she had asked Joyce about it since Joyce actually was walking behind Shirley. Joyce was the last one and Shirley wanted to confirm her hearing with Joyce. Joyce heard it too. There was also no reason for the 2 girls to lie about it because they had been playing this “game” for many times and could have lied even before this. We didn’t dare to tell Angeline since she would be sleeping in her bedroom that night. Could it be that we didn’t properly asked the spirit to leave due to the hurry to get downstairs? Or could it be that we had played too many times and got too “ying”?

Whatever the reason, one thing was for sure. That was the last time we play any spiritual game. We told the story to a nun from a temple after that , to seek her opinion on what happened. She said that “some people may not believe the existence of the supernatural, but well, it does exist as you all may have experienced. What you all did which was to stop playing the “game” was the right thing to do. Thank goodness.”