The Last Seance - 1946

This story is from around eighty years ago, when Millpond was getting back to normal after the war, and in some cases, mourning those they’d lost. This is where a woman named Annie Finch came in.

Annie was a medium, or so she liked to call herself. She lived by herself in an apartment just off Shrew Street, Plymouth. Much like ol’ Mavis Simmons up on Hallow Hill, she made her living giving psychic readings and conducting seances. Only, unlike Mavis, she was a complete charlatan. She’d seen how popular Miss Simmons’ readings and seances were, what a tidy profit she must’ve made for herself, and figured she wanted a piece of that pie.

She undercut Mavis’s prices just enough to take a chunk of her business, but not so much that they cheapened her image. Couldn’t have people thinking she was a grifter, after all. And she had to make a profit.

Readings had been her bread and butter the last few years. Like everywhere else in the country, there was a lot of uncertainty in Millpond during the war years, and folks were anxious to see what the future held for them and their families. Then the war had ended, and suddenly seances saw a rise in popularity. Many grieving widows wanted to say goodbye to their fallen sweethearts, wanting some sort of closure, although they didn’t call it that back then. Parents too, whose sons had been drafted some years prior, and never returned.

That worked just fine for Annie; seances were nearly double what she charged for readings, and she felt no shame in taking money from grief-stricken townsfolk.

They did involve a little more work, however. Readings were easy enough, they were mostly a combination of tricks, manipulation, and telling people what they wanted to hear, in a vague sorta way. Seances, on the other hand, required more effort and showmanship to convince folks they were really talking to their deceased spouses or young’uns.

That didn’t stop Annie, of course. She’d learned a thing or two over the years; fishing wire to make objects appear to move by themselves, cheesecloth for ectoplasm… she even had an assistant named Dora who’d hide behind curtains and cabinets, knocking on walls, and wailing at just the right times.

She later invested in a Ouija board which she incorporated into her routine. Now, she could’ve just moved the planchette about the board herself, spelling out whatever message she wanted, but where was the showmanship in that? Annie went a step further and glued a one-cent coin underneath the funny-shaped piece of wood. And not just any cent. This one was made of steel, one of many minted in forty-three to conserve copper for the war effort. War pennies, they called ‘em. It had to be steel, see, for her trick to work.

During seances, she would instruct the customer to place his or her finger on the planchette, while Annie’s finger rested on top of theirs, light as a feather, with not nearly enough pressure to move the object. She would then hold a magnet under the table and use it to move the planchette. The sturdy mahogany table had had to be modified by a carpenter to make it thin enough in the centre for the magnet to work, but it had been worth it. Her bookings had gone up nearly a third since she’d started using the board.

The hardest part was concealing what she was doing. She’d got her hands on a plaster arm off an old mannequin, lord only knows how, and would stuff it into her dress sleeve. With the lights dimmed and gloves on, she could get away with fooling customers that it was the real thing, while her real arm would be under the table, via a carefully positioned slit in her bodice, holding onto the magnet. Annie’s bulky build, along with the long shawl she always wore draped around her shoulders, made it hard to tell anything was amiss, if you weren’t looking that closely.

There had been a couple of close calls, times that ol’ Annie was almost caught out. Once when she’d accidentally let go of the magnet. But that woman could talk and manipulate herself out of any sticky situation, and so for a few years, she made herself a nice living.

That was, of course, until Ingrid Owen walked through her door.

Now, like many young women in Millpond at that time, Ingrid had lost her husband Norman some two years before, but not in combat. He had taken his own life, and Ingrid had not come to terms with his death. She’d hoped making contact with her beloved, speaking with him one last time, might help her process what had happened.

So the day came, Annie prepared her parlour, using her usual tricks. The candles were lit, objects on the sideboard had been attached to invisible wires, ready to be pulled by Dora, waiting patiently behind the curtain, and the Ouija board was on the table.

Annie sat her paying guest at the table, and asked her to place a photograph of her husband and a personal or significant belonging of his by the Ouija board. She always requested such props; customers seemed to like and expect it, and more importantly, it provided a momentary distraction, during which Annie would pretend to be busying herself with the candles in the corner of the room, when really she’d be shrugging her right arm out of her dress sleeve, and stuffing the plaster arm in its place.

By the time Ingrid had retrieved the items from her purse - a dog-eared photo of a handsome young man and a ring that Annie presumed was his wedding band - and placed them on the table, Annie had finished in the corner. She took the seat next to Ingrid, distracting her with chatter whilst she used her real arm to discreetly place the fake one on the table, then she was ready to begin.

The seance started out as they normally did, Annie asking the spirit world if anyone had any messages for this young lady, asking for signs from her dead husband, with Dora thumping on the wall and pulling those invisible wires at just the right times. Then came the Ouija board. Annie, with the help of her magnet, was spelling out a message from the departed to his beloved, something that would comfort the poor girl. Something to say he was at peace. That was what they always wanted to hear. But she’d no sooner reached the ‘A’ in ‘peace’, when Ingrid turned to her suddenly, and demanded to know if she was moving the piece of wood.

“Hush child!” Annie replied. “Now how could I be movin’ it? My fingers are barely restin’ upon yours! Why, see for yourself!"

With that, she lifted her finger from Ingrid’s, and of course, the planchette continued to move.

“But it doesn’t make sense!” the younger woman cried. “How could he be at peace after

what he did to himself?! To us?!”

Annie had no time to think of a response, for at that moment, the mirror on the far side of the room shattered, as if struck with some great force. A thousand glittering shards fell to the floor and only a few jagged pieces remained in the brass frame.

The pair sat in stunned silence for a moment. Then the planchette, Ingrid’s finger still resting upon it, began to move again. But faster this time. Annie gaped at the triangle as it moved across the board. F R A.

“Stop that!” Annie hissed.

“I’m not doing it!” the other woman replied.

U

Annie grabbed Ingrid’s wrist and yanked it away from the board, just before the planchette reached its final letter.

D

With that, the board flew off the table, spinning like a frisbee, and hit the door with a loud thud. It landed on the floor next to the planchette, now upside down, the penny glued to the underside shining dimly in the candlelight.

There was silence for a moment, then a rustling sound as Dora freed herself from behind the curtain and darted for the door with a frightened whimper.

The two other women remained at the table, both wearing stunned expressions and neither saying a word for some time, until the younger of the two spoke up.

“Y ou’ve been lying all this time? To me and everyone else?” she said in a shaky voice.

“No!” Annie replied defensively, her own voice shaking a little. “I use some props here and there, that’s what people expect now! But all my readings are real and -”

She never finished her sentence, for at that moment the shawl that was draped around her shoulders suddenly tightened around her neck. With a gasp, she began pulling at the fabric, trying to loosen it. The shawl only tightened further, as though pulled by invisible hands. Panic-stricken and eyes bulging, Annie clawed at her neck. She seemed to be trying to say something to the other woman, but all that came out were inarticulate choking sounds.

Ingrid, who’d been frozen in fear for a moment, lunged forward and grabbed the shawl, desperately trying to yank it away from the woman’s neck, around which it was now tightly wound. It seemed the more she pulled, the tighter it became.

The strangled noises eventually dwindled, giving way to silence, as Annie began to lose consciousness. Sobbing, the younger woman tried to pry her fingers under the fabric, but it was no use.

“Stop!” she cried, now standing, and realising what was happening. “Norman! Stop!” The fabric binding the seated woman’s neck remained tightly pulled for another second or two, then loosened and dropped to her shoulders.

When Annie lifted her head to look at Ingrid, the look in her eyes, sorrowful and despondent, was not her own, nor was the voice with which she finally spoke. In fact, she had no recollection whatsoever of what happened to her just before she regained full consciousness, of how Ingrid’s late husband used her body to speak to his wife one last time, or what he said.

All she remembered after slipping into darkness as the shawl tightened, was waking at her table, dazed and foggy. And the young woman, tears drying on her face, waiting by her side for a doctor to arrive.

* * *

So that was it for ol’ Annie… no more seances, no more readings. What happened that afternoon shook her up real good, and even if she’d wanted to carry on, word eventually got out that she was a phoney.

Some things, she learned, really were best left to the professionals, and if you pissed off the spirit world enough to get a warnin’ like that from the afterlife… well maybe you should be thankful for that warnin’ and heed it before it’s too late.