Three American friends were reportedly hospitalized after they were "possessed" by the Ouija board they were playing with in a Mexican village, the U.K.'s Daily Mail newspaper reported Monday.
A young woman, her brother and cousin were playing with the Ouija board, a device used for contacting the spirit world, at a house in the village of San Juan Tlacotenco when they were allegedly taken over by evil spirits. Paramedics arrived at the home to find the woman out of control, forcing them to restrain her before transporting all three to a hospital.
"It appeared as if they were in a trance-like state, apparently after playing with the Ouija board," Victor Demesa, director of public safety in the neighboring town of Tepoztlan, said according to the newspaper.
The patients were said to have calmed down once they were given medication.
The trio had only been playing the Ouija board for a few minutes when the woman, 22-year-old Alexandra Huerta, began "growling" and frantically moving, the Daily Mail reported.
At the same time, Huerta's 22-year-old brother Sergio and her cousin Fernando Cuevas, 18, went blind and deaf.
Huerta's parents reportedly pleaded with a local Catholic priest to perform an exorcism. But the priest refused because the victims did not regularly attend church. That's when the parents called for medical help.
"The medical rescue of these three young people was very complicated," Demesa said according to the newspaper. "They spoke of feeling numbness, double vision, blindness, deafness, hallucinations, muscle spasm and difficulty swallowing."
The "possession" apparently ended once they were given painkillers, eye drops and anti-stress medication.
Ouija boards are designed with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0 through 9 and the words "yes," "no" and "goodbye." They come with a teardrop-shaped "planchette," which guides the user to different letters on the board.
The boards were first marketed in the 1890s as a playful way to get answers "about the past, present and future with marvelous accuracy," and also contact the dead, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
As for the trio that was hospitalized, Demesa told the Daily Mail that doctors could not definitively say if they were possessed by the spirit board or if it was all in their heads.
