This is a personal essay about my childhood memory of my “evil Magic 8 Ball” — that is, being told that my Magic 8 Ball — a simple toy, was a nefarious occult item by a supposedly well-meaning neighbor.
Table of Contents
This essay has some affiliate links in the mix. My primary motivation in writing this is to recollect memories from my childhood — this is one I’ve wanted, for some reason, to write about for a while — but it does mention quite a few objects. Where those objects are available on Amazon, I’ve linked to them. If you click such a link and make a subsequent purchase, I may get a small commission because, hey, we need to support our blogging hobby somehow!
The “Evil Magic 8 Ball” Essay
Please? I begged my mom. I was — to my recollection — around 9 years old, and ngetting the Magic 8 Ball for my birthday was, for me, the near-equivalent of Ralphie’s obsession with the Red Ryder BB gun in A Christmas Story.
So, I was ecstatic when I received this divinatory tool of excellence. I went around prognosticating everyone’s fortune to the point of obnoxiousness. “Ask me a question!” I would declare until I could elicit a yes/no question from my prey. Then I’d run my hands over the ball, give it a good shake, and gravely give them their answer: sadly, “Outlook not so good,” or joyfully, “It is decidedly so!”
I eventually got around to Mrs. Jensen, who lived around the block from us and was the mother of Priscilla, a friend I’d grown up alongside despite a four-year age difference and because of proximity. Mrs. Jensen was well known to everyone, I imagine, within a radius of at least a few miles as she would, wherever she went, preach to people in an attempt to “save” them and prepare them for the rapture — which she believed was going to happen in the very-near-future.
As you might guess, she did not share my enthusiasm for my new toy.
“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head with an air of gloom, “that’s not good.” She went on to explain to me that my new toy was a “tool of Satan” and that I had better not use it. This sapped quite a bit of the joy I was experiencing in playing fortune-teller to the neighborhood.
The evil Magic 8 ball was one of what would be a long line of things that she’d warn me against during my childhood: Ouija (Possession!) 1, The Exorcist 2 (yes, scary, but when I finally did see it, it failed to elicit the demonic visions she claimed it would), Led Zeppelin IV and the Beatles White Album (play it backward and it says demonic things) 3, Budweiser (whose floats she would loudly boo when they passed in our community parade), the tarot deck or cootie catcher 4 (divination), and Richard Hittleman’s 28-day yoga program (False Religions!).
Apparently, the evil of the Magic 8 Ball fell into the same category of suspect objects as the tarot deck: divinatory tools. One wasn’t (according to Mrs. Jensen) supposed to try to tell the future.
Yes, there are admonitions in the Bible against divination. But the Bible also admonishes against trying to forecast Jesus’ return. Mrs. Jensen, however, would conveniently ignore those passages, passing along whatever she heard from a televangelist or — I sometimes suspected — concocted in her own imagination.
“Pastor Snack,” she told me during her daughter’s birthday party at a roller rink, “says that he had a vision of a coin with the year 1984 on it. The rapture will come before that, and Jesus will take all of us good Christians away with him, and the rest of the world will be left with seven years of tribulation. But that means you won’t have to do awful things like grow up or get married! Isn’t that wonderful?”
Apparently, getting told “Outlook good” by my clairvoyant toy was Satanic. It was perfectly acceptable, however, to “reassure” a nine-year-old that the world would soon end.
Wow. That’s a lot for a nine-year-old to unpack.
I recall calculating that I’d be turning 15 in 1984 4, thinking that maybe I wanted to grow up and have a family, feeling abashed that I did not confess my already-burgeoning doubts about whether I was, in fact, a “good Christian,” and considering that I didn’t know the word, “tribulation.”
Based on the context, tribulation didn’t sound like a good thing to me.
It struck me that she didn’t seem all that troubled by the suffering of those left behind. But my mom always had told me that Mrs. Jensen had “good intentions,” and I imagine that her idea of “saving” the unconverted masses from this fate was what prompted her to preach to any ears that would listen. 5
Forecasting the end of the world was sort of a hobby to her. This wasn’t, then, an isolated occurrence. However, it was a memorable one, because by the time we got ready to leave the skating rink, she had a small, but angry crowd gathered around her.
I walked out, pretending not to be with her, and waited outside the rink. Her ever-present presence was one reason I started distancing myself from Priscilla as I grew into teenhood and bypassed the year 1984, failing to ascend to heaven and stubbornly advancing toward that horrible act of growing up.
But back to the evil Magic 8 Ball. Though I was already gradually becoming a young skeptic, I was still a kid and, between her warnings making me nervous and wanting to be a people-pleaser, I gave the “foul” device away to a friend.
Afterward, I proudly told Mrs. Jensen I’d given away the evil Magic 8 Ball, expecting praise. You can guess that I was disappointed in this expectation. Instead, she appeared shocked and lectured that I was just “passing along the evil.”
What did she expect me to do? Pound it apart with a hammer? 6 Burn it? Throw it off a cliff? No, wait! It might survive then, and some unsuspecting soul might fall under its influence!
But I didn’t ask for it back. Giving things to a friend and then asking for them back, at that time, elicited being called a particular name we no longer use, fortunately, as it’s very insensitive.
I did, however, tell my mom that I’d given the ball away—though, for some reason, I didn’t tell her why. If I try to put myself back there now, I recall mild shame. She appeared perplexed that I’d begged for this toy only to give it away. But she shrugged and said, “OK,” if that’s what you want to do with it.
I never got another 8 ball toy, though I used one at a friend’s house and never suffered evil effects. Mrs. Jensen would probably see that differently if she were still around, as I’m now an atheist with an interest in Buddhism, which she would consider evil in itself. But, ironically, knowing Mrs. Jensen had much more to do with starting me on my voyage toward skepticism than any nefarious toys did.
I’m tempted to go out and buy another Magic 8 Ball, just for nostalgia! I’d say, for that, “Outlook good!”
Mrs. Jensen did — many years later, when I was in my teens — try to convince me to get rid of my tarot deck. The same deck still sits in a box on my shelf.
My Evil Magic 8 Ball: Afterthoughts
As an aside:
There have actually been “evil Magic 8 Ball” toys made, at times, though I could find none of them on Amazon. Ones with intentionally suspect messages. I’m making an assumption that they were removed by Mattel. You can find, however, branded 8 balls, like the Stranger Things Magic 8 Ball as the object made an appearance in the show.
Though I haven’t thought about this memory for quite some time and am far-removed from being influened by Mrs. Jensen-type thinking, you can still find plenty of people online worrying about the “occult” nature of simple toys like the “evil Magic 8 Ball.”
Instead of worrying about the suspect nature of plastic toys, like an evil Magic 8 Ball, how about taking some time to question whether there is real evidence for what you believe?
Another aside: When I write about real people, I mostly use fake names. At some point, I may put together a list of people who tend to reappear if I continue to write personal essays, so I can keep these names consistent. “Mrs. Jensen”Mrs. Jensen” is long gone, but loomed large in my childhood, and was one of the reasons I ended up at the library, as a refuge, reading books on world religions.
Footnotes
- Which, of course, you know if you’ve seen enough horror films.[↩]
- Which she actually picketed when it showed at the theater two blocks from our house.[↩]
- Though I was never sure what it was actually supposed to be saying.[↩]
- Those paper fortune teller things we folded up as kids.[↩]
- It’s a good thing we didn’t have Facebook then. She’d definitely have been one of those people amplifying false information.[↩]
- In retrospect, that may have been fun.[↩]