The first one was when I was about 11 years old, attending a sleepover party. We were all camped out on the living room floor, a bunch of girls (at least seven or eight of us), and someone suggested doing levitation. We had one girl lie down on her back, with two girls kneeling on each side, plus one at the feet and one at the head, with only two fingers resting lightly underneath the girl's body. The girl at the head would place (rub?) her fingertips on the temples, and make up a story about how the girl in the middle "died." We would then be able to lift the girl in the middle very high up over our heads, using only our two fingers each. The body of the person being levitated stayed rigid.
We did this a couple of times, once raising a girl well above our heads, which was pretty exciting. I was skeptical and said, "Why don't we try lifting someone without the 'dying' story?" We weren't able to lift anyone off the ground without the ritual, even with our hands. When they tried to levitate me, I remember only half my body (lower half) rising into the air. It seemed odd that my body could remain flat while my legs were tilting upwards, as if I were lying on a board. At the time, it seemed like a perfectly normal party game, that we barely discussed afterwards, but looking back, I am a little freaked out.
The other experience was a year or two later, this time with a Ouija board. My sister and I purchased one, and along with one of her friends, we decided to try it out in my sister's room (she had the darkest windowshade, so the room was almost pitch black). Our cat was curled up napping on her bed. We sat in the middle of the floor and agreed that we wanted to see for real if it worked, so no joking around.
After about ten minutes of patiently asking, "Is there a spirit present?" the needle began to move. We were just beginning to feel it nudging when all of a sudden, we heard the cat hiss. We flipped up the windowshade and the cat was nervously walking past the closet towards the door, clearly agitated. She sat by the door and obviously wanted to get let out immediately. We stuffed the Ouija board back into the box and kept it underneath the couch in the den, never to touch it again. My mother, a devout Irish Catholic, didn't like us fooling around with it anyway, although someday I'd like to give it another try- that experience has changed me from non-believer to skeptical.
skeptika's note:
L.B.C. had a similar experience with the game of "Light as a Feather".