Whether you are a believer or non-believer of paranormal activity, “Summoning Spirits” would have had your heart racing. On Oct. 30, students joined magician and entertainer Peter Boie for his magic show in the Student Union Theatre. Boie visits different colleges to perform shows like this one at the University of Connecticut, especially during this time of year. Students were thrilled to attend the event.
The show started lightly, with Boie coming onto the stage and spilling out building blocks from a bag while stacking them and telling students a story about a ghost named Mary. Afterward, he stood away from the blocks and asked Mary to give him a sign that she was there. After a couple of seconds, the block tower fell apart. Already intriguing the students, Boie moved on to more intense acts.
Many acts were performed, and throughout, he either picked out students from the audience or asked for volunteers to join him, essentially gaining each student’s interest. One act involved Russian roulette, where Boie put a sharp nail in one paper bag out of five and then asked a student volunteer to mix them up while he wasn’t looking. That student then held a bell that, if it rang, was a warning from a ghost named Mimi that Boie was about to slam his hand onto the paper bag with the nail inside. The bell rang right when he was about to slam his hand into the second to last bag left. The bag was then revealed to indeed have the nail inside.
Another act that surprised many students was one involving an issue of Time magazine. Boie wrote something on a whiteboard but did not reveal what he had written to the students. He then asked the student volunteer, “have you ever changed your mind before?” When the student responded, “yeah,” he returned to the whiteboard and wrote something else.
The student then stuck a paper into the middle of the magazine. Then, holding the magazine behind her in one hand and a pen in the other, she drew a small dime-sized circle anywhere on the magazine. Boie asked the student which word she thought was in the middle of the circle, to which she said, “leader.” He told her to pick another one, and she chose “always.” After some deliberating, she decided to stick with “leader” as the most centered word. Boie displayed the whiteboard, where the word “always” was crossed out and then the word “leader” was written below it.
After performing various more skillful acts, the finale shocked the whole theatre. Boie left the stage and played a video of him in Vermont parked outside “Emily’s Bridge.” For reference, Emily was a woman who had died on the bridge in the distant past. Many who have crossed the bridge claim to have heard something or left with a scratch somewhere on them.
Boie left his car with an Ouija board and a camera and admitted that after 20 minutes of trying, he got nothing. However, he then decided to take out a noose to “provoke” Emily into coming out, since that was how she died. The Ouija board then moved, and Boie ran back to his car, where we saw a scratch on his cheek.
“Who wants to talk to Emily?” asked Boie as he returned to the stage. Angela Radoncipi, a third-semester psychology student, was chosen for this act. When asked about her experience, Radoncipi said, “I went on stage for the last act, and I sat down, and we used my phone for the voice memo to talk to Emily. Everyone was quiet, and she was answering when the magician asked her, ‘What is your name?’ ‘What do you want us to do for you?’” She also said “stuff like that was scary because the Ouija board moved, the lights went out and the bell rang. It was crazy.”
When Boie asked the questions, the students could not hear any response from Emily. However, when the recordings were played back, you could hear Emily answering every question. As for the question, “What do you want us to do for you?” she told the crowd to “stop breathing,” which was a bit rude and terrifying.
“The fact that that voice recording was still there on the phone even after the show and you could still hear the voice, like, that’s crazy to me because I’m also a non-believer of this stuff,” said Chloe Mirasol, a first-semester civil and environmental engineering major, when asked if there was anything that especially surprised her.
After the show, students gathered around Radoncipi to listen to the recordings, even asking if she could send them so they could share them with friends and others. While some students immediately left after this frightening show, some could not get over the experience.