I set up the board and pieces. It sits in the dining room on the good table, alone and quiet. A moment will come when a move is in my mind and I will go into the dining room and move the pieces. I use the extra Queens to remember whose move it is.

A memory will flash by – him in his chair, wrapped in four layers of blankets to keep warm, and the room thermostat set to 80° and I sweated as the sunlight poured through the window. Weak though he was, on the chessboard he could play me like an Olympic athlete. We always played at his house and he would have lunch catered in. I never paid a thin dime.

We really had nothing in common. He was the quintessential business executive/entrepreneur and I was the poet-priest, but he asked me one day if I played chess, and I said that yes, I did. You have to remember that I learned to play games long before the electronic shit and chess was at the top of my list. As a child, I loved beautiful chess sets and I had to learn the game. My mind embraced it easily.

Another memory flashes: there was a day when he beat me really badly and he looked at me and asked, “What’s bothering you?” He was right. He could essentially read my mind after a few games of chess. I was troubled. There were thorny financial issues and he was right, I was troubled. “My head was not in the game,” and he could feel it. We bonded like that.

He’s gone now. I officiated at his funeral and gave his eulogy. I walked his ashes to the tomb. Is it a great surprise that I feel him still with me? The veil between life and death is much thinner than most understand. Our important people can still be with us after they’re gone. I was at the hospital the night he died, better than I did with my own father. You might think this is ghoulish but death is a part of life and I had to try to understand it. I had to get as close as I could.

I have a beautiful wooden chess set with its own dedicated round table on which I play when guests come over. The ghost and I play on that one. He had a beautiful hand-carved set in the Medieval style that we used. I hoped that the family would give it to me after he died, considering all the time we spent with it, but they didn’t and it was unseemly to ask for it. I’ve never seen it or one like it again.

He is not slamming moves into my mind right now because he knows that I am writing, but that is often how I know he’s near – moves come into my mind. For now, I am writing and he waits impatiently in the Formative World with the next game in his mind.

Playing a deceased person has its own special challenges. Sometimes they want to play at odd hours. Sometimes it’s hard to tell your own thoughts from theirs. Sometimes they don’t really want to play, but only visit for a while. It helps to be a spiritual medium, but you don’t have to be. Just set up your board and get quiet. Visualize your opponent sitting across from you and let the messages form in your mind. Your ghostly opponent will tell you the moves he wants to play. You may have to play a couple of games with yourself before you really start sensing your opponent, but if you’re interested in it, it will happen. This may be a form of projection where you become two different people for a while. If it makes you more comfortable you can simply see it a playing yourself and be done with the visualizations. Projecting the adversary is more fun.

The chess ghost just beat me. He played a solid game. I could see his attack coming, but I couldn’t do the right things to stave it off. He played Black. We have already begun a new game. I will have my revenge. Since he won the last game, he will play White and I will take Black. The hand-carved chess set, maple and honey rosewood, gleams in the lamp light. We play at a relaxed pace. A single game may take three or four days.

We played to a draw. Black may have eventually won but it might have taken a couple of hours to chase the White King down. White had no other pieces left. So, we called it a draw. The protocol of chess is that the pieces are put back at the ready at the end of the game. You don’t leave a chess board not set up. It’s called, “Respect the Game.” I put the pieces back in place since my friend doesn’t have hands with which he might move things around.

Such is the power of chess, that even the dead return for another game. You might be wondering how I knew that my ghost friend was around. I’m not terribly psychic; I didn’t directly sense him at that time. I have to approach these things indirectly. I write all the time. I wrote a couple of articles that started out on another topic, but ended up talking about my friend. It has been years since he died. I’m beyond the grieving process with him. I became obsessed with chess (again). I read books on chess. I bought two new chess sets, even though the one I have is lovely. The clincher happened one night when I had put a 3-card tarot spread on Twitter. The middle card was the King of Pentacles. I couldn’t see how he fit in that context, and mentioned that. One of my Twitter friends who doesn’t know me personally suddenly chimed in, “He is an older male. Perhaps you knew him in life. He is drawing close to you.”

Suddenly it all came together. The pieces fit. I could see him now clearly in my mind’s eye. I somehow knew when he wanted to play. There was nothing scary or eerie about this awareness. To the contrary, it feels perfectly natural and normal. I have had a sharp awareness of “the other side” since I was a small child. My paternal grandparents died within three months of each other when I nine years old. This pushed me into the consideration of death at a time when my imagination was vividly active. My parents were people of faith, and they spoke to me directly and honestly about what had happened. I never felt that my grandparents were “gone” or annihilated. They lived in a different way and they were not far away from me. The idea that my friend might return to me in some virtual way for some friendly games of chess isn’t much of a stretch for me.  

The veil between worlds is much thinner than many realize. Sometimes we cross between the worlds unaware, as do residents of those worlds cross into ours. Can this be measured scientifically? Is it only a psychological phenomenon? Those questions are unanswerable with the current state of science and those arguments usually come down to a matter of belief, but what is undeniable is the subjective experiences that many of us have. There’s lots of “evidence” for that. Maybe the source of it is unknowable. I used to worry about these considerations more. Today, I just let myself experience what I’m experiencing without a lot of judgement and critical analysis.

We’re playing again tonight. I’m not sleepy so it looks like a long night of chess.


Syd Weedon
4/16/2024