Welcome to the Hidden Gin, a production of I Heart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron

Minky.

You might recall the story I shared much earlier in the season about family friends that had

a number of young sons who used to scare the daylights out of me and my siblings, with

gin tails from their village back home in Pakistan.

Frankly, I was pretty disappointed that our own relatives never shared any gin stories,

but I chalked it up to the fact that we were city folk.

Maybe it was in the villages that the real gin action took place, and unfortunately we

didn't have a village.

In my preteen years, I got more interested in the occult, and because my own family had

pretty much nothing to contribute, I sought out every book on the subject in the tiny local

library where we lived in western Maryland.

Dramatic possession, haunted houses, vampires and zombies, UFOs, well they were all gin

to me.

I was always walking the line between fear and fascination, but I couldn't get enough.

And it was in those books that I learned that people didn't have to be hapless bystanders

in supernatural encounters.

They could actually control those encounters, communicate with these forces, even summon

them.

And I wanted to try.

So I saved up to $14 needed to buy a Ouija board from Kmart, no small feat for a kid

in the 1980s, and I fearfully gave it a try, alone in my bedroom one night.

...