This true life scary story inspired a new Netflix movie titled Veronica. But why I want to share this here is to give us an insight into what happens when one uses the Ouija board.
These days people use the Ouija board like it's some sort of game and end up invoking demonic spirits. That's why there is a whole lot of demon possession cases cos people are dabbling into the occult knowingly or ignorantly.
Listen: there is nothing harmless about the devil. This story is a proof.
Though Netflix called her Veronica, her real name was Estafania Gutierrez Lazaro. The eldest of four children, she died suddenly and inexplicably in August 1991, six months after playing with a Ouija board, and aged just eighteen.
The two events, her devout Catholic parents Maximo and Conception were convinced, were directly linked.
They would later tell police that their daughter and her friends had developed an interest in the occult and on occasion had dabbled in Ouija boards.
When the boyfriend of one of the group died in a tragic motorbike accident, Estafania and two of her peers decided to perform a makeshift seance at their school.
The seance was interrupted by a teacher and later, as they tried to make sense of what had befallen their daughter, Maximo and Conception claimed that both her friends and teacher had told them they had seen a strange swirling smoke enter Estefania’s nose and mouth.
Days later, their daughter began having seizures and hallucinatory visions.
Sometimes she would go into fits of wild rage, snarling and barking at her younger brothers, and on other occasions she would tell her parents that she would see shadowy people walk past her bedroom at night.
Was it some sort of psychotic episode? Estafania’s frantic parents took her to doctor after doctor, yet none could find anything physically wrong and none could give a diagnosis.
All the while, Estefania’s health progressively worsened, and her seizures became ever more frequent. She was, she told her parents, haunted day and night by hallucinations and visions.
Finally, amid worsening health, the teenager was admitted to Madrid’s Gregorio Marañón Hospital where, on a sweltering evening in August 1991, she died.
According to medical reports, no cause of death was given and instead Estafania's case was labelled "unexplained".
If her grieving parents hoped that was the end of the strange and disturbing events that had visited their household they were wrong: as the months rolled by the family started to experience for themselves a series of unnerving and unexplained phenomena.
Doors would slam out of nowhere, electric appliances turned on and off, the couple sensed shadowy beings in the backdrop, and a photo of their daughter unexplained burst into flames.
Finally, at dawn on November 27 1992, one event unfolded which drove a terrified Conception and her husband from their bed.
"I felt pressure on top of me but there was no-one around," she later recalled. "I said (to Mr Gutierrez) 'there’s someone here'. I then felt a paid of hands grab my feet and then grab my hand, which were uncovered by the blanket."
The terrified pair called the National Police who arrived to find the terrified couple cowering on the pavement outside their apartment block with their children.
Leading the investigation was Police Inspector Jose Pedro Negri, who to this day confides he remains shaken by a night he has never fully been able to make sense of.
In an interview given to Spanish television in 2012 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Vallecas case, he relived the moments he arrived outside the apartment block to find a "nervous and anxious" family unable to go back in.
"They said that it had been a terrible time —that pictures had been flying off the wall, that the picture hooks were jumping out and plates were flying through the air. It was something dreadful to see," he recalled.
"I asked him why he thought it was happening and he replied that they’d had a daughter who used the Ouija board and then she was possessed and then suffered a terrible death.
"From that point on, terrible phenomena started to appear in the house."
Initially sceptical, Jose asked the family to accompany him back into the apartment.
"After all, what could I do?" he asked. "And I wasn’t on my own as two other police cars had come too, so there were six of us in total to go up.
"So we went up and he explained what had been going on, all the paraphernalia, furniture and objects strewn around the room, the picture of the daughter upside down."
The frightened couple told the police inspector that the phenomena tended to happen at quiet times, when the house was shrouded in darkness.
"I immediately told them to turn off the light," he recalls. "We were all in a tiny little living room, all of us and the family. Then from one moment to the next, a door in the sideboard slammed open violently again and again. Bang! It was awful."
Jose shouted at his colleagues to turn on the light, and immediately searched for hidden gadgets which might explain what had just unfolded.
"But there was nothing at all," he recalled. "At that point, four of my colleagues asked if they could leave because they couldn’t cope with it. So then it was just two of us."
At that point the family took the duo to one of the apartment’s two bedrooms where, they said, most of the phenomena took place.
"It was a small bedroom with twin beds," Jose recalled. "The father told us that sometimes when he and his little son were sitting on the bed, his son was picked up and thrown on to the other bed in a flying move.
"I sat down in the same bedroom to see if anything would happen. We heard a terrible scream behind us which came from a small balcony. I quickly opened the door and ran out to see if I could see anything. But there was nothing. No fallen stones. Nothing.
"It was 2.30 in the morning and the noise was dreadful."
On return to the bedroom however, he noticed two things that made his spine tingle.
"When I’d first entered the room, I noticed they had a large wooden crucifix on the wall and hanging off it was a smaller pearly crucifix like the one children get at their first holy communions. There was also a poster."
Yet in the few seconds he had been absent, something had changed. "The crucifix had been turned upside down, the little crucifix was on the floor and the poster and the door had three or four deep scratches in them as if someone had clawed through the poster and deep into the door."
There was only one word for it. "It was," Jose told the interviewer, "horrendous."
Too scared to stay there a moment longer, Máximo and Concepcion decided to move out of their home while Jose wrote up what he had witnessed in a police report - a copy of which we see flashed up at the beginning of Veronica and which, the viewer is told, the drama is based on.
The Sun
*Be vigilant. Your enemy, the devil, goes about to and fro (restless) looking for whom to devour. Don't be ignorant of his devices. Subtlety is his watchword.
These days people use the Ouija board like it's some sort of game and end up invoking demonic spirits. That's why there is a whole lot of demon possession cases cos people are dabbling into the occult knowingly or ignorantly.
Listen: there is nothing harmless about the devil. This story is a proof.
 |
| Netflix's Veronica Estafania |
Though Netflix called her Veronica, her real name was Estafania Gutierrez Lazaro. The eldest of four children, she died suddenly and inexplicably in August 1991, six months after playing with a Ouija board, and aged just eighteen.
The two events, her devout Catholic parents Maximo and Conception were convinced, were directly linked.
They would later tell police that their daughter and her friends had developed an interest in the occult and on occasion had dabbled in Ouija boards.
When the boyfriend of one of the group died in a tragic motorbike accident, Estafania and two of her peers decided to perform a makeshift seance at their school.
The seance was interrupted by a teacher and later, as they tried to make sense of what had befallen their daughter, Maximo and Conception claimed that both her friends and teacher had told them they had seen a strange swirling smoke enter Estefania’s nose and mouth.
Days later, their daughter began having seizures and hallucinatory visions.
Sometimes she would go into fits of wild rage, snarling and barking at her younger brothers, and on other occasions she would tell her parents that she would see shadowy people walk past her bedroom at night.
Was it some sort of psychotic episode? Estafania’s frantic parents took her to doctor after doctor, yet none could find anything physically wrong and none could give a diagnosis.
All the while, Estefania’s health progressively worsened, and her seizures became ever more frequent. She was, she told her parents, haunted day and night by hallucinations and visions.
Finally, amid worsening health, the teenager was admitted to Madrid’s Gregorio Marañón Hospital where, on a sweltering evening in August 1991, she died.
According to medical reports, no cause of death was given and instead Estafania's case was labelled "unexplained".
If her grieving parents hoped that was the end of the strange and disturbing events that had visited their household they were wrong: as the months rolled by the family started to experience for themselves a series of unnerving and unexplained phenomena.
Doors would slam out of nowhere, electric appliances turned on and off, the couple sensed shadowy beings in the backdrop, and a photo of their daughter unexplained burst into flames.
Finally, at dawn on November 27 1992, one event unfolded which drove a terrified Conception and her husband from their bed.
"I felt pressure on top of me but there was no-one around," she later recalled. "I said (to Mr Gutierrez) 'there’s someone here'. I then felt a paid of hands grab my feet and then grab my hand, which were uncovered by the blanket."
The terrified pair called the National Police who arrived to find the terrified couple cowering on the pavement outside their apartment block with their children.
Leading the investigation was Police Inspector Jose Pedro Negri, who to this day confides he remains shaken by a night he has never fully been able to make sense of.
In an interview given to Spanish television in 2012 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Vallecas case, he relived the moments he arrived outside the apartment block to find a "nervous and anxious" family unable to go back in.
 |
| Estafania's room |
"They said that it had been a terrible time —that pictures had been flying off the wall, that the picture hooks were jumping out and plates were flying through the air. It was something dreadful to see," he recalled.
"I asked him why he thought it was happening and he replied that they’d had a daughter who used the Ouija board and then she was possessed and then suffered a terrible death.
"From that point on, terrible phenomena started to appear in the house."
Initially sceptical, Jose asked the family to accompany him back into the apartment.
"After all, what could I do?" he asked. "And I wasn’t on my own as two other police cars had come too, so there were six of us in total to go up.
"So we went up and he explained what had been going on, all the paraphernalia, furniture and objects strewn around the room, the picture of the daughter upside down."
The frightened couple told the police inspector that the phenomena tended to happen at quiet times, when the house was shrouded in darkness.
"I immediately told them to turn off the light," he recalls. "We were all in a tiny little living room, all of us and the family. Then from one moment to the next, a door in the sideboard slammed open violently again and again. Bang! It was awful."
Jose shouted at his colleagues to turn on the light, and immediately searched for hidden gadgets which might explain what had just unfolded.
"But there was nothing at all," he recalled. "At that point, four of my colleagues asked if they could leave because they couldn’t cope with it. So then it was just two of us."
At that point the family took the duo to one of the apartment’s two bedrooms where, they said, most of the phenomena took place.
"It was a small bedroom with twin beds," Jose recalled. "The father told us that sometimes when he and his little son were sitting on the bed, his son was picked up and thrown on to the other bed in a flying move.
"I sat down in the same bedroom to see if anything would happen. We heard a terrible scream behind us which came from a small balcony. I quickly opened the door and ran out to see if I could see anything. But there was nothing. No fallen stones. Nothing.
"It was 2.30 in the morning and the noise was dreadful."
On return to the bedroom however, he noticed two things that made his spine tingle.
"When I’d first entered the room, I noticed they had a large wooden crucifix on the wall and hanging off it was a smaller pearly crucifix like the one children get at their first holy communions. There was also a poster."
 |
| A scene from Netflix's Veronica |
Yet in the few seconds he had been absent, something had changed. "The crucifix had been turned upside down, the little crucifix was on the floor and the poster and the door had three or four deep scratches in them as if someone had clawed through the poster and deep into the door."
There was only one word for it. "It was," Jose told the interviewer, "horrendous."
Too scared to stay there a moment longer, Máximo and Concepcion decided to move out of their home while Jose wrote up what he had witnessed in a police report - a copy of which we see flashed up at the beginning of Veronica and which, the viewer is told, the drama is based on.
The Sun
*Be vigilant. Your enemy, the devil, goes about to and fro (restless) looking for whom to devour. Don't be ignorant of his devices. Subtlety is his watchword.
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