Hi all. Thought I'd share something interesting that happened to me about 15 years ago.

Most won't believe me but for what it's worth I promise everything I tell you is 100% true and how it happened to the best of my memory however names have been changed

I was about 18 and I was hanging out at my friend Joanne's house with some other school friends.

Can't quite remember how we got onto the subject but towards the end of the evening Joanne thought it would be fun to perform a seance! Joanne's and her family were from Capetown South Africa had a deep rooted interest in the spiritual (or at least that's what Joanne made out to us)

With the lights off and candles lit We all sat at a round table, with cards fanned out around the edge. Each card had a letter of the alphabet arranged A-Z and a shot glass placed in the middle. Joanne starts speaking out to the spirits in Afrikaans. I remember pulling a face and rolling my eyes (it was too dark for anyone to take offence) at the time I was an insufferable 'enlightened' atheist teen dork! You know the type, cringey 4chan edgelord who thinks any form of spirituality or religion is beneath me and my superior intellect! I never wore a fedora but I was damn close! However what was about to happen made me question everything

It started mundane enough, a few questions were asked and the shot glass we were resting our fingers on started to move to and fro until eventually one of my friends asked 'the spirit' if they were associated with anyone in the room. The shot glass moved directly towards me. Incredulous I asked 'the spirit' "if you're associated with me then what's my mother's maiden name?" My eyes fixate on the letters that spell out her maiden name (Jones) but the glass started spelling out something different. First the glass went to "T" then "H" then "O" I thought then it was bullshit as it was spelling out something completely wrong. I was then struck by a horrific realisation!

When my mom was 6 months old her biological father died of a heart attack and a year after that she took her step father's name! I completely forgot this in the moment as I was expecting the glass to read out the maiden name she had for the majority of her life but it was actually spelling out her original maiden name of Thompson!

It was a fact so trivial that I barely remembered it myself! It was something never talked about even within my family as it happened so long ago! It would be hard to believe that any of my friends would know this esoteric piece of my family's history that occurred 20 years before I was even born but non the less some how it was being spelled out Infront of my very eyes! THOMPSON! My school friends and I wouldn't talk about anything deeper than video games and girls at that age and there's no way I ever mentioned this to any of them! It's not like one of my pot smoking looser friends had a copy of my mom's birth certificate and none of them had ever met anyone else in my family. There was literally no way anyone could have known this!

Before I could contemplate this for too long or ask any other questions to my ghostly associate Joanne's mom came into the room and turns the lights on and with a thick SA accent shouts something like "bloody hell Joanne, stop messing around with this silly crap" And put a definitive stop to the proceedings

Of course at the time I played off as a prank but the more I think of it, the more my mind wonders. Did something actually paranormal happen that night? I know it's nothing dramatic or exciting, I didn't see an apparition or a cryptid, but unlike 90% of the shit you read on reddit this experience is actually true and something to this day I can't explain. I'd love to hear your thoughts

TLDR: Very obscure information about my family history was divulged during a seance which non of the participants could have possibly known!