Paul McCartney Was Not Happy With George Harrison After a Cruel Ouija Board Prank

Before The Beatles rose to astronomical success, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and some friends spent a night together gathered around a Ouija board. For a moment, McCartney believed he’d made contact with the spirit of his mother. Harrison broke the intensity of the moment by revealing that he’d been controlling the planchette. McCartney was not happy to discover that it had been a prank.

Paul McCartney’s mother died when he was 14

When McCartney was 14, his mother, Mary, died of cancer. Her death permanently changed the McCartney family.

“That was the worst thing for me, seeing my dad cry,” he said, per the Mirror. “But I was determined not to let it affect me. I learned to put a shell around me.”

He shared that one of his biggest difficulties, as the years have passed since her death, has been to remember her face.

“At night when she came home [from work], she would cook, so we didn’t have a lot of time with each other,” McCartney said, per the Telegraph. “But she was just a very comforting presence in my life. And when she died, one of the difficulties I had, as the years went by, was that I couldn’t recall her face so easily. That’s how it is for everyone, I think. As each day goes by, you just can’t bring their face into your mind, you have to use photographs and reminders like that.”

Paul McCartney was angry about a prank George Harrison pulled

Several years after his mother’s death, McCartney, Harrison, and some friends were playing with a Ouija board. Per the book Paul McCartney: A Life by Peter Ames Carlin, McCartney sat “bolt upright in his chair” when the board began to spell about a message from Mary McCartney. He was transfixed until Harrison started laughing. He’d been pushing the planchette to make it seem as though the message was coming from McCartney’s late mother.

“Paul jumped on him,” McCartney’s on-and-off-again girlfriend Iris Caldwell said. “He wasn’t very happy about it.”

While Harrison felt comfortable making a joke about McCartney’s mother, Caldwell had taken note of the impact her death had on McCartney.

“It made him very self-contained,” she said. “He never mentioned her at all and kept a protective shell around himself all the time.”

Paul McCartney thought of George Harrison as a younger brother

Though McCartney and Harrison didn’t always get along, they thought of each other as family. McCartney, who was a bit older, looked to Harrison as a younger brother. McCartney recalled their final moments together before Harrison’s death.

“I sat with him for a few hours when he was in treatment just outside New York,” he told Uncut. “He was about 10 days away from his death, as I recall. We joked about things – just amusing, nutty stuff. It was good. It was like we were dreaming. He was my little baby brother, almost, because I’d known him that long. We held hands. It’s funny, even at the height of our friendship – as guys – you would never hold hands. It just wasn’t a Liverpool thing. But it was lovely.”