The Hand That Haunts You

The Draw

What the table whispers about in the dark

The groups turn delicious this week, and Prim means that as the highest compliment. The packing photos of a fortnight ago have given way to tablescapes, and the tablescapes have gone gloriously gothic. Black cloths and tapers, a centerpiece of tiny paper bats, one woman who has lined her flowers up to spell something she will not translate. Somebody always posts a set with jet black tiles and asks whether it is too much, and the answer, every year, is a chorus of no, order one for me too. Prim watches it all with a cup of something and a great deal of satisfaction. A community that dresses its card table for a holiday is a community that has decided the game is worth the fuss.

And then, as reliably as the first cold snap, the debate arrives. Do you play on Halloween night itself, or do you surrender the evening to the doorbell? The table splits every year, and every year it splits along the same line. Half of you cannot imagine giving up a Friday to strangers in costumes. The other half cannot imagine a better night to have the girls over, candy bowl within reach, a game going on the kitchen table between trick or treaters. Prim will take a position, because she always does. Play. Answer the door between hands, admire every costume, give the good candy to the child who is clearly freezing in a homemade ghost, and come back to your rack. The game has waited all season for a night like this. Do not let it sit home alone.

What Prim will not abide is the player who uses the holiday as cover for a sulk, who announces she is “cursed this week” before the first wall is even built. We will get to curses. For now, Prim only asks that you come to the table expecting to enjoy yourself. The tiles can tell, you know.

Crak the Card

The hand that haunts you

Every player has one. Not one hand exactly, because the card is new every April and last year’s lines go with it, but one kind of hand. The ambitious, beautiful, difficult line she spots the moment the fresh card arrives, the one her heart does a small foolish leap for, and the one she is still telling the table, by August, simply does not like her. A different hand each year, the same lovely heartbreak every time. Prim is here, gently, to take the ghost by the collar and show you it is wearing a sheet.

The haunted hand is almost never unlucky. It is untimed.

The hand you cannot make is usually a perfectly good hand that you keep committing to at the wrong moment. You fall for it on the strength of the first Charleston, before the wall has shown you anything, and then you are married to it for the rest of the game while three better hands pass you by. A hand that needs a great deal to go right needs you to wait and see whether it will, not to decide on faith at the East wind. Prim has watched women fall for the hardest, prettiest line on the card year after year and blame the tiles, when the only thing standing between them and it was patience.

Chase it early, or set it down for good.

Here is Prim’s rule for your haunted hand, and she offers it with love. Give it the first third of the wall to prove itself. If by then your tiles are leaning its way and the discards are kind, commit and enjoy the pursuit, because a hand you adore is worth a little risk and the game should be fun. But if the wall is unkind and the hand has not come to you by the halfway mark, let it go that very turn, cleanly, without mourning, and take the plain workmanlike line that will actually close. The hand that haunts you does not want your loyalty. It wants your judgment. Give it the second and you will find, one of these seasons, that it was never cursed at all. It was only waiting for you to grow up a little at the table.

The Table Is Asking

A superstition, settled once and for all

It arrives every autumn, when the talk turns to luck and spells, and it is one of the oldest quarrels at the American table.

“Is it bad luck to touch another player’s rack, or is it just bad manners? My aunt swears it jinxes the whole hand. My friend says it is only rude. Which is it?”

Prim will give you her ruling plainly, and it is this. It is not bad luck. It is bad manners, which is far more serious, because luck forgets by the next hand and manners are remembered for years. A woman’s rack is her private study. It holds everything she has decided and everything she has not decided yet, and it is the one thing on that table that belongs to her alone. To reach across and move it, lift it, or even steady it without a word is to walk into her office and rifle her desk. No curse required. The discourtesy does all the work.

So no, your aunt’s hand was not jinxed by a stray hand on her rack. It was, Prim suspects, simply a difficult hand, and the touch merely gave her somewhere to put the disappointment, which is its own small kindness and Prim will not take it from her. Keep the superstition if you love it. Prim keeps a few of her own and would not dream of defending them. But keep it alongside the manners, not instead of them. Ask before you tidy the common tiles near someone’s seat. Never right a tipped rack but the owner’s. And if your own rack is sacred to you, say so warmly and early, and any table worth sitting at will honor it without a second thought.

Tell Prim the superstition you cannot shake, and whether you have ever caught yourself casting it on a Tuesday afternoon. And because a table never runs out of questions, this week Prim also settled what a jokerless hand is, and whether it still counts if you traded your Joker away, whether a concealed hand can win on someone else’s discard, and whether you may call a discard when all you have to go with it is Jokers.

Who’s Talking

The woman who turned Wednesday into a standing invitation

If a haunted table is a lonely one, then the cure for it is a full one, and almost nobody in the country has filled more tables lately than this week’s voice. She is Alyssa Gross, the founder of The Mahjong Society in Chicago, and Prim has been wanting to raise a cup to her for some time.

It began, as the best things do, with a simple idea. Gather people and teach them the game. Gross started a weekly Mahjong Wednesdays, the plainest invitation in the world, come on a Wednesday and learn, and the thing grew the way a good table grows. The Wednesdays became private lessons. The lessons became events that sold out. The events became a whole community of players in a city that, a few years ago, was not thought of as a mahjong town at all. The Society dates its founding to 2023, which means all of this has happened in about the time it takes most of us to finally make one difficult hand.

What Prim admires most is the part she cannot quite believe. Several of the Society’s instructors today were once Gross’s own students, women who came to learn on a Wednesday, fell for the game, and stayed to teach it to the next room. That is not a business. That is a lineage, the oldest and best way this game has ever traveled, from a patient teacher to a delighted student who becomes a patient teacher in her turn. In 2025 Gross put the method between covers with a book, Play Mahjong!, so that the Wednesday invitation could reach a table she will never sit at.

The Society’s own words for what it does are better than any Prim could invent. They believe, they say, that mahjong “is more than just a tile game: it’s a way to connect, unwind, and build meaningful friendships.” Prim could not have put it better and, being honest, has been trying to for longer than she cares to admit. It is the exact opposite of a haunted parlor. It is a bright loud room full of people who did not know one another last spring and now cannot imagine a week without the table.

And because the calendar is kind, they are proving the point this very week. On Halloween itself The Mahjong Society throws a Mahj-o-ween open play, costumes on and tiles out, at a Chicago brewery, with prizes for the brave. If you are anywhere near that room on the night, go. If you are not, let it be your proof that the game is thriving in rooms you have never heard of, run by women who simply decided to open the door. You can find Gross and the Society, and their very full calendar, at themahjongsociety.com.

Tile Envy

What belongs in a haunted parlor

Prim has a weakness, and this is the week to confess it. She covets a black tile. Not for every game, not for the sunny Tuesday brunch, but for an evening like this one, there is nothing in the world like a set that drinks the candlelight instead of throwing it back. A black tile on a dark cloth is pure theater. You lean in a little further to read it. The whole table lowers its voice without being asked. It is the single most atmospheric thing you can put between four women and a wall of tiles, and on the one night a year built for atmosphere, Prim thinks you are owed it.

The look she keeps returning to this season has a name, and Prim will give it to you plainly, because you asked and because she has no reason to be coy about a thing she loves. It is Yellow Mountain Imports’ Jet Set, a midnight black set of one hundred sixty six tiles with a golden curved Art Deco motif on the back of every one, so that a built wall looks like a row of tiny shuttered windows with the gold light leaking around the edges. The faces are engraved in bright color, dots and bams and craks glowing against all that black like something seen through smoke. At around sixty dollars it is the best kind of luxury, the kind that is really just nerve. And here is the warning Prim promised, the honest one. As she writes this the Jet Set is already sold out, and it is not alone up there. The good black sets are the very first thing to go every single October, Yellow Mountain’s among the first, so if you own one already then this is its week, and if you are only now hunting for the look you may be hunting until spring. Mark the set, and be first in line when it comes back. You do not need a grand budget to dress a table for Halloween evening. You need a dark tile and the good sense to turn the overhead light off.

And if your taste runs older and stranger, Prim will tell you a secret. The truest haunted parlor tile is the antique one, the carved set the color of old candle wax, faces cut by hand into bone and set on little slabs of bamboo, warm and yellowed and clicking like something with opinions. Our grandmothers’ tiles sound different from ours, heavier and softer at once, and on Halloween night they are worth more than any new set on earth, because every one of them has already sat through a hundred games you will never know about. If you have a set like that in a drawer, bring it out this week. Let the ghosts play with their own tiles for once.

And because a table is always better shown than described, here are two from a friend of the table, B. Weber, who was kind enough to let Prim share them. The first is the game itself, waiting: a black cloth, a mat of little ghosts each holding a pumpkin, four orange racks glowing like jack o’ lantern light, and one small lamp doing the work of a candle. The second is the dinner table, with black cats grinning up from every plate, two pumpkin heads keeping watch over a Trick or Treat box, and plaid napkins tied in black. There is not a black tile in sight, and it does not matter one bit. This is what Prim means by a haunted parlor.

Set Your Rack

The giving season opens its doors

Halloween is the hinge of the mahjong year. Behind us is the long tournament summer and the championship just past. Ahead is the warmest stretch on the calendar, the one when the game stops keeping score for a few weeks and starts keeping company, and more tables than you can count turn themselves over to a good cause. Prim loves this season best of all, and she wants to point you at a door you can walk through with your whole heart.

On Sunday, December 6, the Junior League of Manatee County holds Mistletoe Mahjong at the IMG Academy Golf Club in Bradenton, Florida, from one until five in the afternoon, and as of this writing registration is open. It is exactly the kind of afternoon Prim would build if you handed her the calendar. You may come for tournament play, a proper competitive sitting with rounds and prizes, or you may come for open play, which is the relaxed and social kind, friends and fellow enthusiasts and no pressure beyond remembering whose turn it is. Either way there are holiday treats and refreshments, a complimentary drink, festive photographs, and chance drawings throughout.

What makes it more than a lovely afternoon is where the money goes. The Junior League of Manatee County trains women for leadership and pours the proceeds back into the community, including a program they call Feed the Need, which works on food insecurity close to home. So you spend a Sunday playing the game you love, in a room dressed for the season, and a family nearby eats better for it. Tournament seats are seventy five dollars, open play is fifty, or two hundred for a table of four, and you bring your own 2026 card, because this is a room of people who already know the game. Prim can think of no better way to open the giving season than that.

Upcoming events

• OpenMistletoe Mahjong, benefiting the Junior League of Manatee County (Sunday, December 6, IMG Academy Golf Club, Bradenton FL, open play $50 or $200 a table, tournament $75, registration open)
• OpenDestination Mah Jongg Phoenix Scottsdale (Friday to Sunday, December 11 to 13, space still available)
• Sold OutDestination Mah Jongg Houston (November 6 to 8)
• Sold OutDestination Mah Jongg St Petersburg (November 16 to 18)
• Sold OutDestination Mah Jongg Palm Springs (January 29 to 31, 2027)
• Sold OutDestination Mah Jongg Charlotte (February 19 to 21, 2027)

And so you know to move early next time, these rooms are already full:

orderofthetile.com/events.html”>Full events calendar online ›

Crak Intelligence

The ghost in the card

Here is the gentlest haunting Prim knows, and she offers it to you this week in the spirit of the season, which is to say mostly for the shiver of it. Somewhere on a card from a few seasons back there was a hand you loved. A particular line you looked forward to every time you sat down, the one you could almost play in your sleep. And then you went looking for it one day and it was simply not there. Not moved. Not tucked into another section. Gone, the way a room you remember from childhood is gone, there and warm in your memory and a stranger’s house when you finally drive past.

Every seasoned player has a ghost like this, a hand she still reaches for out of pure muscle memory before she remembers it left the table long ago. Prim has a few of her own that she will not name, partly because she is a little superstitious about saying them out loud, and partly because the hands you loved were never quite the hands anyone else loved, which is exactly what made them yours. They are not coming back, and Prim will not pretend that does not sting, because the hands we miss are the proof of the hands we once chased with our whole hearts.

So this week, when the children are telling you what to be afraid of, Prim offers you a friendlier sort of ghost. Not the goblin at the door. The beautiful hand from a card now packed away, the one you will never lay down complete again, gone quietly to make room for the lines you love today. Something at this table is cursed. It is last year’s card, and it is never, ever coming back. Prim, for one, lights a candle for it, and then she picks up the card in front of her and plays.

A Closing Note

It is the thirty third letter, and the spookiest week of the year, and Prim has spent it walking you past every ghost she knows. The hand you chase and cannot catch. The rack you must not touch. The tiles the color of candle wax. The hands the card took back without a word. She hopes you have enjoyed the chill of them, because here, at the end, she is going to blow the candle out and tell you the truth.

None of it is cursed. The haunted hand is only a matter of timing and nerve. The superstition is only manners wearing a costume. The vanished hands made room for the ones you will love next. There is exactly one real curse in this whole lovely game. It is the belief that convinces a woman she is unlucky and sits her out of her own evening. Do not let it. Build your wall, answer the door, play the hand in front of you, and let the only thing haunting your table be the good kind, the laughter you will still be hearing in your head on Sunday.

Prim may write for the women at the table, but she firmly believes everyone is welcome. Everyone deserves a seat at this table.

Ask Prim a question

Don’t tap it, rack it, double stack it. Do it to it, don’t construe it. We all know that Prim won’t skew it. The Order of the Tile, pursue it.

Until next week, may your rack be blessed and your Charleston ruthless.Prim, as always

Forward this to your favorite fourth.
Everyone deserves a seat at this table.

Prim Shows Her Work

Every name, number, and event in this letter, with the receipts.