OUIJA

In the dim and foreboding corners of the paranormal, there exists a sinister conduit to the afterlife—an instrument of terror and intrigue known as the Ouija board. Crafted with letters, numbers, and cryptic symbols, it serves as a portal to converse with the spirits of the departed, allowing the living to beckon the ethereal from the shadows. In the dead of night, with trembling hands and racing hearts, brave souls dare to unlock its eerie potential, to make a connection to the spectral world beyond. Things are about to get strange.

Transcript

In the dim and foreboding corners of the paranormal, there exists a sinister conduit to the afterlife—an instrument of terror and intrigue known as the Ouija board. Crafted with letters, numbers, and cryptic symbols, it serves as a portal to converse with the spirits of the departed, allowing the living to beckon the ethereal from the shadows. In the dead of night, with trembling hands and racing hearts, brave souls dare to unlock its eerie potential, to make a connection to the spectral world beyond. Things are about to get strange.

The ouija board is a flat board marked with the alphabet, the numbers 0-9, “Yes”, “No”, and the occasional “Hello” and “Goodbye”. It uses a planchette as a moveable indicator of the messages. Participants place their fingers on the planchette and it moves around the board to spell out a message. The popular belief is that the word Ouija comes from the French and German words for yes. It is a misconception. The name is taken from a word spelled out on the board when its inventor asked a supposed ghost to name it. 

One of the first mentions of the automatic writing method used in the ouija board is found in China around 1100 AD. It was found in historical documents of the Song Dynasty. The method was known as fuji “planchette writing”. The use of this method as an apparent means of necromancy and communication with the spirit-world continued. Under special rituals and supervision, this was a central practice of the Quanzhen School until it was forbidden by the Qing dynasty. The board that became the Ouija was born in 1886 in Chestertown, Maryland. It was named in 1890 in Baltimore where it was manufactured. Ouija historian Robert Murch has been researching the story of the board since 1992. When he started his research, he said no one really knew anything about its origins, which he thought was odd: “For such an iconic thing that both strokes fear and wonder in American culture, how can no one know where it came from?”

In February 1891, the first few advertisements started appearing in papers. The line was “Ouija, the Wonderful Talking Board.” It was a hit at a Pitttsberg toy and novelty shop, with them describing the magical device that answered questions “about the past, present, and future with marvelous accuracy” and “never-failing amusement and recreation for all the classes”, a link “between the known and unknown, the material and immaterial.” Another advertisement in a New York paper declared it “interesting and mysterious” and testified “as Proven at Patent Office before it was allowed. Price $1.50.” 

Charles Kennard of Baltimore, Maryland acted on the rising fame of the ouija boards. He pulled together a group of four investors- including Elijah Bond, a local attorney, and Col. Washington Bowie, a surveyor- to start the Kennard Novelty Company to exclusively make and market the ouija board. When they first started to talk about these new talking boards, they did not have a name for it. Murch, the historian we spoke about earlier, says that, based on his research, it was Bond’s sister-in-law that named it. She was a strong medium. They were sitting around a table, and asked the board what they should call it. Ouija came through . When asked what that meant, the board replied “Good luck”. 

According to Murch’s interviews with the descendants of the Ouija founders and looking at the original Ouija patent file itself, the story of how the patent was received was an interesting one. If they could now prove that the ouija board worked, they would get the patent. The chief patent officer demanded a demonstration- if the board could accurately spell out his name, which was supposed to be unknown to Bond and Peters, he’d allow the application to proceed. They all sat down, talked with the spirits, and the planchette spelled out the patent officer’s name. It is not known if it was the spirits or the fact that Bond, as a patent attorney, may have just known the officer’s name. It is unclear. But on February 20, 1891, a visibly shaken patent officer awarded Bond a patent for his new game. The first patent does not explain how the device works, just asserts that it does. That ended up being used as part of the marketing for the ouija board. The fact that no one knew how it really worked. The company just wanted it to be a money maker, and it ended up being one. 

By 1892, the Kennard Novelty Company went from one factory in Baltimore to two in Baltimore, Two in New York, two in Chicago, and one in London. By 1983, Kennard and Bond were out. They felt like money was changing things and there were some internal pressures  as well. By this time, William Fuld was running the company. He actually started as a worker on the ground floor and worked his way up. In 1898, He licensed the exclusive rights to make the board with the blessing from Col. Bowie, the majority shareholder, and one of the two remaining original investors. There was a boom for the company, and it created frustrations with those who've been with the board since the beginning- with public squabbling with who really invented the board. Fuld never claimed to be the inventor of the board, even though his obituary in the New York Times declared him to be. In 1919, Bowie sold the remaining business in Ouija to Fuld, his protege, for $1. 

The board’s instant and continual success almost 120 years later shows that it has a weird place in America’s culture. It is logical that the board would find its greatest popularity in uncertain times, which is when people hold fast and look for answers anywhere. The 1910’s and 1920’s show this. There was the devastation of World War I and the prohibition that made a surge of the Ouija board. During the Great Depression, the Fuld Company opened new factories to meet the demand for the boards. In 1944, a single New York department store sold 50,000 of them in a 5 month period. In 1967, the year after Parker Brothers bought the game from the Fuld Company, 2 million boards were sold, outselling Monopoly. That year had more troops going to Vietnam and had race riots in Newark, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee. 

Strange ouija stories also made frequent appearances in American newspapers. In 1920, national wire services reported that would-be crime solvers were turning to their ouija boards for answers in the murder of Joseph Burton Elwell, a New York City gambler. This was  frustrating to the police. In 1921, the New York Times reported that a Chicago woman being sent to a psychiatric hospital tried to explain to doctors that she wasn’t suffering from mania, but that ouija spirits had told her to leave her dead mother’s dead body in the living room for 15 days before burying her in the back yard. In 1930, newspaper readers read that two women in Buffalo, New York killed a woman, supposedly on the encouragement of ouija board messages. In 1941, a 23 year old gas station attendant told the New York Times that a ouija board told him to join the Army. In 1958, a Connecticut court decided to not honor the “ouija board will” of Mrs. Helen Dow Peck. She left only $1,000 to two former servants and $152,000 to Mr. John Gale Forbes- a lucky spirit who contacted her via the ouija board.

Ouija boards have offered literary inspiration. In 1916, Pearl Curran made headlines when she began writing stories and poems that she claimed were dictated, via ouija board, by a spirit of a 17th century Englishwoman called Patience Worth. In 1917, Curran’s friend, Emily Grant Hutchings, claimed that her book “Jap Herron” was communicated via ouija board. Who helped her through the ouija board? None other than the late Mark Twain. Curran had a lot more success than her friend, but neither had the success that James Merrill did. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his work. In 1982, he wrote his ouija inspired and dictated poem “The Changing Light at Sandover”, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Merrill did publicly imply that the ouija board acted more as a magnifier for his poetic thoughts rather than as a hotline to the spirits. In 1979 he wrote Mirabelle: Books of Number, which was another ouija creation. He told the New York Review of Books “if the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become!”

Ouija has existed in popular American culture. It has often been seen as non-threatening. That was until 1973. In that year, one of the scariest horror movies ever was released, The Exorcist. The movie was supposedly based on a true story, and it changed the fabric of pop culture. Almost overnight, the ouija board became a tool for the devil, and therefore a tool for horror writers and filmmakers to start using it in movies and books. Outside entertainment, the ouija board started to get denounced by Christian organizations, with these organizations saying that the board was Satan’s preferred form of communication. In 2001, Almangordo, New Mexico was burning ouija boards in bonfires along with “Harry Potter” and “Snow White”. Catholic.com says that the board is far from harmless. In 2011, Pat Robinson declared on his show “700 Club” that demons can reach us through the board. Hasbro, who acquired Parker Brothers, still sold hundreds of thousands of boards. The reason why though changed. Ouija boards are spooky rather than spiritual, with just a touch of danger.    

So do ouija boards really work? According to scientists, ouija boards are not powered by spirits or demons. What they are powered by are the people using the board. Ouija boards work on the principle of the ideomotor effect. In 1852, physician and physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter published a report for the Royal institution of Great Britain. In this report, he examined the automatic muscular movements that take place without the conscious will or volition of the individual. Almost right away, other researchers saw applications of this effect in popular spiritualists' pastimes. In 1853, chemist and physicist Michael Faraday conducted a series of experiments that proved to him that the table’s motion was due to the ideomotor actions of the participants. Dr. Chris French, a professor of psychology and anomalistic psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, explains “It can generate a very strong impression that the movement is being caused by some outside agency, but it’s not. The thing about these mechanisms we're talking about, dowsing rods, ouija boards, pendulums, these small tables, they're all devices whereby require a small muscular movement can cause a large effect.” With ouija in particular, the individual gives up some conscious control in the group, and because of this, no one in the group can take credit for the planchette’s movements. This makes it seem like the answers to the questions are coming from the spirits or something not from this world. 

Even if there is a scientific reason behind the ouija board, that still does not stop people from using it and thinking that there are supernatural forces behind it. Here are some well known people who have used ouija boards:

1. Alister Crowly- Crowley was an occultist, ritual magician, artist, poet, novelist, and philosophist. He had an admiration for the use of ouija boards. Jane Wolfe, who lived with Crowley, also used the ouija board and credits some of her greatest spiritual communications to the use of this. Crowlet discussed the ouija board with some of his students as well. 
2. Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, used a ouija board and conducted seances in attempts to contact the dead. 
3. There were early reports that Vincent Furnier’s stage name “Alice Cooper” was agreed upon after a session with a ouija board, during which it was revealed that Furnier was the reincarnation of a 17th century witch with that name, Alice Cooper revealed later that he just thought of the first name that came to his head while discussing a new band name with his band. 
4. In the murder trial of Joshua Tucker, his mother insisted that he had carried out the murders while possessed by the Devil, who found him when he was using a ouija board. 
5. E. H. Jones and C. W. Hill, while prisoners of the Turks during the First World War, used a ouija board to convince their captors that they were mediums as part of an escape plan.
6. In 1994 in London, convicted murderer Stephen Young was granted a retrial after it was learned that four of the jurors had conducted a ouija board seance and had “contacted” the murdered man, who named Young as his killer. Young was convicted for a second time at his retrial and jailed for life. 

FUN FACTS

-Rival boards similar to the Ouija board launched and failed.

-Fuld died in 1927 after a freak fall from the roof of his new factory, a factory he said that the Ouija board told him to build. 

-Hasbro has released a glow in the dark version of the board, and is also planning on doing a more classic look as well. 

We may never know if the ouija board helps you speak to spirits or if it is just a game that the participants control. It may just be wishful thinking that we can speak to family and friends who have passed on. One would wish that the ouija board was a communication from the spirits, bringing us comfort from beyond the grave.

Stay Weird Ya’ll.