The Ouija board, also known as a spirit board or talking board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the Latin alphabet, the numbers 0-9, the words "yes", "no", and occasionally "hello" and "goodbye", along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette (a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic) as a movable indicator to spell out messages during a séance. Participants place their fingers on the planchette, which is moved about the board to spell words.
The Ouija board’s history is just about as mysterious as how the “game” works. Are Ouija boards real? What does “Ouija” mean? This article delves into the origins, evolution, and cultural impact of this enigmatic device.
The typical Ouija board. November 23, 1919. New-York Tribune
Origins in Spiritualism
The game was born from Americans’ obsession with Spiritualism in the 19th century. The beginning of modern Spiritualism in America is often linked to an incident in upstate New York in 1848. Two sisters, Kate and Maggie Fox, claimed they had received messages from spirits who rapped on the walls in answer to questions, later recreating this feat of channeling in parlors across the state.
Spiritualism worked for Americans: Many believed it was compatible with Christian dogma, meaning one could hold a séance on Saturday night and have no qualms about going to church the next day. It was an acceptable, even wholesome activity to contact spirits at séances, through automatic writing or table-turning parties, in which participants would place their hands on a table and listen as someone called out the letters of the alphabet. Spiritualism also offered solace in an era when life spans were much shorter than they are today. Even Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the venerable president, conducted séances in the White House after their 11-year-old son died of a fever in 1862.
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“Communicating with the dead was common. It wasn’t seen as bizarre or weird,” says Murch. “It’s hard to imagine that now.
As Spiritualism had grown in American culture, so too did frustration with how long it took to get any meaningful message out of the spirits, says Brandon Hodge, a historian of Spiritualism. Calling out the alphabet and waiting for a knock at the right letter, for example, was deeply boring. After all, rapid communication with breathing humans at far distances was possible-the telegraph had been around for decades-so why shouldn’t spirits be as easy to reach?
One of the first mentions of the automatic writing method used in the Ouija board is found in China around 1100 AD, in historical documents of the Song dynasty. The method was known as fuji "planchette writing".
The Rise of the Talking Board
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In 1886, newspapers reported on a new phenomenon taking over the Spiritualists’ camps in Ohio. It was, for all intents and purposes, a Ouija board, with letters, numbers and a planchette-like device to point to them. The article was read far and wide, but it was Charles Kennard who saw it as a business opportunity.
When a few men in Baltimore started the Kennard Novelty Company, the first producers of the Ouija board, in the late 19th century, opening the gates of hell was the last thing on their minds.
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In the late 1800s, advertisements for a new paranormal product started appearing in papers: “Ouija, or, the Wonderful Talking Board,” boomed a Pittsburgh toy and novelty shop, describing a magical device that answered questions “concerning the past, present and future with marvelous accuracy” and provided a “link which unites the known with the unknown, the material with the immaterial.” Another advertisement in a New York newspaper declared it “interesting and mysterious” and testified that it had been “proven at Patent Office before patent was allowed.
This mysterious talking board was basically what’s sold in stores today: a flat wooden board with the letters of the alphabet arranged in two semicircles above the numbers zero through nine. The words “yes” and “no” appear in the uppermost corners, while “goodbye” is printed at the bottom.
The idea was that two or more people would sit around the board, place their fingertips on the planchette, pose a question, and watch, dumbfounded, as the planchette moved from letter to letter, spelling out the answers seemingly of its own accord.
Naming and Patenting the Ouija Board
But first, Kennard’s talking board needed a name. Contrary to popular belief, “Ouija” is not a combination of the French word for “yes,” oui, and the German equivalent ja. According to Murch, it was Bond’s sister-in-law, Helen Peters (who was, Bond said, a “strong medium”), who supplied the now instantly recognizable handle. When she asked the board what they should call it, the name “Ouija” came through. The board also told her that the word meant “good luck.”
Eerie and cryptic-but for the fact that Peters acknowledged that she was wearing a locket bearing the picture of a woman with the name “Ouija” written beside it.
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According to Murch’s interviews with the descendants of the Ouija founders and the original Ouija patent file itself, which he’s seen, the story of the board’s patent request was true: The men knew that they wouldn’t get their patent if they couldn’t prove that the board worked, so Bond brought the indispensable Peters to the patent office in Washington, D.C. when he filed his application. There, 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 patent application to proceed. They all communed with the spirits, and the planchette faithfully spelled out the patent officer’s name.
Whether it was mystical spirits or the fact that Bond, as a patent attorney, may have simply known the man’s name, is unclear, Murch says. This first patent describes the device but offers no explanation as to how it works. That ambiguity was part of a more or less conscious marketing effort.
“These were very shrewd businessmen,” says Murch. The less the Kennard company said about how the board worked, the more mysterious it seemed-and the more people wanted to buy it.
“Ultimately, it was a money-maker. And it was a money-maker. 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. Soon after, Kennard and Bond were out, owing to some internal pressures and the old adage about money changing everything. By this time, William Fuld, who’d gotten in on the ground floor of the fledgling business as an employee and stockholder, was running the company.
Popularity and Cultural Impact
The board’s instant and now, more than 130 years later, prolonged success showed that it had tapped into a weird place in American culture. It was marketed as both a mystical oracle and as family entertainment, fun with an element of otherworldly excitement. This meant that it wasn’t only Spiritualists who bought the board; in fact, the people who disliked the Ouija board the most tended to be spirit mediums, as it promised access to the spirit world without a middleman.
The Ouija board appealed to people from across a wide spectrum of ages, professions and educational backgrounds. “People want to believe. The need to believe that something else is out there [that] is powerful,” says Murch.
It’s logical, then, that the board would find its greatest popularity in uncertain times, when people are holding fast to belief and searching for answers. The 1910s and ’20s, with the devastations of World War I and the frantic years of the Jazz Age and Prohibition, witnessed a surge in Ouija popularity. Over five months in 1944, as World War II raged, a single New York department store sold 50,000 of the boards. In 1967, the year after Parker Brothers bought the game, two million boards were sold, outperforming Monopoly.
Ouija board sales soared during uncertain times, reflecting people's search for answers and solace.
Strange Tales and Literary Inspiration
Strange Ouija tales also made frequent, titillating appearances in American newspapers. In 1920, national wire services reported that would-be crime solvers were turning to their Ouija boards for clues in the mysterious murder of a New York City gambler, Joseph Bowne Elwell, much to the frustration of the police. In 1921, the New York Times reported that a Chicago woman was sent to a psychiatric hospital after developing “religious hallucinations” induced by a Ouija board.
Similar incidents made occasional appearances in the news for years. In 1930, a woman in Buffalo participated in a murder, supposedly on the encouragement of Ouija board messages. In 1941, a 23-year-old gas station attendant from New Jersey told the Times that he joined the Army due to some spiritual advice.
Ouija boards even offered literary inspiration: In the 1910s, Pearl Curran made headlines when she began writing poems and stories that she claimed were dictated, via Ouija board, by the spirit of a 17th-century Englishwoman called Patience Worth. Not long after, Curran’s friend, Emily Grant Hutchings, claimed that her book, Jap Herron, was communicated via Ouija board by the late Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
But decades later, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill surpassed both women: In 1983, his Ouija-inspired epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. (Merrill, for his part, publicly implied that the Ouija board acted more as a magnifier for his own poetic thoughts, rather than as a hotline to the spirits.
The Exorcist and the Shift in Perception
Ouija existed on the periphery of American culture, perennially popular, mysterious, interesting and usually, barring the few cases of supposed Ouija-inspired murders, non-threatening. That year, The Exorcist-which was supposedly based on a true story-scared the pants off people in theaters. The implication that 12-year-old Regan was possessed by a demon after playing with a Ouija board by herself changed how people saw the board.
“It’s kind of like Psycho-no one was afraid of showers until that scene. … It’s a clear line,” says Murch, adding that before The Exorcist, film and TV depictions of Spiritualism were usually silly. “I Love Lucy,” for example, featured a 1951 episode in which Lucy and Ethel host a séance. “But for at least ten years afterwards, it’s no joke,” Murch adds.
Almost overnight, Ouija became a tool of the devil and, for that reason, a tool of horror writers and moviemakers. It began popping up in scary movies, usually opening the door to evil spirits hell-bent on ripping apart co-eds.
In the years that followed, the Ouija board would be denounced by religious groups as Satan’s preferred method of communication. Even in recent years, Christian religious groups remain wary of the board, citing scripture denouncing communication with spirits through mediums. Catholic.com calls the Ouija board “far from harmless.” In 2011, “700 Club” host Pat Robertson declared that demons can reach us through the board.
Even within the paranormal community, Ouija boards had a dodgy reputation. Murch says that when he first began speaking at paranormal conventions, he was told to leave his antique boards at home because they scared people too much.
Modern Popularity and Scientific Explanations
Ouija’s popularity is also driven by the board’s usefulness as a plot device. The hugely popular movies Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 both featured a Ouija board. It’s also popped up in episodes of “Breaking Bad,” “Rizzoli & Isles” and multiple paranormal reality TV programs. Hot Topic, mall favorite of Goth teens, sold a set of Ouija board bras and underwear. For those wishing to commune with the beyond while on the go, there’s an app (or 20) for that.
The boards are not, scientists say, powered by spirits or demons. Ouija boards work on a principle known to those studying the mind for more than a century: the ideomotor effect. In 1852, physician and physiologist William Carpenter published a report for the Royal Institution of Great Britain examining automatic muscular movements that take place without the conscious will or volition of the individual (think crying in reaction to a sad film, for example).
Almost immediately, other researchers saw applications of the ideomotor effect in popular Spiritualist pastimes. The effect is very convincing. As Chris French, an anomalistic psychologist 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.”
Other devices, such as dowsing rods, or the fake bomb detection kits that deceived scores of international governments and armed services about a decade ago, work on the same principle of non-conscious movement. “The thing about all these mechanisms we’re talking about-dowsing rods, Ouija boards, pendulums, these small tables-they’re all devices whereby a quite small muscular movement can cause quite a large effect,” he says.
“With Ouija boards, you’ve got the whole social context. It’s usually a group of people, and everyone has a slight influence,” French adds. Not only does the individual give up some conscious control while participating-it can’t be me, people think-but also, in a group, no one person can take credit for the planchette’s movements, making it seem like the answers must be coming from an otherworldly source.
The Science Behind the Board
While Ouija boards can’t give us answers from beyond the veil, we can learn quite a lot from them. About a decade ago, a team of researchers from the University of British Columbia-Ronald Rensink, a psychologist and computer scientist; Hélène Gauchou, a psychologist; and Sidney Fels, an electrical and computer engineer-began looking at what exactly happens when people sit down to use a Ouija board.
The initial experiments involved a Ouija-playing robot: Participants were told that they were playing with a person in another room via teleconferencing; the robot, they were told, mimicked the movements of the other person. In reality, the robot’s movements simply amplified the participants’ motions, and the person in the other room was just a ruse, a way to get the participant to think they weren’t in control.
What the team found surprised them: When participants didn’t know the answers but hazarded a guess without using the Ouija board, they were right only around 50 percent of the time, a typical result for guessing. But when they guessed using the board, believing that the answers were coming from someplace else, they answered correctly upwards of 65 percent of the time.
“It was so dramatic how much better they did on these questions than if they answered to the best of their ability that we were like, ‘This is just weird, how could they be that much better?’” says Fels.
The researchers were sufficiently intrigued to pursue further Ouija research. They divined another experiment: This time, rather than a robot, the participant actually played with a real human. At some point, the participant was blindfolded-and the other player, really a confederate, quietly took their hands off the planchette.
It worked. Rensink says, “Some people were complaining about how the other person was moving…” Most people believe Ouija boards are harmless exciting fun, me included.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1848 | Beginning of modern Spiritualism in America with the Fox sisters. |
| 1886 | Newspapers report on a Ouija-like phenomenon in Spiritualist camps in Ohio. |
| 1890 | The Ouija board is patented in Baltimore. |
| 1892 | Kennard Novelty Company expands to multiple factories. |
| 1910s-1920s | Ouija popularity surges after World War I and during the Jazz Age. |
| 1944 | A New York department store sells 50,000 Ouija boards in five months during World War II. |
| 1967 | Parker Brothers buys the game, selling two million boards. |
| 1973 | The Exorcist is released, changing the perception of Ouija boards. |