The Ouija, also known as a spirit board, talking board, or witch 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.
A typical Ouija board.
Origins and Early Use
One of the first mentions of the automatic writing method used in the Ouija board is found in China around 1100 AD, in historical documents of the Song dynasty.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 game was born from Americans’ obsession with Spiritualism in the 19th century. During the mid-19th century, spiritualism was growing in Europe and the United States, based on the knowledge that departed souls can interact with the living and send communication. Spiritualists of the time sought to make contact with the dead, usually through the assistance of a medium.
Read also: Cultural impact of the Ouija board
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. “Communicating with the dead was common. It wasn’t seen as bizarre or weird,” says Murch.
As a part of the spiritualist movement, mediums began to employ various means for communication with the dead. Following the American Civil War in the United States, mediums did significant business in allegedly allowing survivors to contact lost relatives.
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?
Read also: Enigmatic Ouija Board
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 Rise of the Ouija Board
The modern talking board (Ouija board) as we know it emerged in the late 19th century and in 1890, businessman Elijah Bond patented the Ouija board. At a time when the desire to contact the dead had coalesced into a religious movement, a group of entrepreneurs including Charles Kennard and Elijah Bond recognized that a board game could do the work of a medium and make twice the profit.
The local patent office at first refused a patent. Bond and Nosworthy then traveled to Washington, D.C.
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.
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.
Read also: Enigmatic Ouija Board
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.
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.
An advertisement for Ouija from 1919.
Ouija Board and the Media
Ouija boards continue to be so popular that even Hollywood has capitalized on the game and created over two-dozen movies following the success of “The Exorcist.” One of the first films to use a Ouija board, “The Uninvited” with Ray Milland, dates back to the 1944, while “Ouija: A New Beginning,” debuted this year.
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.
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.
Less well known is the Ouija board’s use as inspiration or as an “automatic” writing tool by acclaimed novelists and poets, such as Sylvia Plath, who wrote “Dialogue over a Ouija Board,” and Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill. Merrill used notes from Ouija “consultations” in his 560-page epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, which contained messages from W.B. Yeats, James Merrill released an apocalyptic 560-page epic poem titled The Changing Light at Sandover, which documented two decades of messages dictated from the Ouija board during séances hosted by Merrill and his partner David Noyes Jackson.
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.
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.
The Ideomotor Effect
While some religion groups have denounced the Ouija board, claiming it could lead to demonic possession as portrayed in the movie, “The Exorcist,” the scientific community argues that the action of the planchette can be explained by unconscious muscular movements of those controlling the pointer, known as “ideomotor effect.” Essentially, the mind can trick the body to move the planchette and form a message.
The planchette is guided by unconscious muscular exertions like those responsible for table movement. Nonetheless, in both cases, the illusion that the object (table or planchette) is moving under its own control is often extremely powerful and sufficient to convince many people that spirits are truly at work.
The unconscious muscle movements responsible for the moving tables and Ouija board phenomena seen at seances are examples of a class of phenomena due to what psychologists call a dissociative state. This correlates with the ideomotor phenomenon because both rely on unconscious movement. The difference is that the ideomotor phenomenon is based on the idea that just the idea that something can happen tricks the brain into doing it.
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.
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 Makes Ouija Boards Move?
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.
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 the Ouija board Experiment."
Table: Accuracy of Answers With and Without Ouija Board
| Method | Accuracy |
|---|---|
| Guessing without Ouija Board | 50% |
| Guessing with Ouija Board | 65% |