The Ouija ( WEE-jə, -jee), also known as a Ouija board, 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.
The board that became Ouija was born in 1886 in Chestertown, Maryland and named in 1890 in Baltimore where it was first manufactured. 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 popular belief that the word Ouija comes from the French (oui) and German (ja) words for yes is a misconception. In fact, the name was given from a word spelled out on the board when medium Helen Peters Nosworthy asked the board to name itself. The board also told her that the word meant “good luck.”
One of the first mentions of the automatic writing method used in the Ouija board is found in China around 1100 AD, in historical documents of the Song dynasty.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 Ouija board as we know it today was patented in Baltimore in the year 1890. Its development and success were closely tied to the rise of the American Spiritualist movement following the Civil War, but the men who patented and popularized the divination tool as a board game were not Spiritualists, but capitalists.
Read also: Cultural impact of the Ouija board
Following the American Civil War in the United States, mediums did significant business in allegedly allowing survivors to contact lost relatives. As a part of the spiritualist movement, mediums began to employ various means for communication with the dead.
Что такое доска уиджи и как с ней работать. Стоит ли заниматься спиритизмом.
Типичная доска Уиджи
The Rise of Ouija
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.
Charles Kennard, the founder of Kennard Novelty Company, claims to have invented the board with his business partner, Elijah Bond, who patented it with help from his sister-in-law, spiritualist and medium Helen Peters Nosworthy. Bond and Nosworthy then traveled to Washington, D.C. 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.
However, though Bond’s sister-in-law was a successful medium, neither man believed that the board could be used to contact spirits. In fact, the Ouija board was never advertised as a tool for spirit communication, gaining this reputation from its use in Spiritualist circles rather than advertisements, which focused on the board’s ability to answer any question without specifying who was doing the answering.
Read also: Enigmatic Ouija Board
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.
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.
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.
Kennard and Bond left the Ouija Novelty Company soon after its founding, each creating his own knock-off Ouija board to cash in on the game’s growing popularity. Meanwhile, the trademark for the original Ouija board landed in the hands of William Fuld, who gained a reputation for litigiously defending it against copycats.
Charles Kennard attempted to sell a variety of knock-off boards until Fuld finally sued him into submission, but Bond was smarter. He waited until just after Ouija’s original patent expired to launch the Swastika Novelty Company’s Nirvana board, using symbols that were then associated with Indian religions rather than fascist regimes.
Read also: Enigmatic Ouija Board
Fuld routinely claimed to be the “inventor and exclusive manufacturer” of the Ouija board in his ads. Would say, that William Fuld is not the inventor of OUIJA. The Ouija talking board was invented by Elijah J. Bond, and said invention was patented by him February 10th, 1891, under patent No. 446,054, application for which was filed by said Elijah J. Bond May 28th, 1890, serial No. 353,410. William Fuld never had any title in said patent, by assignment or otherwise, and had no legal right to manufacture same prior to February 10th, 1908, the date of expiration of aforesaid patent.
By the time Ouija reached the height of its popularity in 1920, Kennard, Bond, and several other former employees of the Ouija Novelty Company had all written into the Baltimore Evening Sun claiming to be the original inventor of the Ouija board. None of them were. The most likely candidate for the inventor of the Ouija board is actually a cabinet maker named E. C. Reiche, who, having died in 1899, was unable to defend himself in the paper.
By staying out of this public debate and steadfastly asserting his own claim to the Ouija board, Fuld managed to make Ouija his legacy. Like his predecessors, Fuld was no Spiritualist. When asked if he believed in the Ouija board by the Baltimore Sun in 1920, Fuld responded, “I should say not. I’m no spiritualist. I’m Presbyterian.”
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.
Evolution and Legacy
However, though Fuld’s advertisements were careful to never mentioned spirits, after his death, his son made one concession to the public’s perception of Ouija as a way to speak to the dead. In the year 1941, the Fuld company introduced a new box design that featured a blue ghost, modeled after the 1909 sculpture Eternal Silence by Lorado Taft, a monument that stands in Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery.
The Fuld family manufactured Ouija boards from 1898 to 1966 when they sold Ouija to Parker Brothers. Throughout the years Fuld spent protecting his legacy, Ouija had developed a legacy of its own, mired in ghost stories and eventually tales of demonic possession.
What’s most surprising given modern perceptions of Ouija is how recently its reputation soured. While it always had its detractors, for most of its history Ouija was seen as harmless haunting fun. The year Parker Brothers bought Ouija, it was so widely adored that it outsold Monopoly, but five years later Ouija was on people’s minds for a different reason.
In 1971, William Peter Blatty wrote a novel based on a 1949 case where a child was allegedly possessed by a demon after using a Ouija board with his Spiritualist aunt. The Exorcist sold 13 million copies and cemented the Ouija board as the dangerous demonic pop culture symbol it is today.
The blue ghost had been synonymous with Ouija for three decades, but the year after The Exorcist was published it was gone, as were the other divination-based games Parker Brothers had been advertising alongside Ouija for the previous two years.
Today, Hasbro holds the patent for Ouija and occasionally releases movie tie-in special editions of the board, like 2017’s Stranger Things Edition Ouija Board. But the company doesn’t sell the Ouija board as part of its regular line of products.
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. Curran enjoyed significant popularity, while Hutchings was less successful.
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.
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.
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.
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. 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.
Scientific Explanations
Paranormal and supernatural beliefs associated with Ouija have been criticized by the scientific community and are characterized as pseudoscience. 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.
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.
Ouija in Arts and Culture
These religious objections to use of the Ouija board have given rise to ostension type folklore in the communities where they circulate.
Ouija boards have been the source of inspiration for literary works, used as guidance in writing or as a form of channeling literary works. Pearl Lenore Curran (1883-1937), alleged that for over 20 years she was in contact with a spirit named Patience Worth.
In 1982, poet 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. Sandover, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983, was published in three volumes beginning in 1976. The first contained a poem for each of the letters A through Z, and was called The Book of Ephraim.
Aleister Crowley had great admiration for the use of the ouija board and it played a passing role in his magical workings. Jane Wolfe, who lived with Crowley at Abbey of Thelema, also used the Ouija board. She credits some of her greatest spiritual communications to use of this implement. Crowley also discussed the Ouija board with another of his students, and the most ardent of them, Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones): it is frequently mentioned in their unpublished letters.
In March, Crowley wrote to Achad to inform him, "I'll think up another name for Ouija". But their business venture never came to fruition and Crowley's new design, along with his name for the board, has not survived. There is, however, a good way of using this instrument to get what you want, and that is to perform the whole operation in a consecrated circle, so that undesirable aliens cannot interfere with it. You should then employ the proper magical invocation in order to get into your circle just the one spirit you want. It is comparatively easy to do this.
Early press releases stated that Vincent Furnier's stage and band 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.
According to their story (written for them by a fiction author, Jeremy Robert Johnson), Omar Rodriguez Lopez purchased one while traveling in Jerusalem. At first the board provided a story which became the theme for the album. Strange events allegedly related to this activity occurred during the recording of the album: the studio flooded, one of the album's main engineers had a nervous breakdown, equipment began to malfunction, and Cedric Bixler-Zavala's foot was injured.
A Ouija board is an early part of the plot of the 1973 horror film The Exorcist. Using a Ouija board the young girl Regan makes what first appears to be harmless contact with an entity named "Captain Howdy". The 1986 film Witchboard and its sequels center on the use of Ouija. The 1991 film And You Thought Your Parents Were Weird features use of a Ouija board in an important early scene. What Lies Beneath (2000) includes a séance scene with a board.
Since the early 1990s, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett has used several guitars featuring Ouija board graphics on the body of the guitar itself. Aparichithan (The Stranger) is a 2004 Indian Malayalam-language horror film. Another 2007 film, Ouija, depicted a group of adolescents whose use of the board causes a murderous spirit to follow them. Romancham (Goosebumps) is a 2023 Malayalam-language horror-comedy film.
The British singer Morrissey released a controversial single titled "Ouija Board, Ouija Board" in 1989. The rap group Bone Thugs-n-Harmony referenced Ouija on their Horrorcore albums Creepin on ah Come Up and E.