For some, the rectangular Ouija board evokes memories of late-night sleepover parties filled with shrieks of laughter, alongside toy shelves brimming with Magic Eight Balls, Frisbees, and Barbie dolls. For others, Ouija boards-known more generally as talking boards or spirit boards-have darker associations.
Stories abound of fearsome entities making threats, dire predictions, and even physical assaults on innocent users after a night of Ouija experimentation. Forums around Ouija-associated phenomena populate the internet, of course.
The Ouija Board in Literature
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. The fantastic claims don’t stop there: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill vowed until his death in 1995 that his most celebrated work was written with the use of a homemade Ouija board. Merrill used notes from Ouija “consultations” in his 560-page epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, which contained messages from W.B.
The Ideomotor Effect
A few years ago, Sidney Fels, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UBC, brought out a Ouija board at a Halloween party attended by graduate students, including many who were foreign-born and unfamiliar with how it works. “‘No, you don’t need batteries. It will move,’ I told them,” Fels recalls. But lo and behold, when Fels returned later, the grad students were enthralled because the planchette was moving on its own.
The mechanism at work was actually something known as the ideomotor effect, which refers to the influence of the unconscious mind on muscle movements. (First identified in 1852, preceding Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind by decades, Dr. William Benjamin Carpenter discovered the ideomotor effect while investigating the unconscious mind’s ability to direct motor activity.
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When study participants were asked to answer or guess at a set of challenging questions, they were correct about 50 percent of the time. “It was significant how much better they did on these questions,” Rensink says. Rensink believes the results open greater possibilities for further study.
The Ouija Board in Film
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Most recently, the 2014 movie Ouija did so well at the box office that Ouija 2 is already in the works. When it was released last fall, the movie so dramatically boosted board sales that petitions by evangelical Christian groups to ban the Ouija started popping up again.
Personal Experience
For my part, I first discovered the mysterious workings of Ouija nearly twenty years ago during a typically freezing-cold winter on eastern Long Island.
Read also: Enigmatic Ouija Board
Read also: Enigmatic Ouija Board