The Ouija ( WEE-jə, -jee), 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. Though many of its kind existed previously, the name Ouija is now synonymous for all spirit boards.
Origins in Baltimore
The Ouija board was invented right here in Baltimore, some say by Charles Kennard. In 1891, he pulled together a group of four other investors William Fuld, Issac Fuld, A Commodore, and Elijah Bond, a local attorney-to start the Kennard Novelty Company.
The board that became Ouija was born in 1886 in Chestertown, Maryland and named in 1890 in Baltimore where it was first manufactured.
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.
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The Naming of "Ouija"
The name was coined by Helen Peters, a medium who was testing out the board with her Brother-in-Law, Elijah Bond one night. When asked what they should call the board, the planchette spelled out “Ouija”. The board also told her that the word meant “good luck.”
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.
William Fuld and the Rise of Ouija
William Fuld, one of the original investors of Kennard Novelty Company would later grow the company and popularize Ouija around the world. 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.
William Fuld was known to be a regular user of the Ouija board; in fact in 1917 the Ouija told Fuld to “prepare for big business.” Following these instructions Fuld built his largest facility down the road on Hartford Rd.
In 1927 William Fuld fell from the roof of a building that the Oujia board told him to build. He died, but made his family promise to keep Oujia boards in the family.
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The Fuld family manufactured Ouija boards from 1898 to 1966 when they sold Ouija to Parker Brothers.
Patent and Trademark Battles
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.
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.
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.
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Early Use and Spiritualism
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".
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 Ouija's popularity grew in the wake of World World I, newspaper coverage spread about Pearl Curran, a St. Louis housewife who used Ouija to talk with the spirit of a 17th-century woman named Patience Worth.
Mrs. Curran went on to publish Patience’s writings, many of which were met with critical acclaim.
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.
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 Blue Ghost and Changing Perceptions
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.
An advertisement for Ouija featuring the “blue ghost” box and several other related divination games in the issue of Parker Brothers catalog released in 1971 the year The Exorcist book came out.
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 Exorcist and the Shift to Demonic Symbolism
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.
Modern Ouija
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.
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.
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.
When study participants were asked to answer or guess at a set of challenging questions, they were correct about 50 percent of the time. Rensink believes the results open greater possibilities for further study.
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 in Literature and Arts
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 and other spirits.
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 1917 Achad experimented with the board as a means of summoning Angels, as opposed to Elementals. 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.
Ouija in Films
Top 5 Ouija Board Movies
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. Another 2007 film, Ouija, depicted a group of adolescents whose use of the board causes a murderous spirit to follow them.
Religious Perspectives
These religious objections to use of the Ouija board have given rise to ostension type folklore in the communities where they circulate.
Practically since its invention a century ago, mainstream Christian religions, including Catholicism, have warned against using Ouija boards, claiming that they are a means of dabbling with Satanism.
Placing trust in Ouija boards, fortune tellers, horoscopes and the like means one is breaking the First Commandment of having no other gods besides the one true God, Father Nolan said.