The Ouija board (also known as a “talking board”) is a rectangular slab upon which is written the letters of the alphabet, the numbers one through ten, and the words “yes” and “no.” It requires the use of a planchette (a tiny three-legged marker in the shape of a tear drop). For the original board, the pointed end of the planchette aimed at the spirit’s intended mark. Modern boards contain a piece of circular glass in the center whereby the participants of a séance can see the intended mark on the board. The Ouija board has been used as a method of communication with spirits from other realms or the afterlife. Arguments abound regarding its virtue, dependability, and intended use.
The Ouija board, also known as a “spirit board” or a “talking board,” is an outgrowth of the Spiritualist movement of the mid-nineteenth century. Proponents claim that the Ouija board is a tool useful for communication with sentient supernatural beings, while skeptics offer more prosaic explanations. (Laura Kuhn/Dreamstime.com)
In the mid-nineteenth century, America was overtaken by a wave of otherworldly fervor known as Spiritualism. Séances were conducted across the country in attempts to contact spirits who had passed on from the realm of the living. Table-rapping or table-tapping was one of the earliest forms of communication with spirits. Participants could ask questions and receive a simple yes or no answer based on a single or double sound response. The Fox sisters of New York were the most famous for employing this technique. However, the method was proven a fraud when Margaret Fox confessed to making the rapping noises by cracking her toes. Table-turning, the process by which a three-legged table was tilted or moved in response to a question, was another common practice in Spiritualism. Automatic writing, or trance writing, later became popular as a result of participants wanting a more detailed response to their questions. A medium would go into a daze and the hand holding the writing utensil would move according to the spirit’s desire. However, legibility often became an issue in these cases. The use of a talking board, created with the entire alphabet in large, easily recognizable print, was the most popular attempt at creating a reliable form of communication with the afterlife.
Mystery still surrounds the history of the Ouija board. The name itself, “Ouija,” once was said to have been derived from the French and German words for “yes,” “oui” and “ja” respectively. According to other sources, Helen Peters should be credited with the creation of the name. When Peters asked the board what it should be called, it supposedly answered “Ouija.” An additional element to Peters’s story is the presence of a locket with an image of Ouida, a famous female writer. Some people argue that the name could have been misread or misinterpreted. Instead of “Ouida,” the talking board ended up being called “Ouija.” To compound the mystery of the name, there is also an issue about its practical application. Some critics insist that the Ouija board, and other boards like it, function on the operators’ subconscious or even small unnoticeable tremors in the operators’ hands and fingertips. Advocates of the Ouija board assert that it is a reliable method of communication with the spiritual world. In February 1891, the United States Patent Office granted Elijah Bond a patent for his Ouija board. While the patent confirmed that the board did work, it did not indicate any means or methods explaining how it worked.
Aside from answering questions from séance participants, the Ouija board holds a long and interesting history as a method of rousing the artistic efforts of authors. One of the earliest cases was that of Pearl Curran, a housewife, in 1913. The spirit, a woman by the name of Patience Worth, identified herself as a murder victim who died during a Native American raid. Curran’s communication with the spirit of a seventeenth-century Puritan woman lasted for more than twenty years. Curran and Worth’s communication via the Ouija board led to the publication of numerous novels, short stories, plays, and poems. “For nearly two decades Patience Worth was St. Louis’ best-known local author” (Corbett 1999, 204). Though critics and skeptics attempted to uncover a publicity stunt, no one was ever able to successfully do so.
One of the most famous cases of authorship concerning the Ouija board was that of Emily Grant Hutchings. In 1917, Hutchings published a novel entitled Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board. She insisted that Samuel Clemens (better known by his pen name, Mark Twain) dictated a book and two short stories from the spirit world. According to Hutchings’s account, published in the introduction of the novel, Clemens was an interesting spirit narrator. He would argue, instruct, dictate, and correct as necessary to get his story in proper order. Hutchings noted that the original Ouija board was too confining for their purpose, given the length of the project. The main issue involved the absence of punctuation marks on the board itself. Hutchings added “ten of the most important marks, including the hyphen and the M-dash” to her board in dark India ink (Hutchings 1917, 8). This streamlined the creative process for the medium and the communicating spirit. In 1917 publisher Mitchell Kennerley released the novel with a byline indicating the spirit and medium’s name and included an introduction written by Hutchings explaining how the book was created. Problems arose in 1918 when Samuel Clemens’s daughter and Harper & Brothers, the publisher who owned the copyright to Clemens’s pen name, sued Kennerley. In his lifetime, Samuel Clemens had refused to acknowledge the possibility of a spirit world or afterlife, and this was a critical point in the lawsuit. Kennerley and Hutchings finally agreed to stop publication, and the lawsuit was dropped.
Later in the twentieth century, other authors also utilized the mysterious ability of the Ouija board to contact spirits to dictate literary work from beyond the grave. The Wauchope children, Virginia and Robert, wrote and published The Invisible Inzi of Oz after L. Frank Baum supposedly dictated the story to them via their talking board. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were “both interested in astrology, the occult, and fortune-telling,” which later led to the use of a Ouija board to consult a spirit named Pan (Hargrove 2007, 76). Plath’s lengthy poem “Dialogue over a Ouija Board” is just one overt reference to its use in the poets’ lives and literary works. James Merrill wrote The Changing Light at Sandover, a collection of poems “which he based on transcripts of nearly thirty years of Oujia board sessions” (Materer 1995, 2). It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983.
The Ouija board has worked its way into mainstream popular culture. Norman Rockwell, known for his paintings depicting American mainstream values, used the Ouija board as his theme for the May 1, 1920, cover of the Saturday Evening Post. A couple is portrayed sitting knee to knee, attempting to communicate with spirits using a talking board. In 1951 Lucy and Ethel performed a séance using the Ouija board in the first season of I Love Lucy. Depictions of the Ouija board have flooded popular mass media in a variety of forms since its creation. Its use can be seen by characters in cartoons, comics, TV shows, films, and novels.
The popular attitude toward the Ouija board is noted to have changed in the latter half of the twentieth century. While the Spiritualists were originally attempting to access spirits in the afterlife, there was a distinct lack of fear surrounding the process of using the board as a channel. The use of the Ouija board in numerous horror films like Paranormal Activity (2007), Witchboard (1986), What Lies Beneath (2000), and most famously The Exorcist (1973, which was based on a novel about an actual case of possession involving the use of a talking board) reflects a darker attitude toward the communication tool. In 1920 the United States Supreme Court issued a ruling on Ouija boards, identifying them as taxable toys. Yet many people still argue whether it is an apt description for such a mysterious object.
Josianne Leah Campbell
See also Bloody Mary or I Believe in Mary Worth; Exorcism; Scary Stories; Superstitions
Further Reading
Corbett, Katharine. 1999. In Her Place: A Guide to St. Louis Women’s History. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press.
Ellis, Bill. 2004. Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Hargrove, Nancy. 2007. “The Poems of 1957.” Sylvia Plath, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase.
Horowitz, Mitch. 2009. Occult America: White House Séances, Ouija Circles, Masons, and the Secret Mystic History of Our Nation. New York: Bantam Books.
Hunt, Stoker. 1985. Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game. New York: Perennial Library.
Hutchings, Emily Grant. 1917. Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board. New York: Mitchell Kennerley.
Litvag, Irving. 1972. Singer in the Shadows: The Strange Story of Patience Worth. New York: Macmillan.
Materer, Timothy. 1995. Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
McRobbie, Linda Rodriguez. 2013. “The Strange and Mysterious History of the Ouija Board.” Smithsonian.com. www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-strange-and-mysterious-history-of-the-ouija-board-5860627/. Accessed September 24, 2015.
Merrill, James. 1982. The Changing Light at Sandover. New York: Atheneum.
Offutt, Jason. 2010. What Lurks Beyond: The Paranormal in Your Backyard. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press.
Ouija—Primary Document
Operating the Ouija Board (1919)
By tradition, some strands of popular folk belief hold that living people can sense or even communicate with the spirits of the dead. One mechanism for facilitating this exchange is the Ouija board, which became popular among mediums and spiritualists in the 1880s, then manufactured and sold by the Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore in the 1890s with a retail price of $1.50. The boards became an American living room staple in the early twentieth century, eventually producing a backlash by religious traditionalists who believed that the boards encouraged demonic forces. The following text comes from a 1919 pamphlet that tries to explain how Ouija boards “work.”
HOW LITTLE OUIJA OPERATES THE BOARD.
While we two ladies were engaged one evening with this Planchette, two friends called as if casually, and were invited to be seated.
Our control excused himself from the subject with which we were engaged, and without any questions from the callers, wrote out:
“I will tell these men what they came to find out. They want to know what power drives the little heart shaped table of the Ouija. One of them is already true to the belief in spirits.
“I did not expect to talk about that matter tonight, and have not my ‘parchment’ prepared. But it is all right, and I will try to remember the details.
“The modern Planchette or Ouija is an invention of God, and it was made by a man who did not even believe in its mission, or the spirits.
“He did not know that God ‘ordained’ him to make the invention, but made it from heavenly inspiration, and he sells it as a toy.
“But God did inspire and ordain him to make this modern Planchette and he sells it, never dreaming that a Holy Spirit came and incited every-thing that He thought of in regard to this ‘Right Hand of God’ and God so desired it named, the Modern Planchette.
“A piece of pine wood was chosen for the small table, as it is the easiest to charge with electricity, (which it draws through the mortal body) and the incense of the spiritual magnetism, which is always around the mortal and is half of what they breathe.
“The atmosphere is not all oxygen and hydrogen; it is partly filled with spiritual gravity or ether, which goes to make up life.
“When mortals place their hands upon the heart of love and faith, they must believe in it to be successful in its use.
“A tiny elf is instrumental in manipulating the board.
“The magnetism of the mortals using the board will tell the tiny spirit, or Tom Thumb, who is a dwarf and pushes the table about on the letters, that they wish to talk to the Heavenly spirits.
“When these two people set their hands upon this little elf’s shoulders, he grasps the attention and says to the spirit:
“‘Here are your mortal loved ones, who want to hear from you.’
“The speaker spirit steps behind the mediumistic person using the board, and proceeds to use the spiritual brain or solar plexus to produce the desired results:
“In other words, the messages are sent through the solar plexus or spiritual brain invisibly.
“The solar plexus is a small network of nerves used only by God’s spirit messengers.
“The spiritual brain responds, but as yet the earthly brain knows nothing about the message that is to come.
“Little nerve sentries carry this message to the mortal brain; and it passes to Ouija from the mortal brain’s message, which has just arrived. Thus the table is carried involuntarily to the letters.
“This explains the reason why the table will not travel alone. It must have the spiritual help through the mortal bodies; the solar plexus and the four hands must operate the board to cause the message to be put on the board. These causes start cross currents of electricity and this makes the table move.
“The large table is only a field of letters, and Ouija is a little elf from the heart of God.
“As the character of the person’s heart is, do they get good or bad messages, and the true or untrue, for they bring a like influence about them. The clean mind brings about it good influences and good spiritual aid. But the mortal, known to the spirit world as the black-hearted, bring the evil ogres, the unrepentant slaves of Satan, who know their business—there are no secrets from them—and these receive the untrue and uncanny results or messages.
“The little elf, Ouija or solar plexus, does not know right from wrong, and takes whatever is given to him to send out.
“The mortal using the board must also have mediumistic tendencies to be successful; that is, a very sensitive solar plexus, or they cannot be used spiritually, and ‘Ouija’ is just the link that connects the spiritual brain with the mortal brain. That is his peculiarity.
“The solar plexus can be manipulated by the medium when spirits are not present to grasp it in a spiritual message for Ouija to put upon the board.
“Sometimes the medium’s solar plexus will grasp hidden thoughts and mix them with those of the earthly brain, and that explains ‘Ouija’s human side.’”
Source: Walters, Nellie Irene, and Clarisse Eugenie Perrin. The Secret of the Successful Use of the Ouija Board. Oakland, CA: Blakeley Press, 1919.