Speaking With The Dead: the Ouija Board
19th century humans had an acute relationship with death: the average life span was around 50 years, the infant mortality rate was roughly fifty-percent, with women dying in child birth, and men dying in war. Families often held days-long wakes for the departed’s body in the parlor rooms of their homes. It’s no wonder that seances and communing with spirits would take hold of the imaginations of so many people desperate to connect with loved ones gone; or at least to communicate with an imagining of life after death. Spiritualism, kicked off by the Fox sisters in upstate New York through an act of “calling up spirits’ by snapping their toe joints (see our previous Blog post on the Fox Sisters), grew in this fertile atmosphere, and a demand for professional mediums who could communicate with the dead was born. But, of course, there were only so many mediums to go around.
In 1886, two years before Maggie Fox would famously denounce Spiritualism as a fraud, a shrewd but unsuccessful businessman named Charles Kennard moved to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where he met E. C. Reiche, a furniture-maker-turned-coffin builder and undertaker, through proximity of their offices. Upon reading a story about “talking boards” that communicated with the dead that was then taking Ohio by storm, the two men came up with a business plan to make a dozen boards of their own. They sought funding for the project, and nearly failed, until they met a local attorney, Elija Bond. Bond claimed that his sister-in-law was a powerful medium, took an immediate interest in the board idea, and the Kennard Novelty Company (incorporated the day before Halloween) began manufacturing these boards.
Helen Peters, the aforementioned sister-in-law and very powerful medium, is credited with not only convincing a skeptical patent officer of the legitimacy of the board and thus being awarded the patent, but also for “receiving” the name of the board from the board itself: O-U-I-J-A, meaning “good luck” in oracle board-speak. The Ouija Board was born! Never mind that “Ouija”, it turns out, was actually a name engraved over a picture in a locket worn by Mrs. Peters at the time.
By the early 1890’s around 2,000 Ouija boards were sold per week. At this time, William Fuld, an early investor in the Kennard Novelty Company gained control over the business after he bought the founders out early, and the business went on to make millions. That success would prove fatal for Mr. Fuld, who would fall to his death from the roof of a factory which the board had “told” him to build in anticipation of more business.
The Ouija Board was a sensation, even making it’s way into the literary world. In 1916, Pearl Curran began writing poems and stories that she claimed had been dictated to her through the board by the spirit of Patience Worth, a supposed 17th century Englishwoman. In the following year, Emily Grant Hutchings would write her book, Jap Herron and claim that it had been dictated to her by the late Mark Twain through the Ouija board. The book was a hit, and was reviewed by the New York Times, but was taken out of print when Twain’s family threatened to sue over the unauthorized use of his name. More recently the board had been used as an “automatic” writing tool, notably by Sylvia Plath’s “Dialogue over a Ouija Board”, and Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill, whose epic poem The Changing Light at Sandovar contained messages from W. B. Yeats, and the Archangel Michael.
Over the years the Ouija Board as we know it today has waxed and waned in notoriety and popularity, though it has made countless appearances in pop culture, most notably in 1979’s The Exorcist, when Linda Blair’s character explains to her mother that she has been communicating with “Captain Howdy,” the demon who would go on to possess her, through the Ouija board. Whether or not the board itself is an innocent pastime or the mouth of hell is up for debate, but what most people want to know is this: does it really work? And the answer is yes, it does, but not in the way one might think.
The mechanics of the Ouija board are simple: two or more people gather around the board, lightly placing their fingers along the edge of the planchette, a triangular device with a window allowing the letters of the alphabet to be seen underneath. A question is posed, and the planchette moves from letter to letter spelling out the answer. Well, of course someone’s moving it, right? They always claim not to be, and the more participants gathered, the less likely to be able to pinpoint anyone who might be.
The answer may be the Ideometer Effect, originally discovered in 1852 by Dr. William Benjamin Carter, wherein the unconscious mind has the ability to direct motor activity and muscle movement. In other words, you are moving it— you just don’t realize it. Through later experiments with the Ouija Board, where subjects responded to a series of questions either with the aid of the board or without, and had a higher percentage of correct answers with the board, it is thought that the unconscious mind is capable of pulling up information not accessible to the conscious mind.
Let’s face it though; it’s more fun to imagine our questions are being answered from the other side. A reporter once asked William Fuld if he believed in the powers of the board to which he responded, “I should say not. I’m no spiritualist. I’m a Presbyterian.” If however, he had been building that factory from which he took his fatal tumble at the behest of his famous talking board, he had to have believed in the board, even just a little bit.
- The BP Editors