Ouija, The Wonderful Talking Board.
It’s 1891 in Pittsburgh on a cold February afternoon. Your jacket is tight, your hat is scratchy, and your eyes wide. They’re fixated on a wooden board propped up in a novelty and toy shop. You’re holding a New York newspaper that declared it a magical device that answers questions of your desires. In the left corner is a sun with the word “yes”, on the right is a moon with the word “no” and your head tilts a bit. It’s flat marked with the letters of the alphabet and the numbers zero through nine. “Goodbye” is written at the bottom. A planchette is included, it resembles a tear drop and has glass to see through.
Price? $1.50.
Today, that would be equivalent to about $40. However, nowadays the mysterious talking board can be purchased for about $20, even less.
But it isn’t the price or the first glance of the Ouija board that strikes odd. It is the real history that is rich in mystery. Ouija historian Robert Murch has been puzzled since 1992. According to Smithsonian Magazine, Mursch says nobody truly knows the real origin of the board.
“For such an iconic thing that strikes both fear and wonder in American culture, how can no one know where it came from?” he said.
The Ouija board can be traced back to the 19th century’s fascination with spiritualism, which was written about in our first Halloween Series. Spiritualists claimed the dead could contact the living through the board. They also said a board which appeared similar to the Ouija was used in 1886 at Ohio Spiritualist camps to receive faster communication with the dead.
However, the spiritualism obsession led researchers back to the 1848 incident with the Fox sisters in New York. The three sisters, who play a significant role in the formation of Spiritualism, claimed to have communicated with spirits in their home through rappings. An example would be asking the spirits to repeat the snaps of their fingers, which it would do. Eventually through communication, the spirit claimed to be Charles B. Rosna who was murdered five years prior and he told the sisters his body was buried in the cellular. Eventually, a skeleton was found in the cellar wall.
“Communicating with the dead was common,” said Murch. “It wasn’t seen as bizarre or weird. It’s hard to imagine that now, we look at that and think, ‘Why are you opening the gates of hell?’”
As Spiritualism washed into American homes, it was common for families to hold a séance one night and then go to church the next. This crusade was during a time of short lifespans. There was the Civil war, diseases, and not proper health care and hospitals. People were hungry to connect with loved ones who never resumed home from the war. Spiritualism was so common that even Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd Lincoln was known for leading séances in the White House.
Eventually, after the phenomenon of the talking boards at the spiritualist’s camps in Ohio, investor Elijah Bond and Col. Washington Bowie would go on to create the Kennard Novelty Company to open people’s wallets. The men were not spiritualists, they just found a good way to make money during a raging time of ghostly communications.
Bond and his sister-in-law Helen Peters, first came up with the name for the board after sitting around a table and asking it. It spelled out “Ouija” and when they asked what it meant, it replied with “Good Luck.” Bond often referred to Peters as a “strong medium.”
Interestingly enough, in order to get the patent on their product, they needed to prove the board worked. The chief patent officer said he’d allow the application to proceed only if the board could spell out his name. Bond and Peters were unaware of his name yet the board devotedly spelled out the correct name.
Today the Ouija board forever holds its spot as popular. With movies like The Exorcist and Paranormal Activity and even the 2014 film Ouija, people have been running to online circuits and toy stores to purchase the mystical board to try it themselves.
The Ouija board offers a link between the known and the unknown, lifting a veil to a world we wish to enter… well, only if we dare.