Ouija Boards: Are We Really Letting Kids Summon Spirits? A Death Witch Medium Explains the Science
We are going to talk about the infamous Ouija board and do our best to separate facts from fictions. Are Hasbro. and other game manufacturers encouraging to summon demons at their sleepovers or is there something else entirely going on? Let's look at the history and science behind something so maligned and misunderstood today.
This article will cover:
~ When we first see talking or spirit boards enter human history
~ Who founded the first company that mass-produced Ouija boards
~ How the board "named itself"
~ How they convinced the patent officer the Ouija board was legit
~ The interesting way ownership changed hands and an untimely passing
~ Ouija boards being considered a widely accepted, safe, family passed time
~ The pop culture event that changed the way mainstream society viewed Ouija boards
~ What science says is really going on when we use Ouija boards
~ How I explain/account for the reports of negative things happening during the use of Ouija boards
We're getting close to Halloween/Samhain which is prime divination time and even those who don't normally practice divination or some form of spirit communication sometimes get the bug in the month of October to try a method or two. Since the Ouija board doesn't require you to memorize rules, meanings, or any particular system for its use, many times it seems like the most accessible tool to the novice for these forays.
There's a lot of misinformation out there about Ouija, or spirit boards or talking boards as they are sometimes called, and I'll try to put some of those myths to rest in this article, but I also know that quite frankly, this article is going to piss some people off. There are those that no matter what evidence you present them with are going to stay steadfast to their convictions that Ouija boards, and the like, are objects of pure demon summoning evil. And if you've followed me for any length of time you may already know my feelings on the “d” word. That aside, I have seen some truly ignorant and hateful things said in paranormal and Pagan groups when the topic of the Ouija board is brought up.
I'm not here to try to change anyone's spiritual beliefs, that's not my place and some of what I will talk about is experiential, and I acknowledge that we do NOT all have the same experiences and I'm not trying to invalidate anyone else's experiences. I'm merely proposing that when we take the facts about Ouija boards into consideration we then look at those experiences from a certain perspective.
While Ouija boards are not part of my current practice I have used them in the past and I do currently own one. The reason I stopped using them has nothing to do with the myth that they are evil and everything to do with practicality. I'm dyslexic so trying to keep up with what the board is spelling out is a real pain in my derriere.
Ouija boards, just like Tarot cards, pendulums, other cartomancy decks and all the tools of the like are neither good nor evil in and of themselves. They are merely inanimate objects that do not possess any magic in and of themselves. Only after we deem them as something and imbue them with that energy do they have a leaning one way or the other. And even if we assign them a leaning one way or another that energy is mutable. An Ouija board is nothing more than a piece of mass-produced cardboard, if you're buying the Hasbro one. A Ouija board from Hasbro is no more intrinsically evil than Hasbro's Clue board game. Made in the same type of factory with the same type of material.
No surprise here, we do NOT know the complete history of the Ouija board, which for many is part of its appeal. I've read so many unsubstantiated accounts of who "REALLY" invented it and when, so instead of stoking those gossip fires we're going to talk about what facts we can trace through documentation. There really is no evidence of talking boards, spirit boards, or Ouija boards (whichever name you prefer to use) being used as any sort of ancient spirit communication tool. When we see them enter into human history is during the 19th century and the Spiritualist movement here in America.
The timeline I will give you is supported by newspaper articles, patent office correspondences, patent files, records of business licenses, and some of these documents also match the stories told by the decedents of the folks we're going to talk about. I found much of my information through the Smithsonian but the original company who patented the Ouija board also has a website that details some of the board's history. There is some information on their website that doesn't jive with what I found through the Smithsonian but they have documentation to support their info and honestly, it answers some of the questions I had after reading through the Smithsonian's info. So any way you slice it this isn't tabloid gossip here, we're just talking about people and events that are supported through some form of documentation here.
Who actually invented the first talking board/spirit board? We may likely never know and it may have been the work of more than one person. The Spiritualist Movement hit America in the mid-19th century and thrived here. But the methods of communicating with spirits at that time involved things like knocking, which were time-consuming, and frankly, our ancestors would sometimes get bored with the process. During a séance, the person leading it would say the alphabet out loud and everyone would listen for a knock to indicate the letters to spell out the spirit's message. Honestly, I don't think I could have sat through one of these. Now, there were other means of spirit communication during this time but folks wanted a faster more streamlined way to communicate with spirits, one that even someone who wasn't a medium could use. In fact, some Spiritualist mediums weren't the Ouija board's biggest fans because it was competition.
In 1886 we saw a talking board pop up in Ohio Spiritualist circles and it started to become very popular. This board featured letters and numbers with a planchette that allowed for easier spirit communication. A man from Baltimore Maryland by the name of Charles Kennard saw a business opportunity in these talking boards and rounded up four investors. Two of them were Elijah Bond (a patent attorney) and Col. Washington Bowie (a surveyor) according to the Smithsonian. It bothered me that the Smithsonian material didn't list the names of the two other men so I did some digging and discovered the following information. According to the company's official company biography website which uses incorporation documents to support its timeline, Bond was not one of the initial men involved in ownership of the company but was their patent attorney. On October 20th, 1890 the Kennard Novelty Company was incorporated by the following men; Harry Welles Rusk, William H.A. Maupin, John F. Green, Col. Washington Bowie, and Charles Kennard. Despite the company being named after Kennard he did not run the company but rather was the General Manager. Kennard didn't actually contribute much capital to the venture, it was Col. Bowie who actually contributed most of the capital. This is pure conjecture on my part but I'd say that perhaps they named the company after him because he is credited as the one who had the idea to form the company and sell the boards and he contributed his failing fertilizer factory as their first Ouija board factory. Harry Welles Rusk was actually the president of the company and Col. Bowie was the treasurer and supervisor.
I feel that it is important to mention that none of these men were, by any accounts I've found at least, to be part of the Spiritualist movement or to consider themselves Spiritualists, they were shrewd businessmen.
Bond's sister-in-law was Helen Peters Nosworthy, and she was a Spiritualist medium according to all of the accounts I found. Bond, Peters, and a few others were sitting around one of the boards they made (which was the Ouija board we know today) and asked the board what they should name it. Reportedly the board spelled out “Ouija.” I know that you, like myself, have no doubt seen the many sources out there that say that the name comes from combining the French word "oui" and the German word "ja," but according to interviews from decedents and letters to the patent office this story of the Ouija board essentially naming itself is the real story of how the board was named. They then asked the board what Ouija meant and the board spelled out “good luck.”
Now, there are some that say Helen was a known fan of a writer named Ouida and that her brother-in-law, during this particular board naming session, misspelled the name as he manipulated the planchette. Did Bond intentionally manipulate the planchette? That's something I don't think we'll ever be able to answer with certainty. Peter Nosworthy's headstone credits Helen as the person who named the famous board. Despite records stating a claim that the board named itself.
The group applied for a patent for their Ouija board but in order to get the patent they would have to prove their claims to a patent officer and convince him that the board did indeed actually work. What did they claim? Well, they claimed that the board was a link “between the known and unknown, the material and immaterial.”
Bond and his sister-in-law provided a demonstration for the patent officer to prove their claims. The patent officer believed that there was no way the pair could know his correct name and said that if the board could spell out his correct name he would award them their patent. The Ouija board did spell out his name, which left the patent officer shaken according to some, but true to his word on February 10, 1891, they were awarded their patent under the category of “toy or game.” Just as I lean towards believing that it is highly likely that Bond intentionally manipulated the planchette during the naming session, I lean towards theorizing that Bond had prior knowledge of the patent officer's name. I mean, he was a PATENT attorney for crying out loud. I'm all for believing in spiritual things but I didn't just fall off the turnip wagon this morning. The patent was awarded to Kennard and Maupin. I have to ask myself why it wasn't awarded to all of the men who owned the company since this was a joint venture and neither Kennard nor Maupin were the top capital contributors to the company. I have no answer for this but as we go through the history of the company I think we can all reasonably surmise that there must have been dissension among the ranks between the men who incorporated the Kennard Novelty Company.
Sales of the Ouija board were doing great pretty much right out of the gate but in 1891, not long after the business got going Kennard and Maupin would sell their rights and interests in the company to Bond.
By 1892 William Fuld, who started as an employee, stockholder, and friend of Rusk and Col. Bowie was now running the company. While his obituary in The New York Times says that HE, Fuld, was the inventor of the Ouija board he never made any such claims during his life as far as I can find from any credible source. It was at this time that Bowie and Rusk restructured and renamed the company, now calling it the Ouija Novelty Company. Bowie and Rusk also dismissed the other remaining original owners at this time.
Over the course of 1891 and 1892 Kennard apparently took one of the original company's factories in Chicago and used it to produce a rival talking board that he called the Volo Talking board. Was he successful? I think we can say obviously not because we don't call them Volo Talking boards today.
In 1898 Bowie and Rusk gave Fuld the license and exclusive rights to produce the Ouija board. The following years brought a lot of public squabbles splashed throughout newspapers with different people claiming they were the “real” inventor of the Ouija board. Many tried during this time to start competitor companies and boards but each one failed.
In 1919 Bowie sold his remaining shares of the company to Fuld for just $1, so that he became the full owner. I do not know when Rusk sold or relinquished his. Sales continued to do excellent. Fuld died in 1927 from a freak fall at one of the Ouija board factories, a factory that supposedly a Ouija board told him to build. Neither the Smithsonian nor the company's biography page say if the name was changed after Fuld became the sole owner or if the name was changed after Fuld's untimely passing.
This did not deter sales of the famous board. Part of the board's success is due to the fact that it appealed to people across a wide range of socio-economic standings.
The 1910s and 20s saw a real surge in the board's popularity. You have to remember that from the late 19th century until 1973, spirit communication through the use of an Ouija board wasn't considered weird or evil. It was considered normal and a family activity. It was so normal that Norman Rockwell painted an image of a man and a woman using an Ouija board, and that painting was on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in May of 1920. You can't get much more conservative, wholesome, Americana than a Norman Rockwell painting. That's right, I called the use of the Ouija board "conservative" because it was not uncommon for everyday folks to hold a séance with an Ouija board on Saturday night and go to church Sunday morning without anyone thinking that there was anything strange or evil about it.
In 1944 just one, singular, New York department store sold 50,000 Ouija boards, which were still being produced by Fuld's company.
In 1966 Parker Brothers bought the rights to make the board from Fuld's company and by the end of 1967 they sold 2 million boards. Ouija boards out sold their iconic game of Monopoly.
Today, Hasbro owns the right to the board since they bought Parker Brothers in 1991.
You may be asking yourself how we went from Saturday night séances with Ouija boards being an approved American past-time to the notion often seen today that Ouija boards are evil and channel demons. We can actually draw a straight line to one thing, one thing that changed the fabric of pop culture so significantly that it still colors how we see Ouija boards today.
Prior to this singular event, there would be stories of Ouija boards in newspapers and Ouija boards would sometimes show up in tv shows or movies. The boards were either treated in a positive way or in the case of shows like I Love Lucy they were treated in joking or silly manners.
There were a couple of early 20th-century murderers who tried to make the claim that “the board made them do it.” Kind of like the Son of Sam tried to say the neighbor's dog made him do it, btw Son of Same later admitted he made that up about the dog, in case you didn't know. These were dismissed as untrue and poor attempts to get out of murder convictions and I believe there were only two accounts of anyone trying to do this, at least I only found two. Those couple of kooks aside, and you've always got to expect a bad apple or two, people seemed to fall into one of two camps when it came to how the Ouija board was viewed. Either you just didn't believe in ghosts etc. and thought any claims of spirit communication were silly or you saw absolutely nothing wrong with the use of Ouija boards.
So what was the turning point? What changed?
Well it was the movie The Exorcist in 1973 that changed the Ouija board's place in American culture. In the movie, the young girl gets possessed by a demon and this is attributed to her playing with a Ouija board. The movie was supposed to be based on a true story, but we can and probably will forever debate what if any of the events in the movie were ever true. Consider that despite people involved coming forward and saying it was a hoax and a publicity stunt, and a bid to get Ronnie DeFeo off the hook for murder, a whole ruse inspired by the movie the Exorcist no less, the myth of the Amnytyville house still persists. We know 100%, no grey area what-so-ever that Amnytyville was a hoax but people will still argue it was real and even if we had the same level of evidence to debunk the events depicted in The Exorcist, there would still be people who would believe the events of the movie since it says that it's based on a true story.
I'm willing to entertain the idea that something paranormal may have happened to the person who inspired the story of The Exorcist, but I do not believe that whatever that might have been was anything like the movie. This movie had such an affect on pop culture that we still feel its influence today, far beyond how it colored the perceptions of the Ouija board. Staying on topic though this movie introduced the idea that demons could come through the board and possess people and started the ball rolling on the idea that Ouija boards are inherently evil.
The power of suggestion is far more powerful than we often want to admit and the movie planted a fantastically horrifying seed in our collective human imagination. That seed has grown into a twisted and gnarled tree whose gruesome appearance can make us completely forget the Ouija board's benign beginnings.
I know that some of you are saying, “But Rayne, I or someone I know used an Ouija board and then had a horrible experience with a malevolent spirit. How do you explain that if Ouija boards don't conjure evil spirits?”
We WILL get to that topic, but first let's talk about some actual published scientific research on what's actually going on when you use a Ouija board.
Two doctors, not medical doctors just so we are clear, and a post-doctoral researcher decided they wanted to find out if more than just the ideometer effect was going on when we use an Ouija board. The ideometer effect, if you're not familiar with it was written about by French physician and physiologist Benjamin Carpenter in 1852, in layman's terms it is the the very subtle movements we make without conscious will.
They found out that while it's not spirits or demons speaking to us through the Ouija boards, we can definitely access information through these talking boards. Where is this information coming from? Our subconscious. They found that those ideometric movements weren't completely random but were actually purposefully spelling out information that is inside our brains but that we don't have conscious access to.
It was a Halloween party that inspired the group from the Univ. of British Colombia Visual Cognition Lab to form and conduct these experiments. They had participants answer fact-based questions. Like what is the capital of Brazil? Those who answered without a Ouija board got the answers right about 50% of the time which is statistically what you'd expect for subjects that are guessing. Participants who used an Ouija board to answer got the correct answers upwards of 65% of the time. For those who aren't familiar with this sort of statistical data, that number is very significant. There is one very interesting tidbit that they did find though, for this to work, they found that the participant needed to believe that the answer was coming from somewhere other than themselves. In their experiments the blindfolded participants tended to believe that it was the other person using the Ouija board with them. What they didn't know was that once the blindfold was on, they were actually the only ones touching the planchette. Though they were the only ones touching anything, MANY of the participants complained that the other person, who was a confederate of the experiment and had removed their hands once the participant was blindfolded, was clearly making the planchette move.
The thing is that the very nature of the ideometer effect makes us feel like the movements we see resulting from the effect, like the movement of the planchette, are coming from outside of us rather than inside of us.
In summation, these movements that we aren't conscious of and don't control can offer us a window into parts of our brain that we don't have conscious access to, and as unspooky and unfun as it may be, it's really been us and not spirits or demons moving the planchette all along. We just aren't doing it with our conscious minds.
For those who are academically minded, it was Dr. Rensink, Dr. Fels, and researcher Gauchou of the Univ. of British Columbia who conducted these experiments and an abstract was published in Consciousness and Cognition
Volume 21, Issue 2, June 2012, Pages 976-982
They believe this information could actually have some interesting implications and even some applications to Alzhymers and had a desire to conduct further experiments but traditional research grants don't want to fund any project that involves an Ouija board.
Alright, so we've covered that for the first 75 years of the 121 that the Ouija board has been around it actually had a good rep and wasn't seen as a portal straight to evil. If you want to throw in the years that spirit and talking boards were being used prior to the patented Ouija board then even more of its history is positive. We've also covered that what's mystical about the board is that it allows us to use the ideometer effect to access information in our unconscious, or implicit semantic memory as they refer to it in the abstract.
So, let's address the burning question of why then people have experiences that connect malevolent spirits and Ouija boards. Because I'm not discounting people's experiences, but when we look at Ouija boards in the light of the information I've presented you, we can really only draw a couple of conclusions.
I'm just gonna be blunt and come right out and say it even though there are a lot of people who aren't going to want to hear it.
It's NOT the Ouija board, it's the person or persons using the Ouija board. That doesn't make anyone bad or evil and I'm not judging you if you've ever brought something negative through, but the piece of cardboard from the game company is just that, a lump of cardboard that isn't summoning crap. It's not the tools, it's the person using the tools.
Here's the real talk, anything and I do mean ANYTHING, can be used as a tool to summon dark shit or open a door for it to come through. If you're so minded, you could use a teddy bear to bring a malevolent spirit into your space, but notice how I said that. It's not the teddy bear bringing the dark entity through, it's the person using the teddy bear.
The thing that's different between my teddy bear example and the Ouija board is that the Ouija board is tapping into our unconscious mind which isn't always the safest place, it's where we store some really nasty stuff, that we either can't deal with on a conscious level or have chosen to deny and repress.
You've got two potential reasons here that something negative might come through when using an Ouija board. The first is that someone actually wants to tempt fate and bring something dark in on purpose. The second being somebody's unconscious mind brings something dark through. Either way, don't blame the board.
You may be asking then, “Can spirits ever use the board to communicate with the living?”
The answer to that is yes. While Tarot cards, pendulums, etc. can and at their base nature do work without making contact with spirits they and the Ouija board can all be used to do so. Again, this is not a choice the board makes for us but a way that we choose to use the board. You can set out with the intent to use the board to allow a present spirit or a spirit you call upon to communicate with you through it. I advise great caution in doing this though. Remember, the board is not in control in this situation. Ideally, you, the person using the tool is in control but if you don't know what you're doing you may wind up letting less-than-desirable spirits become in control of the situation. Again, this is not the doing of the Ouija board it's the person allowing the board to be used in this manner, and even experienced mediums like myself can stumble across an unpleasant spirit from time to time. Do you know how to handle such a situation?
I highly recommend that if you listen to nothing else that I say in this article that you take this piece of sage advice to heart. “Never summon, what you can't banish.” I have no idea who originally said that, but when it comes to those who seek out communication with spirits it's the best advice you can heed.
If you really want to communicate with spirits through any tool or by any means I suggest you research, research, research, and if you can get the guidance of a few people who know their butts from a hole in the ground. And even if you're like me, just have a natural aptitude to see and speak with spirits, research, research, research, and learn from the best examples you can find.