History of Ouija
Ouija!
How this American Anomaly Became
More than Just Fun and Games
By Mitch Horowitz
Ouija. For some the rectangular board evokes memories of late-night sleepover parties,
shrieks of laughter, and toy shelves brimming with Magic Eight Balls, Frisbees, and Barbie
dolls.
For others, Ouija boards – known more generally as talking boards or spirit boards – have
darker associations. Stories abound of fearsome entities making threats, dire predictions,
and even physical assaults on innocent users after a night of Ouija experimentation.
And the fantastic claims don’t stop there: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill vowed
until his death in 1995 that his most celebrated work was written with the use of a
homemade Ouija board.
For my part, I first discovered the mysterious workings of Ouija nearly twenty years ago
during a typically freezing-cold winter on eastern Long Island. While heaters clanked and
hummed within the institutional-white walls of my college dormitory, friends allayed boredom
with a Parker Brothers Ouija board.
As is often the case with Ouija, one young woman became the ringleader of board
readings. She reprised the role of spirit medium that had typically fallen to women in past
eras, when the respectable clergy was a male-only affair. Under the gaze of her dark eyes –
which others said gave them chills – the late-night Ouija sessions came into vogue.
Most of my evenings were given over to editing the college newspaper, but I often arrived
home at the dorm to frightening stories: The board, one night, kept spelling out the name
“Seth,” which my friends associated with evil. (Probably connecting it with the malevolent
Egyptian god Set, who is seen as a Satan prototype.) When asked, “Who’s Seth?” the
board directed its attention to a member of the group, and repeatedly replied: “Ask Carlos.”
A visibly shaken Carlos began breathing heavily and refused to answer.
Consumed as I was with exposing scandals within the campus food service, I never took the
opportunity to sit-in on these séances – a move I came to regard with a mixture of relief and
regret. The idea that a mass-produced game board and its plastic pointer could display
some occult faculty, or could tap into a user’s subconscious, got under my skin. And I wasn’t
alone: In its heyday, Ouija outsold Monopoly.
Ouija boards have sharply declined in popularity since the 1960s and 70s, when you could
find one in nearly every toy-cluttered basement. But they remain among the most peculiar
consumer items in American history. Indeed, controversy endures to this day over their
origin. To get a better sense of what Ouija boards are – and where they came from –
requires going back to an era in which even an American president dabbled in talking to the
dead.
Spiritualism Triumphant
Today, it is difficult to imagine the popularity enjoyed by the movement called Spiritualism in
the nineteenth century, when table rapping, séances, medium trances, and other forms of
contacting the “other side” were practiced by an estimated ten percent of the population. It
began in 1848 when the teenaged sisters Kate and Margaret Fox introduced “spirit rapping”
to a lonely hamlet in upstate New York called Hydesville. While every age and culture had
known hauntings, Spiritualism appeared to foster actual communication with the beyond.
Within a few years, people from every walk of life took seriously the contention that one
could talk to the dead.
For many, Spiritualism seemed to extend the hope of reaching loved ones, and perhaps
easing the pain of losing a child to one of the diseases of the day. The allure of immortality
or of feeling oneself lifted beyond workaday realities attracted others. For others still, spirit
counsels became a way to cope with anxiety about the future, providing otherworldly advice
in matters of health, love, or money.
According to newspaper accounts of the era, President Abraham Lincoln hosted a séance
in the White House – though more as a good-humored parlor game than as a serious
spiritual inquiry. Yet at least one vividly rendered Spiritualist memoir places a trance
medium in the private quarters of the White House, advising the President and Mrs. Lincoln
just after the outbreak of the Civil War.
Making Contact
In this atmosphere of ghostly knocks and earnest pleas to hidden forces, nineteenth-
century occultists began looking for easier ways to communicate with the beyond. And in
the best American fashion, they took a do-it-yourself approach to the matter. Their
homespun efforts at contacting the spirit world led toward something we call Ouija – but not
until they worked through several other methods.
One involved a form of table rapping in which questioners solicited spirit knocks when
letters of the alphabet were called out, thus spelling a word. This was, however, a tedious
and time-consuming exercise. A faster means was by “automatic writing,” in which spirit
beings could communicate through the pen of a channeler; but some complained that this
produced many pages of unclear or meandering prose.
One invention directly prefigured the heart-shaped pointer that moves around the Ouija
board. The planchette – French for “little plank” – was a three-legged writing tool with a
hole at the top for the insertion of a pencil. The planchette was designed for one person or
more to rest their fingers on it and allow it to “glide” across a page, writing out a spirit
message. The device originated in Europe in the early 1850s; by 1860 commercially
manufactured planchettes were advertised in America.
Two other items from the 1850s are direct forebears to Ouija: “dial plates” and alphabet
paste boards. In 1853 a Connecticut Spiritualist invented the “Spiritual Telegraph Dial,” a
roulette-like wheel with letters and numerals around its circumference. Dial plates came in
various forms, sometimes of a complex variety. Some were rigged to tables to respond to
“spirit tilts,” while others were presumably guided – like a planchette – by the hands of
questioners.
Alphabet boards further simplified matters. In use as early as 1852, these talking-board
precursors allowed seekers to point to a letter as a means of prompting a “spirit rap,”
thereby quickly spelling a word. It was, perhaps, the easiest method yet. And it was only a
matter of time until inventors and entrepreneurs began to see the possibilities.
Baltimore Oracles
More than 150 years after the dawn of the Spiritualist era, contention endures over who
created Ouija. The conventional history of American toy manufacturing credits a Baltimore
businessman named William Fuld. Fuld, we are told, “invented” Ouija around 1890. So it is
repeated online and in books of trivia, reference works, and “ask me” columns in
newspapers. For many decades, the manufacturer itself – first Fuld’s company and later the
toy giant Parker Brothers – insinuated as much by running the term “William Fuld Talking
Board Set” across the top of every board.
The conventional history is wrong.
The patent for a “Ouija or Egyptian luck-board” was filed on May 28, 1890 by Baltimore
resident and patent attorney Elijah H. Bond, who assigned the rights to two city
businessmen, Charles W. Kennard and William H.A. Maupin. The patent was granted on
February 10, 1891, and so was born the Ouija-brand talking board.
The first patent reveals a familiarly oblong board, with the alphabet running in double rows
across the top, and numbers in a single row along the bottom. The sun and moon, marked
respectively by the words “yes” and “no,” adorn the upper left and right corners, while the
words “Good bye” appear at the bottom center. Later on, instructions and the illustrations
accompanying them, prescribed an expressly social - even flirtatious - experience: Two
parties, preferably a man and woman, were to balance the board between them on their
knees, placing their fingers lightly upon the planchette. ("It draws the two people using it
into close companionship and weaves about them a feeling of mysterious isolation," the box
read.) In an age of buttoned-up morals, it was a tempting dalliance.
True Origins
The Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore employed a teenaged varnisher who helped
run shop operations, and this was William Fuld. By 1892, however, Charles W. Kennard’s
partners removed him from the company amid financial disputes and a new patent – this
time for an improved pointer, or planchette – was filed by a 19-year-old Fuld. In years to
come, it was Fuld who would take over the company and affix his name to every board.
Based on an account in a 1920 magazine article, inventor’s credit sometimes goes to an E.
C. Reichie, alternately identified as a Maryland cabinetmaker or coffin maker. This theory
was popularized by a defunct Baltimore business monthly called Warfield’s, which ran a
richly detailed – and at points, one suspects, richly imagined – history of Ouija boards in
1990. The article opens with a misspelled E.C. “Reiche” as the board’s inventor, and calls
him a coffin maker with an interest in the afterlife – a name and a claim that have been
repeated and circulated ever since.
Yet this figure appears virtually nowhere else in Ouija history, including on the first patent.
His name came up during a period of patent litigation about thirty years after Ouija’s
inception. A 1920 account in New York’s World Magazine – widely disseminated that year in
the popular weekly The Literary Digest – reports that one of Ouija’s early investors told a
judge that E.C. Reichie had invented the board. But no reference to an E.C. Reichie – be
he a cabinetmaker or coffin maker – appears in the court transcript, according to Ouija
historian and talking-board manufacturer Robert Murch.
Ultimately, Reichie’s role, or whether there was a Reichie, may be moot, at least in terms of
the board’s invention. Talking boards of a homemade variety were already a popular craze
among Spiritualists by the mid-1880s. At his online Museum of Talking Boards, Ouija
collector and chronicler Eugene Orlando posts an 1886 article from the New-York Daily
Tribune (as reprinted that year in a Spiritualist monthly, The Carrier Dove) describing the
breathless excitement around the new-fangled alphabet board and its message indicator. “I
know of whole communities that are wild over the 'talking board,'” says a man in the article.
This was a full four years before the first Ouija patent was filed. Obviously Bond, Kennard,
and their associates were capitalizing on an invention – not conceiving of one.
And what of the name Ouija? Alternately pronounced wee-JA and wee-GEE, its origin may
never be known. Kennard at one time claimed it was Egyptian for “good luck” (it’s not). Fuld
later said it was simply a marriage of the French and German words for “yes.” One early
investor claimed the board spelled out its own name. As with other aspects of Ouija history,
the board seems determined to withhold a few secrets of its own.
Ancient Ouija?
Another oft-repeated, but misleading, claim is that Ouija, or talking boards, have ancient
roots. In a typical example, Frank Gaynor’s 1953 Dictionary of Mysticism states that ancient
boards of different shapes and sizes “were used in the sixth century before Christ.” In a
wide range of books and articles, everyone from Pythagoras to the Mongols to the Ancient
Egyptians is said to have possessed Ouija-like devices. But the claims rarely withstand
scrutiny.
Chronicler-curator Orlando points out that the primary reference to Ouija existing in the pre-
modern world appears in a passage from Lewis Spence’s 1920 Encyclopedia of Occultism –
which is repeated in Nandor Fodor’s popular 1934 Encyclopedia of Psychic Science. The
Fodor passage reads, in part: “As an invention it is very old. It was in use in the days of
Pythagoras, about 540 B.C. According to a French historical account of the philosopher’s
life, his sect held frequent séances or circles at which ‘a mystic table, moving on wheels,
moved towards signs, which the philosopher and his pupil Philolaus, interpreted to the
audience...’” It is, Orlando points out, “the one recurring quote found in almost every
academic article on the Ouija board.” But the story presents two problems: The “French
historical account” is never identified; and the Pythagorean scribe Philolaus lived not in
Pythagoras’s time, but in the following century.
It is also worth keeping in mind that we know precious little today about Pythagoras and his
school. No writings of Pythagoras survive, and the historical record depends upon later
works – some of which were written centuries after his death. Hence, commentators on
occult topics are sometimes tempted to project backwards onto Pythagoras all sorts of
arcane practices, Ouija and modern numerology among them.
Still other writers – when they are not repeating claims like the one above – tend to misread
ancient historical accounts and mistake other divinatory tools, such as pendulum dishes, for
Ouija boards. Oracles were rich and varied from culture to culture – from Germanic runes to
Greek Delphic rites – but the prevailing literature on oracular traditions supports no
suggestion that talking boards, as we know them, were in use before the Spiritualist era.
Ouija Boom
After William Fuld took the reins of Ouija manufacturing in America, business was brisk – if
not always happy. Fuld formed a quickly shattered business alliance with his brother Isaac,
which landed the two in court battles for nearly twenty years. Isaac was eventually found to
have violated an injunction against creating a competing board, called the Oriole, after
being forced from the family business in 1901. The two brothers would never speak again.
Ouija, and anything that looked directly like it, was firmly in the hands of William Fuld.
By 1920, the board was so well known that artist Norman Rockwell painted a send-up of a
couple using one – the woman dreamy and credulous, the man fixing her with a cloying grin
– for a cover of The Saturday Evening Post. For Fuld, though, everything was strictly
business. “Believe in the Ouija board?” he once told a reporter. “I should say not. I’m no
spiritualist. I’m a Presbyterian – been one ever since I was so high.” In 1920, the Baltimore
Sun reported that Fuld, by his own “conservative estimate,” had pocketed an astounding $1
million from sales.
Whatever satisfaction Fuld’s success may have brought him was soon lost: On February
26, 1927, he fell to his death from the roof of his Baltimore factory. The 54-year-old
manufacturer was supervising the replacement of a flagpole when an iron support bar he
held gave way, and he fell three stories backward.
Fuld’s children took over his business – and generally prospered. While sales dipped and
rose – and competing boards came and went – only the Ouija brand endured. And by the
1940s, Ouija was experiencing a new surge in popularity.
Historically, séances and other Spiritualist methods proliferate during times of war.
Spiritualism had seen its last great explosion of interest in the period around World War I,
when parents yearned to contact children lost to the battlefield carnage. In World War II,
many anxious families turned to Ouija. In a 1944 article, “The Ouija Comes Back,” The New
York Times reported that one New York City department store alone sold 50,000 Ouija
boards in a five-month period.
American toy manufacturers were taking notice. Some attempted knock-off products. But
Parker Brothers developed bigger plans. In a move that would place a carryover from the
age of Spiritualism into playrooms all across America, the toy giant bought the rights for an
undisclosed sum in 1966. The Fuld family was out of the picture, and Ouija was about to
achieve its biggest success ever.
The following year, Parker Brothers is reported to have sold more than two million Ouija
boards – topping sales of its most popular game, Monopoly. The occult boom that began in
the late 1960s, as astrologers adorned the cover of Time magazine and witchcraft became
a fast-growing “new” religion, fueled the board’s sales for the following decades. A Parker
spokesperson says the company has sold over ten million boards since 1967.
The sixties and seventies also saw the rise of Ouija as a product of the youth culture. Ouija
circles sprang up in college dormitories, and the board emerged as a fad among
adolescents, for whom its ritual of secret messages and intimate communications became a
form of rebellion. One youthful experimenter recalls an enticing atmosphere of danger and
intrigue – “like shoplifting or taking drugs” – that allowed her and a girlfriend to bond
together over Ouija sessions in which they contacted the spirit of “Candelyn,” a nineteenth-
century girl who had perished in a fire. Sociologists suggested that Ouija sessions were a
way for young people to project, and work through, their own fears. But many Ouija users
claimed that the verisimilitude of the communications were reason enough to return to the
board.
Ouija Today
While officials at Parker Brothers (now a division of Hasbro) would not get into the ebb and
flow of sales, there’s little question that Ouija has declined precipitously in recent years. In
1999, the company brought an era to an end when it discontinued the vintage Fuld design
and switched to a smaller, glow-in-the-dark version of the board. In consumer
manufacturing, the redesign of a classic product often signals an effort to reverse falling
sales. Listed at $19.95, Ouija costs about 60% more than standards like Monopoly and
Scrabble, which further suggests that it has become something of a specialty item.
In a far remove from the days when Ouija led Parker Brothers’ lineup, the product now
seems more like a corporate stepchild. The “Ouija Game” (“ages 8 to Adult”) merits barely a
mention on Hasbro’s website. The company posts no official history for Ouija, as it does for
its other storied products. And the claims from the original 1960s-era box – “Weird and
mysterious. Surpasses, in its unique results, mind reading, clairvoyance and second sight”
– have since been significantly toned down. Given the negative attention the board
sometimes attracts – both from frightened users and religionists who smell a whiff of Satan’s
doings – Ouija, its sales likely on the wane, may be a product that Hasbro would just as
soon forget.
And yet...Ouija receives more customer reviews – alternately written in tones of outrage,
fear, delight, or ridicule – than any other “toy” for sale on Amazon.com (280 at last count).
What other “game” so polarizes opinion among those who dismiss it as a childhood
plaything and those who condemn or extol it as a portal to the other side? As it did decades
ago in The Exorcist, Ouija figures into the recent fright films What Lies Beneath and White
Noise. And it sustains an urban mythology that continues to make it a household name in
the early twenty-first century. There would seem little doubt that Ouija – as it has arisen
time and again – awaits a revival in the future. But what makes this game board and its
molded plastic pointer so resilient in our culture, and, some might add, in our nightmares?
“An Occult Splendor”
Among the first things one notices when looking into Ouija is its vast – and sometimes
authentically frightening – history of stories. Claims abound from users who experienced the
presence of malevolent entities during Ouija sessions, sometimes even being physically
harassed by unseen forces. A typical storyline involves communication that is at first
reassuring and even useful – a lost object may be recovered – but eventually gives way to
threatening or terrorizing messages. Hugh Lynn Cayce, son of the eminent American
psychic Edgar Cayce, cautioned that his researches found Ouija boards among the most
“dangerous doorways to the unconscious.”
For their part, Ouija enthusiasts note that teachings such as the inspirational “Seth
material,” channeled by Jane Roberts, first came through a Ouija board. Other channeled
writings, such as an early twentieth-century series of historical novels and poems by an
entity called “Patience Worth” and a posthumous “novel” by Mark Twain (pulled from the
shelves after a legal outcry from the writer's estate), have reputedly come through the
board. Such works, however, have rarely attracted enduring readerships. Poets Sylvia Plath
and Ted Hughes wrote haunting and dark passages about their experiences with Ouija; but
none attain the level of their best work.
So, can anything of lasting value be attributed to the board – this mysterious object that
has, in one form or another, been with us for nearly 120 years? The answer is yes, and it
has stared us in the face for so long that we have nearly forgotten it is there.
In 1976, the American poet James Merrill published – and won the Pulitzer Prize for – an
epic poem that recounted his experience, with his partner David Jackson, of using a Ouija
board from 1955 to 1974. His work The Book of Ephraim was later combined with two other
Ouija-inspired long poems and published in 1982 as The Changing Light at Sandover.
“Many readers,” wrote critic Judith Moffett in her penetrating study entitled James Merrill,
“may well feel they have been waiting for this trilogy all their lives.”
First using a manufactured board and then a homemade one – with a teacup in place of a
planchette – Merrill and Jackson encounter a world of spirit “patrons” who recount to them a
sprawling and profoundly involving creation myth. It is poetry steeped in the epic tradition, in
which myriad characters – from W.H. Auden, to lost friends and family members, to the
Greek muse/interlocutor called Ephraim – walk on and off stage. The voices of Merrill,
Jackson, and those that emerge from the teacup and board, alternately offer theories of
reincarnation, worldly advice, and painfully poignant reflections on the passing of life and
ever-hovering presence of death.
The Changing Light at Sandover gives life to a new mythology of world creation,
destruction, resurrection, and the vast, unknowable mechanizations of God Biology (GOD
B, in the words of the Ouija board) and those mysterious figures who enact his will: Bat-
winged creatures who, in their cosmological laboratory, reconstruct departed souls for new
life on earth. And yet we are never far from the human, grounding voice of Merrill, joking
about the selection of new wallpaper in his Stonington, Connecticut home; or from the
moving council of voices from the board, urging: In life, stand for something.
“It is common knowledge – and glaringly obvious in the poems, though not taken seriously
by his critics – that these three works, and their final compilation, were based on
conversations...through a Ouija board,” wrote John Chambers in his outstanding analysis of
Merrill in the Summer 1997 issue of The Anomalist.
Critic Harold Bloom, in a departure from others who sidestep the question of the work’s
source, calls the first of the Sandover poems “an occult splendor.” Indeed, it is not difficult
to argue that, in literary terms, The Changing Light at Sandover is a masterpiece – perhaps
the masterpiece – of occult experimentation. In some respects, it is like an unintended
response to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which not one man acting alone, but two acting
and thinking together, successfully pierce the veil of life’s inner and cosmic mysteries – and
live not only to tell, but to teach.
One wonders, then, why the work is so little known and read within a spiritual subculture
that embraces other channeled works, such as the Ouija-received “Seth material,” the
automatic writing of A Course In Miracles, or the currently popular Abraham-Hicks
channeled readings. The Changing Light at Sandover ought to be evidence that something
– be it inner or outer – is available through this kind of communication, however rare. It is
up to the reader to find out what.
Voices Within?
Of course, the Merrill case begs the question of whether the Ouija board channels
something from beyond or merely reflects the ideas found in one’s subconscious. After all,
who but a poetic genius like James Merrill could have recorded channeled passages of
such literary grace and epic dimension? Plainly put, this wasn’t Joe Schmoe at the board.
In a 1970 book on psychical phenomena, ESP, Seers & Psychics, researcher-skeptic
Milbourne Christopher announces – a tad too triumphantly, perhaps – that if you effectively
blindfold a board’s user and rearrange the order of letters, communication ceases. A
believable enough claim – but what does it really tell us? In 1915, a specialist in abnormal
psychology proposed the same test to the channeled entity called Patience Worth, who,
through a St. Louis housewife named Pearl Curran, had produced a remarkable range of
novels, plays, and poems – some of them hugely ambitious in scale and written in a Middle
English dialect that Curran (who didn’t finish high school) would have had no means of
knowing.
As reported in Irving Litvag’s 1972 study, Singer in the Shadows, Patience Worth
responded to the request that Curran be blindfolded in her typically inimitable fashion: “I be
aset athin the throb o’ her. Aye, and doth thee to take then the lute awhither that she see
not, think ye then she may to set up musics for the hear o’ thee?” In other words, how can
you remove the instrument and expect music?
Some authorities in psychical research support the contention that Ouija is a tool of our
subconscious. For years J.B. Rhine, the veritable dean of psychical research in America,
worked with his wife, Louisa, a trained biologist and well-regarded researcher in her own
right, to bring scientific rigor to the study of psychical phenomena. Responding to the occult
fads of the day, Louisa wrote an item on Ouija boards and automatic writing adapted in the
winter 1970 newsletter of the American Society for Psychical Research. Whatever
messages come through the board, she maintained, are a product of the user’s
subconscious – not any metaphysical force: “In several ways the very nature of automatic
writing and the Ouija board makes them particularly open to misunderstanding. For one
thing, because [such communications] are unconscious, the person does not get the feeling
of his own involvement. Instead, it seems to him that some personality outside of himself is
responsible. In addition, and possibly because of this, the material is usually cast in a form
as if originating from another intelligence.”
For his part, the poet Merrill took a subtler view of the matter. “If it’s still yourself that you’re
drawing upon,” he said, “then that self is much stranger and freer and more far-seeking
than the one you thought you knew.” And at another point: “If the spirits aren’t external, how
astonishing the mediums become!”
To Ouija – Or Not to Ouija?
As I was preparing for this article, I began to revisit notes I had made months earlier. These
presented me with several questions. Among them: Should I be practicing with the Ouija
board myself, testing its occult powers in person? Just at this time, I received an email,
impeccably and even mysteriously timed, warning me off Ouija boards. The sender, whom I
didn’t know, told in sensitive and vivid tones of her family’s harrowing experiences with a
board.
As my exchange with the sender continued, however, my relatively few lines of response
elicited back pages and pages of material, each progressively more pedantic and
judgmental in tone, reading – or projecting – multiple levels into what little I had written in
reply (most of which was in appreciation). And so I wondered: In terms of the influences to
which we open ourselves, how do we sort out the fine from the coarse, allowing in
communications that are useful and generative, rather than those that become simply
depleting?
Ouija is intriguing, interesting, even oddly magnetic – a survey of users in the 2001
International Journal of Parapsychology found that one half “felt a compulsion to use it.”
But, in a culture filled with possibilities, and in a modern life of limited time and energy, is
Ouija really the place to search? Clearly, for a James Merrill, it was. But there exists a
deeper intuition than what comes through a board, or any outer object – one that answers
that kind of question for every clear-thinking person. For me, the answer was no.
It was time to pack up my antique Ouija board in its box and return to what I found most
lasting on the journey: The work of Merrill, who passed through the uses of this instrument
and, with it, created a body of art that perhaps justifies the tumultuous, serpentine history
from which Ouija has come.
Back to Ouija Home
How this American Anomaly Became
More than Just Fun and Games
By Mitch Horowitz
Ouija. For some the rectangular board evokes memories of late-night sleepover parties,
shrieks of laughter, and toy shelves brimming with Magic Eight Balls, Frisbees, and Barbie
dolls.
For others, Ouija boards – known more generally as talking boards or spirit boards – have
darker associations. Stories abound of fearsome entities making threats, dire predictions,
and even physical assaults on innocent users after a night of Ouija experimentation.
And the fantastic claims don’t stop there: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill vowed
until his death in 1995 that his most celebrated work was written with the use of a
homemade Ouija board.
For my part, I first discovered the mysterious workings of Ouija nearly twenty years ago
during a typically freezing-cold winter on eastern Long Island. While heaters clanked and
hummed within the institutional-white walls of my college dormitory, friends allayed boredom
with a Parker Brothers Ouija board.
As is often the case with Ouija, one young woman became the ringleader of board
readings. She reprised the role of spirit medium that had typically fallen to women in past
eras, when the respectable clergy was a male-only affair. Under the gaze of her dark eyes –
which others said gave them chills – the late-night Ouija sessions came into vogue.
Most of my evenings were given over to editing the college newspaper, but I often arrived
home at the dorm to frightening stories: The board, one night, kept spelling out the name
“Seth,” which my friends associated with evil. (Probably connecting it with the malevolent
Egyptian god Set, who is seen as a Satan prototype.) When asked, “Who’s Seth?” the
board directed its attention to a member of the group, and repeatedly replied: “Ask Carlos.”
A visibly shaken Carlos began breathing heavily and refused to answer.
Consumed as I was with exposing scandals within the campus food service, I never took the
opportunity to sit-in on these séances – a move I came to regard with a mixture of relief and
regret. The idea that a mass-produced game board and its plastic pointer could display
some occult faculty, or could tap into a user’s subconscious, got under my skin. And I wasn’t
alone: In its heyday, Ouija outsold Monopoly.
Ouija boards have sharply declined in popularity since the 1960s and 70s, when you could
find one in nearly every toy-cluttered basement. But they remain among the most peculiar
consumer items in American history. Indeed, controversy endures to this day over their
origin. To get a better sense of what Ouija boards are – and where they came from –
requires going back to an era in which even an American president dabbled in talking to the
dead.
Spiritualism Triumphant
Today, it is difficult to imagine the popularity enjoyed by the movement called Spiritualism in
the nineteenth century, when table rapping, séances, medium trances, and other forms of
contacting the “other side” were practiced by an estimated ten percent of the population. It
began in 1848 when the teenaged sisters Kate and Margaret Fox introduced “spirit rapping”
to a lonely hamlet in upstate New York called Hydesville. While every age and culture had
known hauntings, Spiritualism appeared to foster actual communication with the beyond.
Within a few years, people from every walk of life took seriously the contention that one
could talk to the dead.
For many, Spiritualism seemed to extend the hope of reaching loved ones, and perhaps
easing the pain of losing a child to one of the diseases of the day. The allure of immortality
or of feeling oneself lifted beyond workaday realities attracted others. For others still, spirit
counsels became a way to cope with anxiety about the future, providing otherworldly advice
in matters of health, love, or money.
According to newspaper accounts of the era, President Abraham Lincoln hosted a séance
in the White House – though more as a good-humored parlor game than as a serious
spiritual inquiry. Yet at least one vividly rendered Spiritualist memoir places a trance
medium in the private quarters of the White House, advising the President and Mrs. Lincoln
just after the outbreak of the Civil War.
Making Contact
In this atmosphere of ghostly knocks and earnest pleas to hidden forces, nineteenth-
century occultists began looking for easier ways to communicate with the beyond. And in
the best American fashion, they took a do-it-yourself approach to the matter. Their
homespun efforts at contacting the spirit world led toward something we call Ouija – but not
until they worked through several other methods.
One involved a form of table rapping in which questioners solicited spirit knocks when
letters of the alphabet were called out, thus spelling a word. This was, however, a tedious
and time-consuming exercise. A faster means was by “automatic writing,” in which spirit
beings could communicate through the pen of a channeler; but some complained that this
produced many pages of unclear or meandering prose.
One invention directly prefigured the heart-shaped pointer that moves around the Ouija
board. The planchette – French for “little plank” – was a three-legged writing tool with a
hole at the top for the insertion of a pencil. The planchette was designed for one person or
more to rest their fingers on it and allow it to “glide” across a page, writing out a spirit
message. The device originated in Europe in the early 1850s; by 1860 commercially
manufactured planchettes were advertised in America.
Two other items from the 1850s are direct forebears to Ouija: “dial plates” and alphabet
paste boards. In 1853 a Connecticut Spiritualist invented the “Spiritual Telegraph Dial,” a
roulette-like wheel with letters and numerals around its circumference. Dial plates came in
various forms, sometimes of a complex variety. Some were rigged to tables to respond to
“spirit tilts,” while others were presumably guided – like a planchette – by the hands of
questioners.
Alphabet boards further simplified matters. In use as early as 1852, these talking-board
precursors allowed seekers to point to a letter as a means of prompting a “spirit rap,”
thereby quickly spelling a word. It was, perhaps, the easiest method yet. And it was only a
matter of time until inventors and entrepreneurs began to see the possibilities.
Baltimore Oracles
More than 150 years after the dawn of the Spiritualist era, contention endures over who
created Ouija. The conventional history of American toy manufacturing credits a Baltimore
businessman named William Fuld. Fuld, we are told, “invented” Ouija around 1890. So it is
repeated online and in books of trivia, reference works, and “ask me” columns in
newspapers. For many decades, the manufacturer itself – first Fuld’s company and later the
toy giant Parker Brothers – insinuated as much by running the term “William Fuld Talking
Board Set” across the top of every board.
The conventional history is wrong.
The patent for a “Ouija or Egyptian luck-board” was filed on May 28, 1890 by Baltimore
resident and patent attorney Elijah H. Bond, who assigned the rights to two city
businessmen, Charles W. Kennard and William H.A. Maupin. The patent was granted on
February 10, 1891, and so was born the Ouija-brand talking board.
The first patent reveals a familiarly oblong board, with the alphabet running in double rows
across the top, and numbers in a single row along the bottom. The sun and moon, marked
respectively by the words “yes” and “no,” adorn the upper left and right corners, while the
words “Good bye” appear at the bottom center. Later on, instructions and the illustrations
accompanying them, prescribed an expressly social - even flirtatious - experience: Two
parties, preferably a man and woman, were to balance the board between them on their
knees, placing their fingers lightly upon the planchette. ("It draws the two people using it
into close companionship and weaves about them a feeling of mysterious isolation," the box
read.) In an age of buttoned-up morals, it was a tempting dalliance.
True Origins
The Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore employed a teenaged varnisher who helped
run shop operations, and this was William Fuld. By 1892, however, Charles W. Kennard’s
partners removed him from the company amid financial disputes and a new patent – this
time for an improved pointer, or planchette – was filed by a 19-year-old Fuld. In years to
come, it was Fuld who would take over the company and affix his name to every board.
Based on an account in a 1920 magazine article, inventor’s credit sometimes goes to an E.
C. Reichie, alternately identified as a Maryland cabinetmaker or coffin maker. This theory
was popularized by a defunct Baltimore business monthly called Warfield’s, which ran a
richly detailed – and at points, one suspects, richly imagined – history of Ouija boards in
1990. The article opens with a misspelled E.C. “Reiche” as the board’s inventor, and calls
him a coffin maker with an interest in the afterlife – a name and a claim that have been
repeated and circulated ever since.
Yet this figure appears virtually nowhere else in Ouija history, including on the first patent.
His name came up during a period of patent litigation about thirty years after Ouija’s
inception. A 1920 account in New York’s World Magazine – widely disseminated that year in
the popular weekly The Literary Digest – reports that one of Ouija’s early investors told a
judge that E.C. Reichie had invented the board. But no reference to an E.C. Reichie – be
he a cabinetmaker or coffin maker – appears in the court transcript, according to Ouija
historian and talking-board manufacturer Robert Murch.
Ultimately, Reichie’s role, or whether there was a Reichie, may be moot, at least in terms of
the board’s invention. Talking boards of a homemade variety were already a popular craze
among Spiritualists by the mid-1880s. At his online Museum of Talking Boards, Ouija
collector and chronicler Eugene Orlando posts an 1886 article from the New-York Daily
Tribune (as reprinted that year in a Spiritualist monthly, The Carrier Dove) describing the
breathless excitement around the new-fangled alphabet board and its message indicator. “I
know of whole communities that are wild over the 'talking board,'” says a man in the article.
This was a full four years before the first Ouija patent was filed. Obviously Bond, Kennard,
and their associates were capitalizing on an invention – not conceiving of one.
And what of the name Ouija? Alternately pronounced wee-JA and wee-GEE, its origin may
never be known. Kennard at one time claimed it was Egyptian for “good luck” (it’s not). Fuld
later said it was simply a marriage of the French and German words for “yes.” One early
investor claimed the board spelled out its own name. As with other aspects of Ouija history,
the board seems determined to withhold a few secrets of its own.
Ancient Ouija?
Another oft-repeated, but misleading, claim is that Ouija, or talking boards, have ancient
roots. In a typical example, Frank Gaynor’s 1953 Dictionary of Mysticism states that ancient
boards of different shapes and sizes “were used in the sixth century before Christ.” In a
wide range of books and articles, everyone from Pythagoras to the Mongols to the Ancient
Egyptians is said to have possessed Ouija-like devices. But the claims rarely withstand
scrutiny.
Chronicler-curator Orlando points out that the primary reference to Ouija existing in the pre-
modern world appears in a passage from Lewis Spence’s 1920 Encyclopedia of Occultism –
which is repeated in Nandor Fodor’s popular 1934 Encyclopedia of Psychic Science. The
Fodor passage reads, in part: “As an invention it is very old. It was in use in the days of
Pythagoras, about 540 B.C. According to a French historical account of the philosopher’s
life, his sect held frequent séances or circles at which ‘a mystic table, moving on wheels,
moved towards signs, which the philosopher and his pupil Philolaus, interpreted to the
audience...’” It is, Orlando points out, “the one recurring quote found in almost every
academic article on the Ouija board.” But the story presents two problems: The “French
historical account” is never identified; and the Pythagorean scribe Philolaus lived not in
Pythagoras’s time, but in the following century.
It is also worth keeping in mind that we know precious little today about Pythagoras and his
school. No writings of Pythagoras survive, and the historical record depends upon later
works – some of which were written centuries after his death. Hence, commentators on
occult topics are sometimes tempted to project backwards onto Pythagoras all sorts of
arcane practices, Ouija and modern numerology among them.
Still other writers – when they are not repeating claims like the one above – tend to misread
ancient historical accounts and mistake other divinatory tools, such as pendulum dishes, for
Ouija boards. Oracles were rich and varied from culture to culture – from Germanic runes to
Greek Delphic rites – but the prevailing literature on oracular traditions supports no
suggestion that talking boards, as we know them, were in use before the Spiritualist era.
Ouija Boom
After William Fuld took the reins of Ouija manufacturing in America, business was brisk – if
not always happy. Fuld formed a quickly shattered business alliance with his brother Isaac,
which landed the two in court battles for nearly twenty years. Isaac was eventually found to
have violated an injunction against creating a competing board, called the Oriole, after
being forced from the family business in 1901. The two brothers would never speak again.
Ouija, and anything that looked directly like it, was firmly in the hands of William Fuld.
By 1920, the board was so well known that artist Norman Rockwell painted a send-up of a
couple using one – the woman dreamy and credulous, the man fixing her with a cloying grin
– for a cover of The Saturday Evening Post. For Fuld, though, everything was strictly
business. “Believe in the Ouija board?” he once told a reporter. “I should say not. I’m no
spiritualist. I’m a Presbyterian – been one ever since I was so high.” In 1920, the Baltimore
Sun reported that Fuld, by his own “conservative estimate,” had pocketed an astounding $1
million from sales.
Whatever satisfaction Fuld’s success may have brought him was soon lost: On February
26, 1927, he fell to his death from the roof of his Baltimore factory. The 54-year-old
manufacturer was supervising the replacement of a flagpole when an iron support bar he
held gave way, and he fell three stories backward.
Fuld’s children took over his business – and generally prospered. While sales dipped and
rose – and competing boards came and went – only the Ouija brand endured. And by the
1940s, Ouija was experiencing a new surge in popularity.
Historically, séances and other Spiritualist methods proliferate during times of war.
Spiritualism had seen its last great explosion of interest in the period around World War I,
when parents yearned to contact children lost to the battlefield carnage. In World War II,
many anxious families turned to Ouija. In a 1944 article, “The Ouija Comes Back,” The New
York Times reported that one New York City department store alone sold 50,000 Ouija
boards in a five-month period.
American toy manufacturers were taking notice. Some attempted knock-off products. But
Parker Brothers developed bigger plans. In a move that would place a carryover from the
age of Spiritualism into playrooms all across America, the toy giant bought the rights for an
undisclosed sum in 1966. The Fuld family was out of the picture, and Ouija was about to
achieve its biggest success ever.
The following year, Parker Brothers is reported to have sold more than two million Ouija
boards – topping sales of its most popular game, Monopoly. The occult boom that began in
the late 1960s, as astrologers adorned the cover of Time magazine and witchcraft became
a fast-growing “new” religion, fueled the board’s sales for the following decades. A Parker
spokesperson says the company has sold over ten million boards since 1967.
The sixties and seventies also saw the rise of Ouija as a product of the youth culture. Ouija
circles sprang up in college dormitories, and the board emerged as a fad among
adolescents, for whom its ritual of secret messages and intimate communications became a
form of rebellion. One youthful experimenter recalls an enticing atmosphere of danger and
intrigue – “like shoplifting or taking drugs” – that allowed her and a girlfriend to bond
together over Ouija sessions in which they contacted the spirit of “Candelyn,” a nineteenth-
century girl who had perished in a fire. Sociologists suggested that Ouija sessions were a
way for young people to project, and work through, their own fears. But many Ouija users
claimed that the verisimilitude of the communications were reason enough to return to the
board.
Ouija Today
While officials at Parker Brothers (now a division of Hasbro) would not get into the ebb and
flow of sales, there’s little question that Ouija has declined precipitously in recent years. In
1999, the company brought an era to an end when it discontinued the vintage Fuld design
and switched to a smaller, glow-in-the-dark version of the board. In consumer
manufacturing, the redesign of a classic product often signals an effort to reverse falling
sales. Listed at $19.95, Ouija costs about 60% more than standards like Monopoly and
Scrabble, which further suggests that it has become something of a specialty item.
In a far remove from the days when Ouija led Parker Brothers’ lineup, the product now
seems more like a corporate stepchild. The “Ouija Game” (“ages 8 to Adult”) merits barely a
mention on Hasbro’s website. The company posts no official history for Ouija, as it does for
its other storied products. And the claims from the original 1960s-era box – “Weird and
mysterious. Surpasses, in its unique results, mind reading, clairvoyance and second sight”
– have since been significantly toned down. Given the negative attention the board
sometimes attracts – both from frightened users and religionists who smell a whiff of Satan’s
doings – Ouija, its sales likely on the wane, may be a product that Hasbro would just as
soon forget.
And yet...Ouija receives more customer reviews – alternately written in tones of outrage,
fear, delight, or ridicule – than any other “toy” for sale on Amazon.com (280 at last count).
What other “game” so polarizes opinion among those who dismiss it as a childhood
plaything and those who condemn or extol it as a portal to the other side? As it did decades
ago in The Exorcist, Ouija figures into the recent fright films What Lies Beneath and White
Noise. And it sustains an urban mythology that continues to make it a household name in
the early twenty-first century. There would seem little doubt that Ouija – as it has arisen
time and again – awaits a revival in the future. But what makes this game board and its
molded plastic pointer so resilient in our culture, and, some might add, in our nightmares?
“An Occult Splendor”
Among the first things one notices when looking into Ouija is its vast – and sometimes
authentically frightening – history of stories. Claims abound from users who experienced the
presence of malevolent entities during Ouija sessions, sometimes even being physically
harassed by unseen forces. A typical storyline involves communication that is at first
reassuring and even useful – a lost object may be recovered – but eventually gives way to
threatening or terrorizing messages. Hugh Lynn Cayce, son of the eminent American
psychic Edgar Cayce, cautioned that his researches found Ouija boards among the most
“dangerous doorways to the unconscious.”
For their part, Ouija enthusiasts note that teachings such as the inspirational “Seth
material,” channeled by Jane Roberts, first came through a Ouija board. Other channeled
writings, such as an early twentieth-century series of historical novels and poems by an
entity called “Patience Worth” and a posthumous “novel” by Mark Twain (pulled from the
shelves after a legal outcry from the writer's estate), have reputedly come through the
board. Such works, however, have rarely attracted enduring readerships. Poets Sylvia Plath
and Ted Hughes wrote haunting and dark passages about their experiences with Ouija; but
none attain the level of their best work.
So, can anything of lasting value be attributed to the board – this mysterious object that
has, in one form or another, been with us for nearly 120 years? The answer is yes, and it
has stared us in the face for so long that we have nearly forgotten it is there.
In 1976, the American poet James Merrill published – and won the Pulitzer Prize for – an
epic poem that recounted his experience, with his partner David Jackson, of using a Ouija
board from 1955 to 1974. His work The Book of Ephraim was later combined with two other
Ouija-inspired long poems and published in 1982 as The Changing Light at Sandover.
“Many readers,” wrote critic Judith Moffett in her penetrating study entitled James Merrill,
“may well feel they have been waiting for this trilogy all their lives.”
First using a manufactured board and then a homemade one – with a teacup in place of a
planchette – Merrill and Jackson encounter a world of spirit “patrons” who recount to them a
sprawling and profoundly involving creation myth. It is poetry steeped in the epic tradition, in
which myriad characters – from W.H. Auden, to lost friends and family members, to the
Greek muse/interlocutor called Ephraim – walk on and off stage. The voices of Merrill,
Jackson, and those that emerge from the teacup and board, alternately offer theories of
reincarnation, worldly advice, and painfully poignant reflections on the passing of life and
ever-hovering presence of death.
The Changing Light at Sandover gives life to a new mythology of world creation,
destruction, resurrection, and the vast, unknowable mechanizations of God Biology (GOD
B, in the words of the Ouija board) and those mysterious figures who enact his will: Bat-
winged creatures who, in their cosmological laboratory, reconstruct departed souls for new
life on earth. And yet we are never far from the human, grounding voice of Merrill, joking
about the selection of new wallpaper in his Stonington, Connecticut home; or from the
moving council of voices from the board, urging: In life, stand for something.
“It is common knowledge – and glaringly obvious in the poems, though not taken seriously
by his critics – that these three works, and their final compilation, were based on
conversations...through a Ouija board,” wrote John Chambers in his outstanding analysis of
Merrill in the Summer 1997 issue of The Anomalist.
Critic Harold Bloom, in a departure from others who sidestep the question of the work’s
source, calls the first of the Sandover poems “an occult splendor.” Indeed, it is not difficult
to argue that, in literary terms, The Changing Light at Sandover is a masterpiece – perhaps
the masterpiece – of occult experimentation. In some respects, it is like an unintended
response to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in which not one man acting alone, but two acting
and thinking together, successfully pierce the veil of life’s inner and cosmic mysteries – and
live not only to tell, but to teach.
One wonders, then, why the work is so little known and read within a spiritual subculture
that embraces other channeled works, such as the Ouija-received “Seth material,” the
automatic writing of A Course In Miracles, or the currently popular Abraham-Hicks
channeled readings. The Changing Light at Sandover ought to be evidence that something
– be it inner or outer – is available through this kind of communication, however rare. It is
up to the reader to find out what.
Voices Within?
Of course, the Merrill case begs the question of whether the Ouija board channels
something from beyond or merely reflects the ideas found in one’s subconscious. After all,
who but a poetic genius like James Merrill could have recorded channeled passages of
such literary grace and epic dimension? Plainly put, this wasn’t Joe Schmoe at the board.
In a 1970 book on psychical phenomena, ESP, Seers & Psychics, researcher-skeptic
Milbourne Christopher announces – a tad too triumphantly, perhaps – that if you effectively
blindfold a board’s user and rearrange the order of letters, communication ceases. A
believable enough claim – but what does it really tell us? In 1915, a specialist in abnormal
psychology proposed the same test to the channeled entity called Patience Worth, who,
through a St. Louis housewife named Pearl Curran, had produced a remarkable range of
novels, plays, and poems – some of them hugely ambitious in scale and written in a Middle
English dialect that Curran (who didn’t finish high school) would have had no means of
knowing.
As reported in Irving Litvag’s 1972 study, Singer in the Shadows, Patience Worth
responded to the request that Curran be blindfolded in her typically inimitable fashion: “I be
aset athin the throb o’ her. Aye, and doth thee to take then the lute awhither that she see
not, think ye then she may to set up musics for the hear o’ thee?” In other words, how can
you remove the instrument and expect music?
Some authorities in psychical research support the contention that Ouija is a tool of our
subconscious. For years J.B. Rhine, the veritable dean of psychical research in America,
worked with his wife, Louisa, a trained biologist and well-regarded researcher in her own
right, to bring scientific rigor to the study of psychical phenomena. Responding to the occult
fads of the day, Louisa wrote an item on Ouija boards and automatic writing adapted in the
winter 1970 newsletter of the American Society for Psychical Research. Whatever
messages come through the board, she maintained, are a product of the user’s
subconscious – not any metaphysical force: “In several ways the very nature of automatic
writing and the Ouija board makes them particularly open to misunderstanding. For one
thing, because [such communications] are unconscious, the person does not get the feeling
of his own involvement. Instead, it seems to him that some personality outside of himself is
responsible. In addition, and possibly because of this, the material is usually cast in a form
as if originating from another intelligence.”
For his part, the poet Merrill took a subtler view of the matter. “If it’s still yourself that you’re
drawing upon,” he said, “then that self is much stranger and freer and more far-seeking
than the one you thought you knew.” And at another point: “If the spirits aren’t external, how
astonishing the mediums become!”
To Ouija – Or Not to Ouija?
As I was preparing for this article, I began to revisit notes I had made months earlier. These
presented me with several questions. Among them: Should I be practicing with the Ouija
board myself, testing its occult powers in person? Just at this time, I received an email,
impeccably and even mysteriously timed, warning me off Ouija boards. The sender, whom I
didn’t know, told in sensitive and vivid tones of her family’s harrowing experiences with a
board.
As my exchange with the sender continued, however, my relatively few lines of response
elicited back pages and pages of material, each progressively more pedantic and
judgmental in tone, reading – or projecting – multiple levels into what little I had written in
reply (most of which was in appreciation). And so I wondered: In terms of the influences to
which we open ourselves, how do we sort out the fine from the coarse, allowing in
communications that are useful and generative, rather than those that become simply
depleting?
Ouija is intriguing, interesting, even oddly magnetic – a survey of users in the 2001
International Journal of Parapsychology found that one half “felt a compulsion to use it.”
But, in a culture filled with possibilities, and in a modern life of limited time and energy, is
Ouija really the place to search? Clearly, for a James Merrill, it was. But there exists a
deeper intuition than what comes through a board, or any outer object – one that answers
that kind of question for every clear-thinking person. For me, the answer was no.
It was time to pack up my antique Ouija board in its box and return to what I found most
lasting on the journey: The work of Merrill, who passed through the uses of this instrument
and, with it, created a body of art that perhaps justifies the tumultuous, serpentine history
from which Ouija has come.
Back to Ouija Home
The following article appeared in the Fall 2006 issue of Esopus
(www.esopusmag.com), a biannual of arts and culture.
(www.esopusmag.com), a biannual of arts and culture.
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