The Ouija Board Can't Connect Us to Paranormal Forces—but It Can Tell Us a Lot About Psychology, Grief and Uncertainty

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie; Updated by Ellen Wexler

In the late 1800s, advertisements for a new paranormal product started appearing in papers: “Ouija, or, the Wonderful Talking Board,” boomed a Pittsburgh toy and novelty shop, describing a magical device that answered questions “concerning the past, present and future with marvelous accuracy” and provided a “link which unites the known with the unknown, the material with the immaterial.” Another advertisement in a New York newspaper declared it “interesting and mysterious” and testified that it had been “proven at Patent Office before patent was allowed. Price, $1.50.”

This mysterious talking board was basically what’s sold in stores today: a flat wooden board with the letters of the alphabet arranged in two semicircles above the numbers zero through nine. The words “yes” and “no” appear in the uppermost corners, while “goodbye” is printed at the bottom. The board also comes with a “planchette,” a teardrop-shaped device, usually with a small window in the body, used to maneuver about the board.

The idea was that two or more people would sit around the board, place their fingertips on the planchette, pose a question, and watch, dumbfounded, as the planchette moved from letter to letter, spelling out the answers seemingly of its own accord. Today, the Ouija board game’s design is similar, though the boards can also come in other materials other than wood, like plastic.

Are Ouija boards real? What does “Ouija” mean? Though truth in advertising is hard to come by, especially in products from the 19th century, the mystical device was “interesting and mysterious”; it actually had been “proven” to work at the Patent Office before its patent was allowed to proceed; and today, even psychologists believe that it may offer a link between the known and the unknown.

The Ouija board’s history is just about as mysterious as how the “game” works. Ouija historian Robert Murch has been researching the story of the board since 1992, when he first purchased a copy. At that time, he says, no one really knew anything about its origins, which struck him as odd: “For such an iconic thing that strikes both fear and wonder in American culture, how can no one know where it came from?”

The rise of Spiritualism in the United States

The Ouija board, in fact, came straight out of the American 19th-century obsession with Spiritualism, the belief that the dead are able to communicate with the living.

The beginning of modern Spiritualism in America is often linked to an incident in upstate New York in 1848. Two sisters, Kate and Maggie Fox, claimed they had received messages from spirits who rapped on the walls in answer to questions, later recreating this feat of channeling in parlors across the state. Aided by the stories about the celebrity sisters and other Spiritualists, the movement reached millions of adherents in the years that followed.

Spiritualism worked for Americans: Many believed it was compatible with Christian dogma, meaning one could hold a séance on Saturday night and have no qualms about going to church the next day. It was an acceptable, even wholesome activity to contact spirits at séances, through automatic writing or table-turning parties, in which participants would place their hands on a table and listen as someone called out the letters of the alphabet. When certain letters were spoken, they would watch the table begin to shake and rattle, declaring all the while that they weren’t moving it.

Occult ritual — A group performing an occult ritual around 1920 Mills / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Spiritualism also offered solace in an era when life spans were much shorter than they are today. Even Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of the venerable president, conducted séances in the White House after their 11-year-old son died of a fever in 1862. During the Civil War, Spiritualism attracted droves of adherents, who were desperate to connect with loved ones who’d gone away to war and never come home.

“Communicating with the dead was common. It wasn’t seen as bizarre or weird,” says Murch. “It’s hard to imagine that now. We look at that and think, ‘Why are you opening the gates of hell?’”

Who invented the Ouija board?

When a few men in Baltimore started the Kennard Novelty Company, the first producers of the Ouija board, in the late 19th century, opening the gates of hell was the last thing on their minds. Instead, they were mostly interested in opening Americans’ wallets.

As Spiritualism had grown in American culture, so too did frustration with how long it took to get any meaningful message out of the spirits, says Brandon Hodge, a historian of Spiritualism. Calling out the alphabet and waiting for a knock at the right letter, for example, was deeply boring. After all, rapid communication with breathing humans at far distances was possible—the telegraph had been around for decades—so why shouldn’t spirits be as easy to reach? People were desperate for methods of communication that would be quicker—and while several entrepreneurs realized that, it was the Kennard Novelty Company that really nailed it.

Charles Kennard of Baltimore, Maryland, pulled together a group of four other investors to start the Kennard Novelty Company. Robert Murch

Elijah Bond, a Baltimore attorney, was one of the first to patent the Ouija Board. Robert Murch

In 1886, newspapers reported on a new phenomenon taking over the Spiritualists’ camps in Ohio. It was, for all intents and purposes, a Ouija board, with letters, numbers and a planchette-like device to point to them. The article was read far and wide, but it was Charles Kennard who saw it as a business opportunity. In 1890, he pulled together a group of four other investors—including Elijah Bond, a local attorney, and Washington Bowie, a surveyor—to start the Kennard Novelty Company, which would exclusively make and market these new talking boards.

But first, Kennard’s talking board needed a name. Contrary to popular belief, “Ouija” is not a combination of the French word for “yes,” oui, and the German equivalent ja. According to Murch, it was Bond’s sister-in-law, Helen Peters (who was, Bond said, a “strong medium”), who supplied the now instantly recognizable handle. When she asked the board what they should call it, the name “Ouija” came through. The board also told her that the word meant “good luck.” Eerie and cryptic—but for the fact that Peters acknowledged that she was wearing a locket bearing the picture of a woman with the name “Ouija” written beside it. That’s the story that emerged from the Ouija founders’ letters; it’s very possible that the woman in the locket was famous author Ouida, whom Peters admired, and that “Ouija” was just a misreading of the name.

Ouija board patent file — This file from the United States Patent Office shows that officials required the board to be tested before they would grant a patent. Robert Murch

According to Murch’s interviews with the descendants of the Ouija founders and the original Ouija patent file itself, which he’s seen, the story of the board’s patent request was true: The men knew that they wouldn’t get their patent if they couldn’t prove that the board worked, so Bond brought the indispensable Peters to the patent office in Washington, D.C. when he filed his application. There, the chief patent officer demanded a demonstration—if the board could accurately spell out his name, which was supposed to be unknown to Bond and Peters, he’d allow the patent application to proceed. They all communed with the spirits, and the planchette faithfully spelled out the patent officer’s name. Whether it was mystical spirits or the fact that Bond, as a patent attorney, may have simply known the man’s name, is unclear, Murch says. But on February 10, 1891, a white-faced and visibly shaken official awarded Bond a patent for his new “toy or game”:

The operation is as follows: The table is placed upon the board, and the hand of the operator is lightly laid or held on the table, when in a few moments the table will move and point to certain letters on the board, spelling and forming sentences, answering questions put by the operator or any other person that may be present at the time.

This first patent describes the device but offers no explanation as to how it works. That ambiguity was part of a more or less conscious marketing effort. “These were very shrewd businessmen,” says Murch. The less the Kennard company said about how the board worked, the more mysterious it seemed—and the more people wanted to buy it. “Ultimately, it was a money-maker. They didn’t care why people thought it worked.”

And it was a money-maker. By 1892, the Kennard Novelty Company went from one factory in Baltimore to two in Baltimore, two in New York, two in Chicago and one in London. Soon after, Kennard and Bond were out, owing to some internal pressures and the old adage about money changing everything. By this time, William Fuld, who’d gotten in on the ground floor of the fledgling business as an employee and stockholder, was running the company. (Notably, Fuld is not and never claimed to be the inventor of the board, though even his obituary in the New York Times declared him to be; also notably, Fuld died in 1927 after a freak fall from the roof of his new factory—a factory he said the Ouija board told him to build.)

What followed were boom years for Fuld and frustration for some of the men who’d been in on the Ouija board from the beginning—public squabbling over who’d really invented it played out in the pages of the Baltimore Sun, while their rival boards launched and failed.

How did the Ouija board become so popular?

The board’s instant and now, more than 130 years later, prolonged success showed that it had tapped into a weird place in American culture. It was marketed as both a mystical oracle and as family entertainment, fun with an element of otherworldly excitement. This meant that it wasn’t only Spiritualists who bought the board; in fact, the people who disliked the Ouija board the most tended to be spirit mediums, as it promised access to the spirit world without a middleman. The Ouija board appealed to people from across a wide spectrum of ages, professions and educational backgrounds. “People want to believe. The need to believe that something else is out there [that] is powerful,” says Murch. “This thing is one of those things that allows them to express that belief.”

It’s logical, then, that the board would find its greatest popularity in uncertain times, when people are holding fast to belief and searching for answers. The 1910s and ’20s, with the devastations of World War I and the frantic years of the Jazz Age and Prohibition, witnessed a surge in Ouija popularity. In 1920, Norman Rockwell, illustrator of blissful 20th-century domesticity, painted a man and a woman, a Ouija board between them, communing with the beyond on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Over five months in 1944, as World War II raged, a single New York department store sold 50,000 of the boards. In 1967, the year after Parker Brothers bought the game, two million boards were sold, outperforming Monopoly. That same year saw more American troops dying in Vietnam, the Summer of Love in San Francisco and race riots in cities across the country.

Two women use Ouija board circa 1940 — Two women in a diner using a Ouija board circa 1940 The Montifraulo Collection / Getty Images

Strange Ouija tales also made frequent, titillating appearances in American newspapers. In 1920, national wire services reported that would-be crime solvers were turning to their Ouija boards for clues in the mysterious murder of a New York City gambler, Joseph Bowne Elwell, much to the frustration of the police. In 1921, the New York Times reported that a Chicago woman was sent to a psychiatric hospital after developing “religious hallucinations” induced by a Ouija board. She described how the situation developed:

We started by getting sermons from the beyond. We have hundreds of these sermons that we typewrote and preserved. They are hidden away from prying eyes. These sermons grew more and more beautiful. All of them came from the Ouija board. … I myself was doubtful. But after the Ouija board had been talking to us for days, we just had to believe.

Similar incidents made occasional appearances in the news for years. In 1930, a woman in Buffalo participated in a murder, supposedly on the encouragement of Ouija board messages. In 1941, a 23-year-old gas station attendant from New Jersey told the Times that he joined the Army due to some spiritual advice. When officials at the recruitment office asked “what gave [him] the idea of becoming a soldier,” he answered: “I want to learn a trade in an Army school, and my Ouija board told me the Army was the place to do it.” In 1956, a Connecticut judge heard the case of Helen Dow Peck, who left only $1,000 each to two former servants and a whopping $178,000 to John Gale Forbes—a lucky but bodiless spirit who’d contacted her via the Ouija board.

Ouija boards even offered literary inspiration: In the 1910s, Pearl Curran made headlines when she began writing poems and stories that she claimed were dictated, via Ouija board, by the spirit of a 17th-century Englishwoman called Patience Worth. Not long after, Curran’s friend, Emily Grant Hutchings, claimed that her book, Jap Herron, was communicated via Ouija board by the late Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Curran enjoyed significant popularity, while Hutchings was less successful. But decades later, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill surpassed both women: In 1983, his Ouija-inspired epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. (Merrill, for his part, publicly implied that the Ouija board acted more as a magnifier for his own poetic thoughts, rather than as a hotline to the spirits. In 1979, after he wrote Mirabell: Books of Number, another Ouija creation, he’d told the New York Review of Books, “If the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become!”)

How did Americans come to fear the Ouija board?

Ouija existed on the periphery of American culture, perennially popular, mysterious, interesting and usually, barring the few cases of supposed Ouija-inspired murders, non-threatening. That is, until 1973.

That year, The Exorcist—which was supposedly based on a true story—scared the pants off people in theaters. The implication that 12-year-old Regan was possessed by a demon after playing with a Ouija board by herself changed how people saw the board. “It’s kind of like Psycho—no one was afraid of showers until that scene. … It’s a clear line,” says Murch, adding that before The Exorcist, film and TV depictions of Spiritualism were usually silly. “I Love Lucy,” for example, featured a 1951 episode in which Lucy and Ethel host a séance. “But for at least ten years afterwards, it’s no joke,” Murch adds. “[The Exorcist] actually changed the fabric of pop culture.”

Almost overnight, Ouija became a tool of the devil and, for that reason, a tool of horror writers and moviemakers. It began popping up in scary movies, usually opening the door to evil spirits hell-bent on ripping apart co-eds. In the years that followed, the Ouija board would be denounced by religious groups as Satan’s preferred method of communication. In 2001 in Alamogordo, New Mexico, it was burned on bonfires along with copies of Harry Potter and Disney’s Snow White.

Even in recent years, Christian religious groups remain wary of the board, citing scripture denouncing communication with spirits through mediums. Catholic.com calls the Ouija board “far from harmless.” In 2011, “700 Club” host Pat Robertson declared that demons can reach us through the board. Even within the paranormal community, Ouija boards had a dodgy reputation. Murch says that when he first began speaking at paranormal conventions, he was told to leave his antique boards at home because they scared people too much. Parker Brothers (and later, Hasbro, after acquiring Parker Brothers in 1991) still sold thousands of them, but the reasons people were buying them had changed significantly: Ouija boards were spooky rather than spiritual, with a distinct frisson of danger.

Bonfire — A woman tosses a Ouija board into a bonfire outside the Christ Community Church in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 2001. Neil Jacobs / Getty Images

Ouija’s popularity is also driven by the board’s usefulness as a plot device. The hugely popular movies Paranormal Activity and Paranormal Activity 2 both featured a Ouija board. It’s also popped up in episodes of “Breaking Bad,” “Rizzoli & Isles” and multiple paranormal reality TV programs. Hot Topic, mall favorite of Goth teens, sold a set of Ouija board bras and underwear. For those wishing to commune with the beyond while on the go, there’s an app (or 20) for that. In 2013, Hasbro released a more “mystical” version of the game, replacing its old glow-in-the-dark version.

How do Ouija boards work?

The boards are not, scientists say, powered by spirits or demons. But they’re still equally fascinating—because they’re powered by us, even when we protest that we’re not doing it, we swear.

Ouija boards work on a principle known to those studying the mind for more than a century: the ideomotor effect. In 1852, physician and physiologist William Carpenter published a report for the Royal Institution of Great Britain examining automatic muscular movements that take place without the conscious will or volition of the individual (think crying in reaction to a sad film, for example). Almost immediately, other researchers saw applications of the ideomotor effect in popular Spiritualist pastimes. Around the same time, chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, intrigued by table-turning, conducted a series of experiments that proved to him (though not to most Spiritualists) that the table’s motion was due to the ideomotor actions of the participants.

The effect is very convincing. As Chris French, an anomalistic psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, explains, “It can generate a very strong impression that the movement is being caused by some outside agency, but it’s not.” Other devices, such as dowsing rods, or the fake bomb detection kits that deceived scores of international governments and armed services about a decade ago, work on the same principle of non-conscious movement. “The thing about all these mechanisms we’re talking about—dowsing rods, Ouija boards, pendulums, these small tables—they’re all devices whereby a quite small muscular movement can cause quite a large effect,” he says. Planchettes, in particular, are well suited for their task—many used to be constructed of a lightweight wooden board and fitted with small casters to help them move more smoothly and freely; now, they’re usually plastic and have felt feet, which also help them slide over the board easily.

“With Ouija boards, you’ve got the whole social context. It’s usually a group of people, and everyone has a slight influence,” French adds. Not only does the individual give up some conscious control while participating—it can’t be me, people think—but also, in a group, no one person can take credit for the planchette’s movements, making it seem like the answers must be coming from an otherworldly source. “Once the idea has been implanted there, there’s almost a readiness to happen.”

People around a Ouija board — When a group uses a Ouija board, each individual tends to experience a loss of agency. Maskot

What can Ouija boards tell us about ourselves?

While Ouija boards can’t give us answers from beyond the veil, we can learn quite a lot from them. Researchers think the board may be a good way to examine how the mind processes information differently on different levels.

About a decade ago, a team of researchers from the University of British Columbia—Ronald Rensink, a psychologist and computer scientist; Hélène Gauchou, a psychologist; and Sidney Fels, an electrical and computer engineer—began looking at what exactly happens when people sit down to use a Ouija board. Fels says that they got the idea after he hosted a Halloween party with a fortune-telling theme and found himself explaining to several foreign students, who had never really seen it before, how the Ouija works.

“They kept asking where to put the batteries,” Fels says, laughing. After offering up a more Halloween-friendly, mystical explanation—leaving out the ideomotor effect—he left the students to play with the board on their own. When he came back, hours later, they were still at it—and they were supremely spooked. A few days later, Fels, Rensink and a few others began talking about what is actually going on with the Ouija. The team thought the board could be a unique way to investigate non-conscious knowledge and determine whether ideomotor action could also express what the non-conscious knows.

“It was one of [those] things that we thought, ‘It probably won’t work, but if it did work, it’d be really freaking cool,’” says Rensink.

The initial experiments involved a Ouija-playing robot: Participants were told that they were playing with a person in another room via teleconferencing; the robot, they were told, mimicked the movements of the other person. In reality, the robot’s movements simply amplified the participants’ motions, and the person in the other room was just a ruse, a way to get the participant to think they weren’t in control. Participants were asked a series of yes or no, fact-based questions (“Is Buenos Aires the capital of Brazil?” “Were the 2000 Summer Olympics held in Sydney?”) and expected to use the Ouija board to answer.

What the team found surprised them: When participants didn’t know the answers but hazarded a guess without using the Ouija board, they were right only around 50 percent of the time, a typical result for guessing. But when they guessed using the board, believing that the answers were coming from someplace else, they answered correctly upwards of 65 percent of the time. “It was so dramatic how much better they did on these questions than if they answered to the best of their ability that we were like, ‘This is just weird, how could they be that much better?’” says Fels. “It was so dramatic we couldn’t believe it.” The implication was that one’s non-conscious was a lot smarter than anyone knew.

Ouija board in 1973 — Ouija boards could help scientists learn more about conscious and unconscious cognition. Bettmann

The researchers were sufficiently intrigued to pursue further Ouija research. They divined another experiment: This time, rather than a robot, the participant actually played with a real human. At some point, the participant was blindfolded—and the other player, really a confederate, quietly took their hands off the planchette. This meant that the participant believed they weren’t alone, enabling the kind of automatic pilot state the researchers were looking for, but still ensuring that the answers could only come from the participant.

It worked. Rensink says, “Some people were complaining about how the other person was moving the planchette around. That was a good sign that we really got this kind of condition that people were convinced that somebody else was there.” Their results replicated the findings of the experiment with the robot, that, when making a guess, people knew more when they didn’t think they were controlling the answers (50 percent accuracy for vocal responses to 65 percent for Ouija responses). They reported their findings in the February 2012 issue of Consciousness and Cognition.

“You do much better with the Ouija on questions that you really don’t think you know, but actually something inside you does know and the Ouija can help you answer above chance,” says Fels.

These experiments show that the Ouija could be a very useful tool in rigorously investigating non-conscious thought processes. “Now that we have some hypotheses in terms of what’s going on here, accessing knowledge and cognitive abilities that you don’t have conscious awareness of, [the Ouija board] would be an instrument to actually get at that,” Fels explains. “Now we can start using it to ask other types of questions.”

Those types of questions include how much and what the non-conscious mind knows, how fast it can learn, how it remembers and even how it amuses itself. This opens up even more avenues of exploration—for example, are the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind affected differently by neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s? If unconscious thoughts were affected earlier, Rensink hypothesizes, indications of the illness could show up in Ouija manipulation, possibly even before being detected in conscious cognitive processes.

The team has managed to make good on one of the claims of the early Ouija advertisements: The board does offer a link between the known and the unknown. The unknown just happened to be different from what many wanted to believe.

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie | | READ MORE

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie is an American freelance writer living in London, England. She covers the weird stuff for Smithsonian.com, Boing Boing, Slate, mental_floss, and others, and she's the author of Princesses Behaving Badly.

The Ouija Board Can’t Connect Us to Paranormal Forces—but It Can Tell Us a Lot About Psychology, Grief and Uncertainty