The Mysterious Ouija Board

 

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134 years ago today the Ouija Board had its commercial introduction as a harmless parlor game.

A Ouija board is a rectangle of wood or cardboard printed with the alphabet, the numbers 0-9 and the words yes, no, and goodbye. Players put their fingers on a triangular planchette and ask questions of the spirits, who answer by moving the planchette around the board. Of course, we know how this goes: it’s malicious entities who respond and then they kill everybody. That’s the trope. But it wasn’t always like that.

The Ouija began as a benign religious practice of Civil War-era Spiritualists, who were seeking to contact beloved family members who had died or met the more horrifying fate of vanishing into the theater of war. The board’s darker reputation began with the 1973 movie The Exorcist, which showed demonic consequences for playing.

Check out my blog post for more on the mysterious talking board, plus writing prompts, such as:

Call in the spirits. The Ouija board was built for necromancy: divination (seeking supernatural knowledge) from the dead. Of course, the practice of begging data from the dearly departed began long before the board came about. But the Ouija makes it easy. So let’s dial up the deceased.

(Pro-tip: You can DIY a Ouija board by drawing numbers and letters on a flat surface and using an upside down glass as a planchette.)

Possibilities for benign contact include loving family members who pass on reassurances about the afterlife, ghosts with info on random stuff like lottery numbers, ghosts of murder victims who wish to name their killers, or creative types who want to help you write novels (looking at you, Patience Worth).

But of course, you can also phone up the fiendish: convicted killers, undiscovered killers, relatives you thought were kind who were actually killers, ghosts who like mean pranks, ghosts who just plain hate the living, and the biggest danger: dead dudes who would like to live a second life. Possession by spirits is a favorite Ouija trope, and you often get there by breaking a rule while playing the “game,” which can be anything you like: don’t play alone, don’t try to contact the very recently dead, don’t play without a piece of iron in your pocket, etc.  

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