Ouija (February/March 1983 | Volume: 34, Issue: 2)

Ouija

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Authors: James P. Johnson

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February/March 1983 | Volume 34, Issue 2

PARKER BROTHERS , who bought the rights to the Ouija in 1966, denies that it is more than a game. But over the past century millions of Americans have used it to speak with the dead, to answer life’s questions, and to make their decisions. Common sense says it merely reveals the user’s unconscious thoughts and is subject to overt manipulation as well, but some believers in the occult dread it as the devil’s oracle. This three-legged table on its alphabet board may have no inherent power, but when its users are receptive, there is little it cannot do for them.

American Ouija boards sprang from the first native spiritualist craze. In 1847 in Hydesville, New York, the two teen-aged Fox sisters claimed that mysterious rappings emanated from their bodies. The source of these rappings, they said, was the ghost of a peddler thought to have been murdered and buried in their cellar. The two girls decoded the rappings and built a lucrative spiritualist business.

Under pressure they at last admitted that they were cracking their knee joints, but hundreds of mediums had opened shop, and the wish to communicate with the dead soon led to the creation of tables that answered questions by rapping when individual letters were indicated.

In the 1850s Robert Hare, a professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, developed a complex table that converted movements into letters automatically by means of pulleys and a circular alphabet dial. Hare claimed messages from “Geo. Washington” and “J. Q. Adams,” only to see his device supplanted by a simpler tabletop ” spiritoscope.”

In the meantime French spiritualists were producing automatic writing with a planchette —a tiny, heart-shaped board supported by two short wooden legs—and a pencil. When the user rested his fingers lightly on the board, the pencil moved about the paper below it; two Marylanders, E. C. Reichie and C.W.Kennard, each claimed to have created the modern Ouija board by combining the alphabet board and the planchette . Calling his products Witch Boards, Kennard sold them through the Kennard Novelty Company. William FuId, a foreman in the firm, bought the rights and recorded a patent in 1892. His brother Isaac created the Southern Novelty Company, which marketed the Oriole Talking Board. Though Kennard later claimed the word Ouija was Egyptian for “good luck,” William FuId said that he merely took oui , the French word for “yes,” and combined it with ja , the German affirmative. Both men maintained that the board itself gave them the name.

The Fuld brothers, who had amused themselves with “spirit boards” as youths, designed their small, heart-shaped, three-legged table or pointer to move on a three-ply, eighteen by twelve-inch pine board. On it were printed the alphabet, the numbers zero through nine, the words yes, no, hello , and good-bye . Seated with knees