 |
The latest. The Spirit Six - Spirit control: no running expense
Life Magazine, January 1920 |
It probably isn't surprising that when I started writing I
chose the supernatural to be one of my recurring topics. Growing up I had a
fascination with all things occult. If you had asked me I would have said that there
were UFOs hovering over my neighborhood, Bigfoot infesting the local
campgrounds, and every graveyard and old house came with at least one ghost.
So, I spent my summers in the public library, scouring Richard Cavendish's
Man, Myth, and Magic and reading
anything I could on the subjects of UFOs, psychic phenomena, and hauntings. By
the time I got to junior high, I'd learned to read the Tarot and regularly used
a Ouija board that was handed down by my aunt. Today that same Ouija board sits
in a closet in the hallway and I haven't taken it out of its box for years. It's
a connection between me, the spiritualists of the 19th century, and beyond -
maybe even the
great beyond.
That little press-board oracle with its alphabet, numbers,
"Yes", "No", and "Goodbye" has an interesting
history. According to Smithsonian.com, the first ads for the Ouija appeared in
February 1891 in the window of a Pittsburgh novelty shop. The ads promised that
the Ouija would tell its users "about the past, present, and future with
marvelous accuracy" and that it was "never-failing amusement and
recreation for all the classes" and "a link between the known and
unknown, the material and immaterial."
Unlike most products that have managed to stay around for
over a hundred years, the Ouija you might find in your local toy store is
virtually identical to the one that a Victorian shopper might have purchased.
Though the materials have changed, the fortune-telling board set still consists
of a board (now made of cardboard) and a pointer or planchette (now made of
plastic). The seekers sit in a dimly-lit room around the board with their
fingertips lightly resting on the planchette as one of them asks a question. The
planchette slowly moves about the board, using the letters and numbers to spell
out an answer to the question posed. Dubious, yes, but what can be said is that
the US Patent Office required the board be demonstrated before granting a
patent, the demonstration was performed and the patent granted, so to
paraphrase
Miracle on 34th Street, if
the US government admits the presence of supernatural powers manipulating the
Ouija...
The Ouija board emerged from American 19th century
spiritualism, a belief that accepts that if given an opportunity and means, the
dead can communicate with the living. Spiritualism arrived on America's shores
in 1848 with a pair of mediums known as the Fox sisters. The Foxes claimed they
received messages from beyond the grave in the form of rapping on the walls of
their parlor and with the aid of these celebrities, spiritualism spread across
the nation. By the second half of the century, spiritualism had peaked and
provided a method of holding a séance which was compatible with Christian
dogma. In a century where the average life expectancy was 50, spiritualism was
the best of both worlds. It kept you in line with what you heard from the pulpit
while providing evidence of the life everlasting.
The problem with the typical séance was ambiguity and, to be
honest, the clunkiness of the whole affair. Imagine getting together on a
Saturday night with a group of five or ten friends, locking yourselves in the
parlor, diming the lights, and calling "on the spirit of dear departed
aunt Hester" to provide you a message from the afterlife. She can knock
once for yes and twice for no, which eliminates just about any really
interesting information from the conversation. The answer to this issue was the
Ouija with its alphabet and numbers. Now dear old Hessie could spell out,
"don't marry that leach of a New Jersey insurance salesman you've been
catting around with" instead of yes-ing and no-ing all night long. The
Ouija was a telegraph to the netherworld, a direct line to all your loved ones
and the sum and whole knowledge of the ages. In 1886 AP reported on something
new sweeping through spiritualist camps in Ohio, the talking board. This
article circulated in many papers, but it took Charles Kennard of Baltimore, MD
to create the first mass-marketed talking board, but it wasn't the Ouija quite
yet, in fact the board didn't even have a name.
Now, there's an urban legend that states the Ouija got its
name from a combination of the French
Oui
(meaning yes) and German
ja (also
meaning yes). Truth is that the name is a bit more mysterious, because the
board named itself. According to research by Ouija authority Robert Murch,
Kennard investor Elijah Bond's sister-in-law Helen Peters, who was purported to
be a "very strong medium". asked the board what it should be called
and it spelled out Ouija. When Peters asked what the word meant, the board
replied "good luck". Of course it should be said that the night of
the board's naming Peters happened to be wearing a locket with a picture of author
and women's rights activist, Ouida, which had the word "Ouija"
printed above the picture.
By 1892 Kennard Novelty Company was raking in cash from
sales of the Ouija and, but 1893, Kennard himself was out of the talking board
business. William Fuld, who the
New York
Times erroneously credited as the inventor of the Ouija in his obituary,
took over the company. By 1927 Fuld was dead, having perished in a freak fall
from the top of his new factory for building talking boards.
The Ouija has remained popular for more than 120 years, a
direct line to the spirit world with no medium intermediary required. Its
popularity grew in tough times when people needed answers and something to
believe in (World War I, prohibition, and so forth). Norman Rockwell
illustrated a scene including a man and woman with an Ouija on their knees for
the
Saturday Evening Post and
Life Magazine joked on the idea of spirit-powered cars (see the Spirit Six comic at the beginning of this post)
. During the
Great Depression, while industry was stagnating, Fuld and Company had to open
additional plants to manufacture enough boards to meet demands. During five
months in 1944 one New York department store sold over 50000 Ouijas. In 1967
(the year I was born and the same year additional American troops were being
sent to Viet Nam), Parker Brothers bought the rights to the Ouija board and
sold 2 million copies, more than their Monopoly game. And, considering the
state of the world economy, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Russia setting its site on
whichever former satellite country it finds an irritant this week, that Ouija
sales are climbing again.
Ouija boards have been credited with the inspiration for
novels and poetry, but the reputation of the talking board has darkened
significantly since the days of the early spiritualists. In 1973 a movie that
scared me to death hit the big screen.
The
Exorcist plot featured a little girl who'd become possessed after playing
with the Ouija and it managed to alter the fabric of pop culture. Suddenly the
Ouija was seen as a tool of the devil, a cliché in bad horror movies, and a
target of hatred for fundamentalist Christians, but sales stayed strong.
How does the Ouija work? Well, there's a lot of theory about
that, the most widely accepted hearkening back to something called the ideometer
effect described in 1852 by physician and physiologist William Benjamin
Carpenter and published a report for the Royal Institution of Great Britain.
But I'm not here to bury the Ouija, I'm here to revel in its mystery. For
example, a group of researchers performed an experiment involving a robot, a
test subject, and an Ouija board. The subject was told that they were p playing
with a subject in another room and that the robot simply mimicked that isolated
participant's movements, but this was a trick. The robot did nothing but
amplify the participant's movements as a way to make them think they weren't in
control. They then were asked a series of yes or no, fact-based questions and expected
to use the Ouija to answer. This is where the weirdness starts.
When a group of participants were asked to guess the
answers, they scored approximately 50%, but the participants using the Ouija
scored approximately 65%. Further research is underway, but I'm going to use
this shred of statistically insignificant data to support my dear old talking
board. Maybe I'll break it out the next time I have to take a test. As for writing inspiration, the Ouija is one of those tropes that's been pretty much done to death (pun intended). It still appears on TV and in the movies as the conduit for demonic entities, spirit possession, and all sorts of paranormal mischief, which says something for its cultural significance, but if you're looking for an entry point to a story, I'd choose something else.
