Ouija boards Archives - Bone and Sickle

Devil Boards

By boneandsickle | October 28, 2024

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:36 — 39.6MB)

The devilish reputation Ouija boards enjoy in horror films is a relatively new phenomenon. In the Victorian era, they were regarded by “psychical researchers” as something to be embraced in a spirit of calm scientific inquiry, while Spiritualists saw in them a means of reaching out to those who’d passed into the “Summerland,” an anodyne realm of sweetness and light.

While these were the dominant attitudes of the day, the idea of spirit communications has always been fraught with a sense of the uncanny, tainted even by an association with witchcraft and the Devil. We’ll see this element already present in those first communications of the Spiritualist movement, the dialogues the Fox sisters with an unseen presence at first presumed to be a sort of devil.

As we saw in our previous episode, spirit-boards represent a particular danger to those with psychologically fragile constitutions. Beyond the instances of obsessive madness detailed previously, this episode examines a handful of cases from the 1920s and ’30s involving actual bloodshed — murder, suicide, and explicit invocations of the Devil.

Of course these remained isolated incidents, and historical distrust of the Ouija was generally low, and all but non-existent during the spiritual and occult explorations of the 1960s. But all of this would soon change with William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, The Exorcist, and its 1973 cinematic adaptation, both of which famously depict the Ouija board as a channel through which the Devil enters.

Some listeners may know that Blatty’s novel was inspired by actual reports of an exorcism that took place in America of the late 1940s, one involving a teenage boy rather than girl, a change Blatty said he’d made to help preserve the privacy of the boy.

Within the last decade, as individuals involved in these incidents have passed on, more information on this case has made its way to public scrutiny. In the last half of our show, we examine the role spirit-boards and Spiritualist practices played in these events as revealed by a day-to-day log kept by the lead exorcist during the rites . Mrs. Karswell reads for us the passages from the journal.

An element Blatty wove in with this source material was a specific identity of the demon possessing his fictional victim — Pazuzu, an ancient Mesopotamian wind spirit bringing dro ught, famine, storms, and all manner of ill fortune. As this figure was digested into pop culture over the next decades, a version of its name, “Zozo,” would eventually appear in the early 2000s as a destructive entity often channeled by unwary Ouija user. We take a look at this bit of evolving web-lore, showcased in paranormal shows, like Ghost Adventures and at the heart of the 2012 indie horror film I am Zozo.

Spirit Boards

By boneandsickle | October 17, 2024

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:37 — 44.2MB)

Ouija boards, or more generally, “spirit boards” have antecedents going back to the very first days of the Spiritualist movement. We begin our show with a seasonally spooky visit to the cottage of the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York, where the ghost of a murdered pedlar supposedly began communicating with the family through a series of mysterious knocking sounds. While the method used by the Fox sisters to translate these knocks into messages anticipates the process of pointing out letters on a Ouija board, the evolution of spirit boards was not so straightforward.

We learn how the planchette, used on board as a pointer, appeared long before any boards were printed and was initially used as a writing device. It was equipped with a pencil inserted through it like a third leg. As the planchette was guided by the user (supernaturally and/or unconsciously), “spirit writing” was produced.

We next hear from a number of contemporaneous accounts describing the pencil planchette as if it were inhabited by a ghostly presence and how these devices first appeared in Paris and London. Once imported to America, the homeland of the Spiritualist movement, merchants in Boston and New York did brisk business in producing versions of their own.

By the 1880s, the planchette was finally beginning to be used as a pointer, and W. S. Reed Toy Company of Massachusetts became one of the first merchants to produce boards printed with letters. Reed’s model was known as the “Witch-board.” Along the way, we hear of an unexpected connection between President Grover Cleveland and Witch-boards.

We then go to Baltimore, where former fertilizer salesman Charles W. Kenner partners with attorney Elijah to create their own version of the ghostly spelling board, one they name Ouija. Lore around the naming of the board (through a seance) and peculiar happenings at the US Patent office in Washington DC are discussed along with the passing of rights to manufacture the novelty to William Fuld, who manufactured the Ouija board from 1897 to his untimely death in 1927.

We discuss the phenomenon of “Ouija-mania,” which generated a number of songs and (questionable) literary works. Ouija-mania also generated a certain degree of misery among unstable users. Several absurd and tragic stories from newspapers of the day are read by Mrs. Karswell, and we close with a particularly dramatic story told in a letter preserved in the William Fuld archives. It conceives of the Ouija as a tool of the Devil, something we will explore more in our next episode.