Ouija Boards, in some form or another, have actually been
around much longer than the above patent would appear to
indicate. In fact, such boards, often referred to as talking
boards, have been around since the 19th century and there were
earlier predecessors known as dial plates or Spiritographs. The
fact that they were referred to as “talking boards” was meant to
indicate that they were somehow allowing spirits to communicate
with the living by means of the board.
The boards with which we are most familiar have an alphabet
placed in two curved rows along with answers of Yes, No, Good
Bye and the numbers 0 through 9. Also, until recently, one of
the more commonly available Ouija Boards by Parker Brothers
always included the name of William Fuld, a prolific
manufacturer of Ouija Boards until his untimely death in 1927.
He was supervising the installation of a flagpole on top of the
building from which he fell to his death.
The case could be made that there is nothing inherently
evil or demonic about a Ouija Board. After all, most of those
we see today are cardboard and printed paper with a plastic
planchette (the pointing device). The device itself is simply a
patented form of a method of “spirit communication” that was
commonly toyed with during the latter 19th century. People
wishing to contact spirits would lay out cards with the alphabet
and numbers in a circle on a table. An overturned glass would
be placed in the center, and each sitter at the table would
place a finger on the glass. They would ask questions and the
glass would often move around to spell out answers. Despite all
of this, there are those who insist that Ouija Boards are evil
even though they have long been manufactured by toy companies
(Fuld and later Parker Brothers among many others) and sold in a
wide variety of toy stores.
Some will tell you it is spirits that are responsible for
the movement of the planchette while other will tell you the
pointer moves because of something called the ideomotor response
(assuming that the pointer is not being consciously pushed).
The ideomotor response is a result of unconsciously driven minor
muscle movements. In other words, the unconscious/subconscious
mind makes the things move. Some psychologists describe it as a
form of dissociation, since the brain sends signals to the
muscles directly, bypassing human consciousness. The term was
coined by psychologist/physiologist William B. Carpenter in
1852. Yet, does the ideomotor explanation mean spirits are
really not involved?
One thing does appear to be true as observed by those who
have used Ouija Boards, the answers obtained with the boards are
not always correct. People often ask questions about the future
during Ouija Boards sessions. When the subsequent realities are
later compared with the predictions the boards seldom provide
answers that are much better than guesswork. So, does this mean
that spirits are not involved or just that the spirits are no
more knowledgeable about the future than the rest of us?
The instructions that have accompanied Ouija Boards in the
recent past always explain that you need to treat attempts to
use the board with a degree of seriousness. That is, joking
around with an attempt to use the board is likely to result in a
lack of responsiveness from the board. It has also been pointed
out that responsiveness on the first few attempts can be slow in
coming. So, people do tend to treat the experience with some
degree of decorum and seriousness. As a result, participants do
generally try their best to be careful that they are not simply
pushing the planchette to a desired answer. Also, in general,
the participating pair of users will normally swear that they
are not making the pointer move to specific answers.
Normally a pair of Ouija Board participants gently place
their finger tips on the planchette and ask a question that they
wish the board to answer. Then they wait patiently until the
planchette begins to move to either spell out an answer, supply
a Yes or No answer, or pick any of the numbers on the board. It
often takes quite a while before some kind of activity begins to
happen during an initial attempt, but invariably something does
eventually happen. In response to subsequent questions or after
users have become more familiar with what to expect, the board
generally reacts much faster.
My direct personal experience with a Ouija Board happened
about forty years ago when I was about 15 years old and my
sister was about 12. I don’t remember the circumstance
surrounding how we happened to acquire the board in our house,
but the simple fact was that my sister and I began to “play”
with this “toy” from Parker Bothers. As the instructions
warned, our first attempt at using the board met with a long
wait and a slow response. However, this wasn’t the case for
long. By the end of our first session the reaction of the board
was quite fast. Subsequent uses of the board also did not
exhibit any initial delay in responsiveness.
In our use of the board I knew I was not purposely moving
the planchette and I was subsequently convinced that my sister
was also not voluntarily moving it. I came to this conclusion
because she took to using the Quija Board by herself (something
that is not particularly common). Using the board by yourself
wouldn’t make any sense if you knew you were pushing the pointer
to the answers. So, it seems that both of us were using the
board appropriately. We also took it seriously and didn’t joke
around with it.
The results we obtained were both interesting and
inconclusive. During our use, the board claimed that the
answers we were getting were coming from someone named Huggins
who was a deceased American Indian. We also learned that
Huggins was no good at predicting the future. What was more
interesting to me were the things that the board did that didn’t
result in answers.
When we asked a question for which the board did not have
an immediate answer it took to doing a couple of rather
interesting things. Of course it could be said that it was
actually us doing these things. At any rate, we were often
faced with a couple of interesting “moves” by the board. One of
the moves was something I called scanning. The planchette under
our hands would literally race across the top row of the
alphabet then back across the bottom row time after time. Then
after several cycles of this it would begin to slow and begin
spelling an actual answer. At other times, if an answer still
wasn’t available, the planchette would begin doing a second
interesting move I termed the death spiral. The death spiral
began as a large circle slowly reducing in diameter until it
reaches the center point. At this point the planchette would
return to scanning a few more times before rewarding us with an
answer.
To put scanning and the death spiral into perspective, it
never occurred to my sister and I that such moves could even be
expected from a Quija Board. We knew nothing about how this
thing should, could or would work. I remember both the scanning
and spirally process surprised us both at the time. It
surprised us by the speed and accuracy of the movements which
would actually be hard to coordinate between two people who were
purposely trying to make them happen let alone between two kids
who were not trying to make them happen.
One question surrounding use of a Quija Board tends to be
whether or not the answers are coming from a spirit or just from
the ideomotor affect of the participants. However, maybe this
is the wrong question all together.
Our muscles are driven by small electrical impulses
conducted through nerves. Could it be that when participants
purposely relax voluntary control over their muscles these
nerves, or perhaps the brain itself, picks up small electrical
signals from another source or spirit? Interestingly, having
two participants might actually help nullify uncoordinated
ideomotor actions by each person while increasing the
susceptibility to any coordinated influence by an external
source or spirit. In support of this it should be noted that
use of a Ouija Board by only one person is notably more
difficult. Possibly this is because of the difficulty an
individual will have relaxing and suppressing uncoordinated
ideomotor actions that would otherwise prevent the board from
producing coherent rather than random movements.
Having said all of this, are Ouija Boards evil or just
toys? The famous line in the movie Forrest Gump was, “Stupid is
as stupid does.” Perhaps the same applies here as well. It is
what we do with a Ouija Board that is the determining factor.
