Carrion Luggage

Yes? No? Goodbye

Did you know that no Ouija board ever spelled out the word "gullible?" A rather long treatise on the soi-disant spirit-communicator from Smithsonian:

    The Ouija Board Can’t Connect Us to Paranormal Forces—but It Can Tell Us a Lot About Psychology, Grief and Uncertainty  
The game was born from Americans’ obsession with Spiritualism in the 19th century. Since then, it’s functioned as a reflection of their deep-seated beliefs and anxieties for more than a century

You know how I knew Ouija boards weren't what they were advertised to be, when I was a kid? Two things: One, it uses standard English, when everyone knows that spiritualist devices have to be in intrinsically arcane languages like Hebrew, Sanskrit or Latin. Two, it was available in places like Toys R Us, alongside Monopoly and Risk; if kids could actually speak with spirits from beyond, it would have been locked away in some secret vault, only to be discovered later by some plucky young archaeologist who then had to spend the rest of the movie containing the horrors she had released, at great personal sacrifice to her wardrobe.

And yet, there was something there.

In the late 1800s, advertisements for a new paranormal product started appearing in papers: “Ouija, or, the Wonderful Talking Board,” boomed a Pittsburgh toy and novelty shop, describing a magical device that answered questions “concerning the past, present and future with marvelous accuracy” and provided a “link which unites the known with the unknown, the material with the immaterial.”

Also, if it did work as advertised, it would have made detectives' jobs that much easier. "Who murdered you?" "J-O-H-N-S-M-I-T-H." It would at the very least narrow down the list of possible suspects.

Not to mention, with the "future" bit, do you really want to know? "When am I going to die?" "T-O-N-I-G-H-T."

The idea was that two or more people would sit around the board, place their fingertips on the planchette, pose a question, and watch, dumbfounded, as the planchette moved from letter to letter, spelling out the answers seemingly of its own accord.

You want to impress me? Have it move on its own, without fingers, batteries, magnets, or stray gusts of wind.

Are Ouija boards real?

Well, yes, in a sense, they are, in the same way that a porn star's breasts are real: they exist, but they're also a misleading illusion.

Ouija historian Robert Murch has been researching the story of the board since 1992, when he first purchased a copy. At that time, he says, no one really knew anything about its origins, which struck him as odd: “For such an iconic thing that strikes both fear and wonder in American culture, how can no one know where it came from?”

I suppose asking the Ouija board never occurred to him.

As I said, the article is rather long, so I'm skipping over bits like the background of the spiritualist craze in the US in the 19th century, which supposedly helped to birth the board.

When a few men in Baltimore started the Kennard Novelty Company, the first producers of the Ouija board, in the late 19th century, opening the gates of hell was the last thing on their minds. Instead, they were mostly interested in opening Americans’ wallets.

It really doesn't get more American than that: see a market, take advantage of it, rake in the dough.

Contrary to popular belief, “Ouija” is not a combination of the French word for “yes,” oui, and the German equivalent ja. According to Murch, it was Bond’s sister-in-law, Helen Peters (who was, Bond said, a “strong medium”), who supplied the now instantly recognizable handle. When she asked the board what they should call it, the name “Ouija” came through.

I honestly hadn't heard that fauxtymology, but I absolutely get how people would believe it (the board itself is evidence that people will believe anything, given the right circumstances). After all, English is basically a French/German creole that somehow (coughcolonialismcough) spread across the entire world.

Again, skipping over quite a bit here.

Parker Brothers (and later, Hasbro, after acquiring Parker Brothers in 1991) still sold thousands of them, but the reasons people were buying them had changed significantly: Ouija boards were spooky rather than spiritual, with a distinct frisson of danger.

I just quote this bit to point out that it's still being made by a game company. Hasbro also publishes Dungeons and Dragons, whose character arc is pretty much the exact opposite of that of the Ouija board, though much shorter: D&D went from being feared and accused of demonic associations to being acknowledged as a fun pastime and font of creativity; Ouija went the other way.

For whatever it's worth, Hasbro also controls My Little Pony.

As interesting as the history is, I was looking for non-paranormal explanations. As I said above, there's something there; I just figured it had something to do with the subconscious, which can be scary enough without needlessly adding in entities from the Great Beyond.

The boards are not, scientists say, powered by spirits or demons. But they’re still equally fascinating—because they’re powered by us, even when we protest that we’re not doing it, we swear.

This is where I admit that no, I've never actually played with a Ouija board. This is not out of fear or skepticism, but largely disinterest.

Ouija boards work on a principle known to those studying the mind for more than a century: the ideomotor effect. In 1852, physician and physiologist William Carpenter published a report for the Royal Institution of Great Britain examining automatic muscular movements that take place without the conscious will or volition of the individual (think crying in reaction to a sad film, for example).

Astute readers of the article, or even of those few excerpts I provide here, will note that the ideomotor effect report was published decades before the first Ouija board was produced.

Around the same time, chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, intrigued by table-turning, conducted a series of experiments that proved to him (though not to most Spiritualists) that the table’s motion was due to the ideomotor actions of the participants.

Yes, that Faraday. ("Table-turning" was a common spiritualist practice when Faraday was alive, and had nothing directly to do with Ouija. The former might have influenced the invention of the latter, however.)

While Ouija boards can’t give us answers from beyond the veil, we can learn quite a lot from them. Researchers think the board may be a good way to examine how the mind processes information differently on different levels.

And that is why this sort of thing shouldn't be dismissed entirely from a scientific perspective, in my opinion. Same for astrology, tarot, sympathetic magick, cryptid sightings, hauntings, alien abduction, etc.: there's something going on there that might help us understand ourselves, or even the world around us. Research is thin on the ground, though, because almost everyone attracted to it is either a Believer or a Skeptic, neither of which is ideal when doing real science; and also because other scientists tend to mock those attracted to what's called "paranormal."

I'm not saying that Ouija, or any of those other things, is actually doing what it's advertised to be doing; just that it would be a mistake for us to think we know everything.

The article goes into some actual experiments, and then ends with a statement that echoes my own thoughts:

The team has managed to make good on one of the claims of the early Ouija advertisements: The board does offer a link between the known and the unknown. The unknown just happened to be different from what many wanted to believe.