Fear of the Spirit Board
Penny Griffiths-Morgan
Call it what you like, mention Talking board, spirit board or the dreaded Ouija board and people have very strong views on them, but is their reputation justified?
I remember when I was about fourteen years old, and my best friend and I started dabbling in them, we definitely got answers to questions that we had no idea about and subsequently found to be correct, but we both also started having some very scary dreams which made us decide to stop using the board. I say board…it was a piece of wood with letters and numbers drawn on it, nothing very technical. For twenty-five years I refused to ever touch a planchette again, but as my knowledge of the paranormal and spiritual grew, I started to question my decision.
The first time I agreed to go back on one I was on a public event in Drakelow Tunnels ( Kidderminster), and felt I needed to protect one of the other people as she was being drained by an errant spirit – or at least that is how it appeared to me as a then observer. Within minutes I had a pounding headache, a symptom I was to experience on subsequent occasions when looking to contact spirits via the talking board.
But are they evil? Are they a portal to hell? Or are they just a Victorian era parlor game that has been adopted by paranormal enthusiasts as a method of communicating with other worlds?
Robert Murch and the rest of his colleagues at the Talking Board Historical Society have made it their mission to dig into the birth of this “device”, and if you want to delve into the history even more, they are a great resource to visit.
Anyway, back to the board itself, in the 1890’s, the Ouija board appeared for the first time in shops courtesy of Kennard Novelty Co, costing $1.50 ( based on an inflation calculator, around $43 in 2020 money) . They had got the inspiration for the “toy” from the very popular spiritualist movement that was everywhere in the 19th century. Many may wonder why communing with the dead was apparently so acceptable in a time which is seen to be historically, quite pious, but with the average lifespan being around fifty years on average and child mortality being distressingly high – not to mention the destruction that war could bring – it is no wonder that if people felt they could talk to their lost loved ones again that they would.
What I found really interesting when researching for this is the commonly held belief as to why it is called “Ouija”, with Oui translating to yes in French and Ja, the same in German, but I have found that this is perhaps not accurate. Apparently it was the board itself that wanted to be named as such, after a séance was conducted by one of the founding businessmen Elijah Bond, and the board came up with the name itself telling the audience that it meant “Good luck”. It has to be said, that even this may not be strictly true as there are also accounts of Bond’s sister in law, a Medium by the name of Helen Peters who is said to have had a vision of what the board should be called, the resultant word being “Ouija”.
In the interests of objectivity, I do have to mention the other theory as to what a Talking Board actually is, and that is nothing more than the effect of something known as the Ideomotor Effect. This is basically microscopic muscle movements that are made involuntarily, and it is in fact the individuals sub conscious mind influencing the planchette. Someone may argue how would the brain know the answers to questions that a person could not give themselves? I would counter that with the fact that scientists believe we use such a tiny percentage of our cerebral capacity, who knows what else it is capable of?
I said at the beginning of this article that opinions on this particular piece of equipment tends to be very polarizing. I saw a piece on one of the social media sites where a board had been found buried in a wall, responses varied from “Wow! What a find, probably an antique! “ to “Burn it, it’s evil”. The interesting thing is however, that those people who are vehemently against using a talking board do not seem to be willing to listen to views of other exponents of the paranormal.
One of the best “warnings” I was given however was that using a Ouija board or similar is no different to chatting to someone online who you have never met, they may say that they are a thirty-five-year-old mother of two with the same interests as you, but do you ever know that for sure…
For what it is worth, even though I have had negative experiences from using one of these, how is it any different to communing with a spirit via a Spirit box? Or an Ovilus? Surely opening a channel of communication with the spirit world carries the same risks regardless of the medium (if you pardon the pun) that you use?.
