Do Ouija Boards Really Communicate with the Dead?
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Ouija Boards Throughout History
The Ouija board (sometimes known as a spirit board) started out life as a humble board game. Its history can be traced back to the mid-19th century when spiritualism, a belief in the ability to communicate with the dead, was gaining popularity in the western world. Ouija boards are said to create a communication link between the world of the living and the underworld of the dead.
In 1853, a group of French spiritualists created a device called a planchette, which was used to communicate with spirits. In its original form, the planchette was a small wooden board with a pencil attached to it. The user would place their hands on the board and the planchette would move, supposedly under the control of the spirits, to spell out messages.
In 1890, the Ouija board as we know it today was introduced by businessman, Elijah Bond, and lawyer, Charles Kennard. They patented the board and began selling it as a game. The name “Ouija” is said to have come from a combination of the French and German words for “yes” – “oui” and “ja.” So essentially it’s a YesYes board, which kind of takes the wind out of its sails just a tad.
Grief Is a Powerful Force
The popularity of the Ouija board grew in the early 20th century, especially during World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic when many people were seeking ways to communicate with loved ones who had died. The board was even endorsed by famous author and spiritualist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There’s a lot to be said for grief and the overwhelming need to believe in an afterlife.
However, the Ouija board has also been associated with controversy and superstition. Some people believe that it can be used to summon evil spirits or demons, and that it should be avoided. Others believe that it is simply a harmless game or tool for self-reflection and introspection.
Today, the Ouija board remains a popular board game and has been featured in numerous movies and television shows. Its origins and purpose continue to be a subject of debate and intrigue.
You’ve got to admit, they’re very pretty things. I’m as obsessed as any goth girl with planchettes [shakes lovely planchette earrings].
Controversy & Ouija Boards
The controversy surrounding Ouija boards stems from a variety of factors, including their association with spiritualism, the paranormal, and the occult.
Belief In the Paranormal
Many people believe that Ouija boards can be used to communicate with spirits. This belief is based on the assumption that the board is not simply a game, but a tool for divination. This belief is not shared by everyone, and some sceptics argue that the movements of the planchette are not caused by spirits, but by the subconscious movements of the users. There is something to be said for the power of suggestion. The planchette begins to move, everyone is secretly hoping it will move and subconscious micro-movements gain momentum when they’re powered by more people who are running on auto suggestion. Like clunky predictive text.
Whether you believe ouija boards communicate with ghosts or not generally comes down to whether or not you hold spiritual beliefs.
Fear of the Unknown
The unknown can be scary, and the idea of contacting spirits or entities from another realm can be unsettling. This fear can be compounded by stories and legends about Ouija boards that have been perpetuated in popular culture. We all know someone who has a gripping ghost story about when a group of friends decided to have a laugh with the ouija board and creepy things started to happen.
Religious Beliefs
Organised religious groups often believe that Ouija boards are a tool of the devil or demonic entities. These beliefs are often based on a strict interpretation of scripture, which prohibits divination and communication with the dead.
I mean, if you have a belief system that relies entirely on behaving a certain way because of a blind faith in the afterlife, and you prohibit people from speaking to the people in the afterlife to confirm, doesn’t that undermine your argument somewhat? Almost as if they’re worried people may find out that there is no afterlife after all…
Negative Energy
Some people have reported negative experiences while using Ouija boards, such as feeling overwhelmed by negative energy or encountering malevolent spirits. These experiences can fuel the belief that Ouija boards are dangerous or should be avoided.
Feelings like this are highly contagious. Fear is a very strong emotion and Ouija boards are usually operated by a group of people, so when your fear is mirrored back at you by the people around you, it validates your fear. Once you’re on high alert, you begin to notice things that justify your feelings and small things that you wouldn’t have even noticed before become yet more evidence, in your mind, that something bad is happening. I’ve spoken before about the lizard brain in panic mode – it thinks there’s a physical threat to your life and puts you on high alert. Anyone who has lifelong anxiety will know that these feelings often begin to snowball until you feel paralysed by fear.
In summary, the controversy surrounding Ouija boards is based on a combination of fear and lingering religious beliefs. Whether or not Ouija boards are truly a gateway to the spirit world remains a subject of debate and speculation.
Ouija Boards & The Exorcist
The bulk of the negativity surrounding Ouija boards actually stems from the film, The Exorcist. Until 1974, Ouija boards weren’t widely feared. For those of you that know me, you already know that I can’t watch that film. Not because I believe it’s cursed, but because I watched it when I was far too young to and it scared me so much, it took years for me to be ok again. I still get chills when I hear Tubular Bells. But if you can remember the film, or you know it well, you will know that Regan becomes possessed by the devil when she plays with a Ouija board and starts talking to a spirit called Captain Howdy. Which is supposedly the devil in disguise.
The movie, The Exorcist, is based on a book by author, William Blatty. Blatty himself had some spooky experiences with a Ouija board and by the time he’d finished writing the book, he had begun to believe that Ouija boards were, indeed, a way to communicate with the dead. And even more than that, thought that they were a gateway that the devil could come through.
On being asked if he’d ever scared himself while writing the book, Blatty said
William Peter Blatty, 1972
“Well, I don’t want to sound like a nut but as I was writing the last chapter and the epilogue I did have a series of bizarre experiences. For the first time in my life I got hung up on a Ouija board.
I’d never done it before but I found I couldn’t leave it alone. And I had the most definite feeling that I was communicating with the dead. Yes, I agree an awful lot of it could be auto-suggestion, and I knew all about how Ouija boards worked because I’d researched it so much for the book, but there were certain things which are not susceptible to explanation by the subconscious mind.
I thought it was my father communicating with me, and I got someone in to help validate the experience. She was a girl who could put herself into a self-imposed hypnotic trance and who would operate the planchette on the Ouija board. I didn’t touch it at all, and asked the questions in Arabic, which she didn’t understand a word of, and I got precisely the right answers.
But then I thought well maybe subconsciously I was formulating the answers in English and she was picking them up from me telepathically.
But then there were poltergeist experiences. Doing revision of the book at a friend’s house, the telephone rang and suddenly the receiver leapt off the hook. It happened to him first and then to me. So I asked a friend who did the acoustics for the Kennedy Center what the possibilities were electrically and he said it was impossible. Then telephone engineers in two states confirmed that it was impossible. But we both saw it happen. That was the culmination of several incidents, but it was the one that in no way could be explained.
An electric typewriter wrote a line of gibberish, but what do I know about electricity. Maybe there was a short circuit somewhere. That was possible.”
It Gets In Your Head
This all sounds really scary, but Blatty had been in the world of the paranormal for months while writing this book. It’s a terrifying read and just researching for the podcast has given me the heebie jeebies. I can’t imagine what immersing yourself in a story like The Exorcist would do to your psyche.
Oh, and the telephone thing – it’s not just a nice metaphor. “The phone rang off the hook” is an idiom based on the fact that the bells in older landline telephones could occasionally cause the receivers to bounce off their cradle if they hadn’t been replaced properly after a previous call. It’s spooky, but if that’s all the devil does when she comes through a Ouija board, I’m unperturbed.
Be gone Satan! I banish you from jiggling my phone around a little bit once!
Scaredy Cat has already been there, Done That & got the T-shirt… well, the earrings
So, I admit, I have done a ouija board in the past. It probably wasn’t the best example of an experiment. It was at a house party, I was pretty drunk and some friends and I made a makeshift ouija board out of bits of paper and used a glass as a planchette. I can’t say that anything much happened. I got a bit silly and tried to push the glass and then not long after, I got my sleeping bag out and went to sleep (it was back in the days when sleeping on the floor wouldn’t result in a week of back pain). When I awoke, I discovered that I had slept right on top of our paper ouija board. Nothing much happened after that. Well, nothing that wasn’t already happening.
I’m very open to trying this again. After all, I’ve been in that evil stone circle in Edinburgh vaults, so I’m not easily fazed (story to follow about what happened after that!).
Not Everyone Is Happy About It
I mooted the idea of the Ouija session with a friend of the podcast and spiritual consultant of mine for the podcast. She absolutely refused and then said I shouldn’t even think about doing it. I didn’t like to tell her I’d already done one. She then sent me a ritual to perform to protect myself while I’m doing these types of investigations. And I mean, in for a penny, in for a pound, right? It’s a nice visualisation and it makes a change from my usual meditations, so at the very least, it’s making me smile, and at most, it’s protecting me from evil spirits. I’ll write the instructions down at some point, but I must check in with her that I’ve got it right before I start handing out advice. I am the sceptic, not the ghost expert, after all.
The main thing that I find bizarre about Ouija boards is the “why” of it all. Like… why is a game that was developed in the not too distant past the most effective way to communicate with spirits? Even Blatty mentions typewriters in his commentary on his experience with Ouija boards. But why would a spirit not just use the typewriter in the first place? Why, in this day and age when we have communication devices at our very fingertips, does it make sense that a spirit would wait for someone to dust off a board game before making a move? Especially an evil spirit, desperate to get in and wreak havoc.
Science & Ouija Boards
There is some scientific thought behind why people report spooky happenings during ouija seances. And there science behind why the planchette moves too. Spoiler alert – it’s not ghosts.
The Glass or Planchette Moves!
The reason behind this phenomenon is called the ideomotor effect and describes involuntary, subconscious movements. You can make your body move a tiny bit if you think about making a movement. The movement you actually make can be imperceptible to you or anyone else. Now couple that with every person at the séance making these tiny movements and you’ve got momentum. Once it appears that a word is being spelt out, the power of suggestion is going to increase the chances of the planchette picking up speed and finishing the word with a flourish. You’ll often come across stories where the glass falls over at the end of a message, or the planchette flies off the board. And that’s purely down to excess momentum and not an evil spirit throwing a hissy fit.
It Couldn't Possibly Have Known That!
There’s also the phenomenon of Ouija boards giving correct answers to questions that the participants didn’t know the answer to. There’s a scientific reason for that too. And it’s the subconscious mind. Or zombie brain, as it’s known. It’s the same thing that happens when you have an out of body experience and see things you think you shouldn’t know about. Somewhere, deep down, you do know it, or you have already seen it. It’s just been filed away in the back of your mind waiting to jump to the fore. When you take part in something spooky, like a séance, your brain is thinking in a different way than it normally does, because you’re doing something that’s out of your comfort zone. So it starts to access the information you’ve filed away in case you need it.
Our brains are amazing. When you dream, for example, one part of your brain creates a story and another part of your brain is watching it in amazement. Participating consciously in your dreams (lucid dreaming) is when you can actively control the part of your brain that’s coming up with the story. Personally, I like to have a good fly around at that point.
We Need It
There’s something deep within us that seeks an afterlife. We want to believe that there’s more to it than just this short life. The idea of our personalities, carefully forged in pain and experience, being just… gone. It’s terrifying. And we have this inner need to know that our loved ones who are no longer with us haven’t completely left us. In a sense, they haven’t – the molecules of their bodies are now intermingling with other molecules to create animals, structures, rocks… in some cases, thier organs are used to preserve the life of someone else. We are all made of molecules that once made up someone or something entirely different. Their conscious minds and their subconscious, though – the part of them that was created by synapses in the brain, that part of them has stopped. It’s been turned off. Like a computer with no power. And one day, we will be gone too. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Brian Cox said a wonderful thing about human existence:
Prof. Brian Cox OBE, Physicist
“Life, just like the stars, the planets and the galaxies, is just a temporary structure on the long road from order to disorder. But that doesn't make us insignificant, because we are the Cosmos made conscious. Life is the means by which the universe understands itself. And for me, our true significance lies in our ability to understand and explore this beautiful universe.”
And how can you argue with a face like that?
Seriously, though, that resonates with me so much, it brings me to tears. I very much feel that we are temporary structures, born of stardust, that think and feel. What a wonderful and ever changing thing nature is.
But what would I know? I am a mere artist on a spinning, slightly soggy rock in a vast and unknowable universe. There are many things I do not know and will never be able to comprehend in my lifetime.
Your Stories with Ouija Boards
Of course, I’m open to suggestion and other opinions. That is the whole point of this podcast, after all. Have you had a scary experience with a ouija board? Get in touch. There’s nothing I love more than having my mind changed.
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