Talking Board

Spirit communication in early Spiritualism was slow. Sitters called the alphabet aloud and counted raps, or watched a tipping table lurch at the right letter, and the obvious inefficiency invited invention: planchettes that wrote with a pencil had a craze in the late 1860s, and by the 1880s American Spiritualist circles were using homemade alphabet boards over which a pointer slid directly to the letters, an arrangement the newspapers called the talking board. Commerce followed.

In 1890 the Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore began selling the board as a parlor amusement, and Elijah Bond's patent was granted in February 1891; the trade name Ouija, of disputed origin but attached to the product from the first, passed to the employee William Fuld, whose company dominated the market for half a century, then to Parker Brothers in 1966, and with it to Hasbro, which holds the trademark today. That trademark is why careful usage keeps the generic name: any maker may sell a talking board, but Ouija names one company's product. The object itself has barely changed since Fuld: the arc of letters, the numerals, yes and no in the corners, goodbye at the bottom, and the heart-shaped planchette on which the sitters' fingers rest. Sold as a game, used in earnest, and condemned from pulpits, the board has spent its whole career on the border between toy and instrument, which no owner of one needs explained.

Two explanations of the talking board have coexisted since it was patented. For Spiritualists and for millions of informal users, the planchette moves because someone answers: the board is an instrument of communication with the dead, quicker than raps and available to anyone with a parlor table. The scientific account is older than the board itself.

In 1852 the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter described the ideomotor effect, unconscious muscular action driven by expectation, and Michael Faraday's experiments on table-turning the next year demonstrated exactly such action in sitters who sincerely denied pushing. Applied to the board, the account holds that the sitters themselves move the planchette without knowing it, their pooled expectations spelling out answers no spirit supplied, which is why blindfolded sitters with a rotated board produce gibberish. The explanation has never dented the practice. The board's folklore grew darker over the twentieth century, fed by horror films and by religious warnings that treat it as a door better left shut; many Christian denominations counsel against its use, and popular culture supplies a steady stream of cautionary stories.

Even within Spiritualism the board is contested, with many mediums preferring disciplined circle work to an instrument they consider unpredictable. The talking board thus occupies a rare position: a mass-produced object sold in toy aisles that large numbers of people, believers and objectors alike, treat as genuinely consequential.