Thread by @dreamsellerbrnd

FRIDAY OCCULT HISTORY | 004

Family Game Or Tool Of The Devil? : Mysterious Origin Of Ouija

#fridayocculthistory #thread

Ouija board, spirit board, talking board, spirit of the coin, whatever the name is, everyone got the basic idea of what Ouija Board suppose to be.

Apart from being a family game, ouija board also are part of the spiritualist movement where mediums began to use to communicate with the dead.

Ouija was created and named in Baltimore, Maryland in 1890 but talking board was already reported to be taking over spiritualist camps in Ohio by 1886.

In the 1970s, ouija board users were also described as "cult members" by sociologists, though this was severely examine closely in the field.

Ouija board, in fact, came straight out of the American 19th century obsession with spiritualism, the belief that the dead are able to communicate with the living.

Spiritualism, which had been around for years in Europe, hit America hard in 1848 with the sudden prominence of the Fox Sisters (see the #fridayocculthistory 001). They claimed to receive messages from spirits who rapped on the walls in answer to questions.

In 1890, the Kennard Novelty Company was chosen to exclusively make and market the new talking boards. The company were not a spiritualists but they were just a keen businessmen and they’d identified the potential of the boards.

But the Kennard talking board lacked a name. Contrary to popular belief, “Ouija” is not a combination of the French for “yes,” oui, and the German ja. It was Helen Peters (a “strong medium”), who supplied the famous name.

Sitting around the table, they asked the board what they should call it; the name “Ouija” came through and, when they asked what that meant, the board replied, “Good luck.”

The board’s instant and now, more than 120 years later, prolonged success showed that it had tapped into a weird place in American culture.

It was marketed as both mystical oracle and as family entertainment, fun with an element of other-worldly excitement.

This meant that it wasn’t only spiritualists who bought the board; in fact, the people who disliked the Ouija board the most tended to be spirit mediums, as they’d just found their job as spiritual middleman cut out.

The Ouija board appealed to people from across a wide spectrum of ages, professions, and education—mostly, as claims, because the Ouija board offered a fun way for people to believe in something.