The Ouija board (also called a talking board or spirit board) is a flat board printed with letters, numbers, and simple words, used with a small pointer called a planchette that participants rest their fingers on, allowing it to move seemingly of its own accord to spell out messages. Although widely associated with contacting the dead, it is now understood by researchers to work through the ideomotor effect — unconscious muscular movement by the participants themselves, rather than any external force.
Origins
Talking boards emerged from the American Spiritualist movement's frustration with slower communication methods, such as calling out the alphabet and waiting for a rap at the correct letter. In 1886, the Associated Press reported that such boards had become widespread among Spiritualist circles in Ohio. Baltimore businessman Charles Kennard saw commercial potential in the trend and, in 1890, founded the Kennard Novelty Company with attorney Elijah Bond and several other investors specifically to manufacture and sell the boards.
According to a widely repeated account, when the U.S. Patent Office demanded proof the board actually worked before granting a patent, Bond and his sister-in-law — Spiritualist medium Helen Peters — used the board to correctly spell out the name of the chief patent officer, which had supposedly not been disclosed to them; the patent was granted in 1891. The board's own name is said, by the same tradition, to have been chosen by the board itself when asked what it wished to be called.
Commercial history
The Kennard Novelty Company grew rapidly, operating factories across the United States and in London within its first few years. In 1901, employee William Fuld took over production under the "Ouija" name. Ownership passed through several companies over the following decades, before Parker Brothers acquired the brand in 1966; Parker Brothers was itself later absorbed into Hasbro in 1991, which continues to manufacture the board today.
The ideomotor effect
The board's movement is explained by the ideomotor effect, a term coined by physiologist William Carpenter in 1852 to describe involuntary muscular movements produced by a person's own subconscious expectations, without any awareness of controlling them. When several people rest their fingers lightly on the planchette, each participant's own small, unintentional movements combine to move it, while each person experiences the movement as coming from somewhere other than themselves — a phenomenon studied in relation to Spiritualist practices even before the Ouija board itself existed.
Cultural reputation
Despite being marketed and sold from the outset as a family parlour game, sitting alongside chess and checkers rather than being framed as an occult device, the Ouija board's horror reputation is largely attributed to a single film: William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), which opens with its central character playing with a board shortly before her possession. By that point, the board had already been a mainstream toy company product for years. Its use remains a recurring device in horror media, and it continues to be used, and debated, as a genuine attempt at spirit communication by some practitioners today.
Scientific perspective
Mainstream science attributes all Ouija board results to the ideomotor effect rather than any paranormal cause, and no controlled test has demonstrated the board producing information unavailable to the participants by ordinary means. Some paranormal investigation teams choose to avoid using the board during investigations for this reason — Are You Haunted..?, for instance, deliberately avoids ouija boards and glass divination in favour of direct observation.