99% Invisible - 138- O-U-I-J-A

Episode Date: October 28, 2014

The Ouija board is so simple and iconic that it looks like it comes from another time, or maybe another realm. The game is not as ancient as it was designed to look, but those two arched rows of letters have … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. This is our special Halloween episode, so I'm gonna turn up a little bit of this in a little of this. Just to get us in the mood. Oh, and here, here's some moons. Moons are creepy. All right. A couple of weekends ago, the whole 99 P.I. team got together to do something. None of us had done since we were 13 net slumber parties. I feel like we need to like recite something first, right? And it basically sounds exactly like it did

when we were 13 at slumber parties. Who's there? You're still here. You're out of your hour. That night at my house, we turned out all the lights and lit candles and attempted to summon the spirit world with a Ouija board. That's producer Katie Mingle. She was our host that evening. We were using

a homemade board that Avery designed in the style of a store-bought Egypt Board. Two arced rows of letters, the top row A through M, the second row N through Z, and then below the letters, a straight row of all the single digit numbers. And then of course, yes and no in the upper left and right corners, respectively, and goodbye at the bottom of the board. So the way we just supposed to work is participants, usually to, though sometimes more, ask a question to the spirits. And then they, the participants, lightly rest their fingers on a planchette, which is the pointer that slides around the board. And you're not supposed to push the planchette, Sam Greenspan, you're supposed to allow the

spirits to guide it around the board, indicating what letters or words they're attempting to communicate. You pee? The Ouija board is so simple and iconic and it looks like it comes from another time. Like it has real history, which it turns out is more than just good design. People have been gathering around a board like this one for about 130 years. Hi, my name is Robert Merch. Most people call me Merch and I'm considered the world's foremost expert on Weeja and talking boards. Merch also collects boards and all sorts of other Weeja related artifacts.

So the stuff is everywhere. You know, I frame things. The arrangement I have with my husband is that I can only put things on the wall that can be framed. Now, when he made that agreement, he didn't realize that I could frame anything. So, yeah, that was unfortunate for him. Merch says to understand where talking boards came from. That's the generic term, talking boards. If to go back to the middle of the 1800s, to three sisters in New York.

The Fox sisters, they are really what starts this explosion of mediumship and spiritualism in America and beyond. The Fox sisters claim to be mediums to the spirit world, and in public demonstrations, they would ask questions of the spirits and receive audible knocks back on the wall, knocks that they translated into letters of the alphabet. The Fox sisters were a sensation. They were the most visible faces of a growing movement known as spiritualism, which held that spirits of the dead could be contacted by the living

and that they had secret knowledge to impart. When tales of the fox sisters swept through American newspapers, more and more people started to believe. During and after the Civil War, spiritualism became even more important to people. Everyone had, you know, whether it was a father, a son, a grandfather, an uncle. You know, they all lost somebody. People just went away and they didn't come back. So, what else are you going to do?

You know, you turn to trying to make contact with these people who are gone. And in 1886, the fledgling associated press ran an article in papers all over the country about these new talking boards coming out of the spiritualist movement in Ohio. It's unclear whether he read the article, but a few years later, in 1890, a businessman named Charles Canard of Baltimore, Maryland realized this talking board could make him lots and lots of money. Canard pulled together a small group of investors and formed the Canard novelty company to exclusively make and market talking boards. Contrary to popular beliefs, the name Ouija is not a combination of the French and German words for yes,

we and yeah. Merch says that according to documents belonging to the original founders of the company, they sat down and asked the board itself what it wanted to be called. And letter by letter it spells out the UIJA. And when they ask the board what that means, O-U-I-J-A. And when they ask the board what that means, the board spells out good luck. They called the board Ouija, the Egyptian luck board. They added Egyptian just for a little exotic flair. The patented Ouija board looked a lot like the talking boards that came out of the spiritualist movement. The only real substantial change was that the Ouija board put the letters of the alphabet in a double arc instead of two straight lines across. There have been a few small design changes

since the early boards. For example, there was once a full moon and a crescent moon in the top left and right hand corners. Eventually, the full moon became a sun, which is what you see now. But through the years, the brand has always been very identifiable. So the WeChat board has always been very simple. Anyone who looked at it would know, okay, that's a WeChat board.

By 1893, Charles Canard had left the company, and it was taken over by William Fould, who had come to be known as the father of WeChat. Fould's New York Times obituary actually credited him with inventing the board, which of course he did not do, but he was incredibly good at selling it. Instead of being a straight-up evangelist for the boards, he'd purport to be one of the skeptics. You would say, I don't believe in the Wege board.

You know, I'm no spiritualist. I'm a pros-butarian. And then at the same time, same interview, he would say, but we lost a shipment of Weechy boards on the train tracks and we asked the board where they were, and it told us and then they went down that track and sure enough they found that the train had derailed and we found all our boards. Whether the board worked and how it worked,

whether it was just a game or a more serious spiritual tool, was something fold kept intentionally mysterious. And this marketing strategy was extremely successful. Hey, everyone had one. People played at home with their families. Ladies played at Tea parties. In fact, one of the boards in Merch's collection doubles as a tea tray. People even played with their little kids, which might seem kind of weird now.

Fast forward a couple of decades around 1920, and Weja is still good, clean, family fun. And it turned out, it was also a great thing to do on a date. So you're coming out of Victorian times when men and women are not supposed to be alone together. They're not supposed to be in the dark together. They're not supposed to be in the dark together. They're not supposed to be touching. So the original Ouija board would be placed on your lap. Your knees would be touching.

Your fingers would be touching on the point and shed. You know, you would be doing it by candlelight. And you can see really quickly that the directions add in, you know, two people a man and a woman prefer. And if you need proof of what a normal part of Americana the Ouija Board was, look no further than the King of Americana himself, Norman Rockwell.

In 1920, he made a painting of a man and a woman in the position merch just described. Knees touching, he looking flirtatiously at her, a Ouija board resting in their laps. And the first and loudest were actually the people who's jobs these talking boards had just stolen. We see mediums actually saying, these things are dangerous. You don't know what kind of doors you're opening.

You need someone like me who's experienced to guide you through this unseen world. Now why would they say that? Well because it's cutting into their profession, their money. But Nasey was stayed on the fringe through the years. Oh sure, there'd be the occasional the Ouija board told me to do it murder that would make it into the news. But they were a few and far between. Throughout the decades, Ouija mostly held on to its wholesome reputation.

Until... Mother of the Year! Mother of the Year! Mother of the Year! Mother of the Year! Mother of the Year! Mother of the Year! Mother of the Year! Mother of the Year! Until The exorcist released in 1973 I had to sleep in my parents bedroom for a week after I saw this when I was a kid At the beginning of the movie the main character's mother discovers she's been playing with a Ouija board. The exorcist is really the first big media moment that infers that playing a Ouija board

by yourself, could lead to demonic possession. The following years saw the Ouija board denounced by religious groups as Satan's preferred method of communication. Ouija board denounced by religious groups as Satan's preferred method of communication. Ouija boards aren't harmless. Sayonses aren't harmless. Listen, don't be playing games on Halloween. Don't call on demons because they'll come and live with you. The Bible says he who seeks evil, evil will come to him. Pat Robertson is pretty extreme, but still still the image of the board changed a lot since that Norman Rockwell painting in 1920. Parker Brothers and later Hasbro, which acquired Parker Brothers in 1991, still sells a lot of

boards, but the reason people buy them has changed. It's not good clean family fun anymore. Now people buy them because they want to get scared. There's another Ouija movie just released called Weja, which will do nothing to change the board sinister reputation. But as sinister reputation is fine with Hasbro. In fact, they put up a lot of the money for that new Weijah movie. They've also released a new version of the game

and changed the tagline, which used to be. It's just a game, isn't it? The new tagline? You not play the Weijih board if you think it's just a game. The design of the new board is different too. For the first time in a very long time, the Ouija board got a makeover. They've added a couple of modern features, like a purple light in the planchette, but overall, they've tried to make the board look older than the classic board.

It's brown and kind of weathered, and it looks like something you might find on a pirate ship. They've really gone for the older look, which is neat, because again, people assume these boards have been around for thousands of years, which we know isn't true, but belief is important to the Ouija board. Belief is very important to the Ouija board, especially subconscious beliefs, which brings us finally to how these things work. which brings us finally to how these things work.

Basically, when it comes to the Ouija board, the reason that it seems to work, it feels as if it works, is down to something called the idiomotary effect. And what that is essentially is non-conscious muscular movements. That's Professor Chris French. I am head of the anomalousist psychology research unit at Goldsmiths University of London. And before you ask a anomalousist psychology, is the psychology of weird stuff. The term idiomotor of fact was first coined by an English physician and researcher

named William Benjamin Carpenter back in 1852, right when spiritualism was starting to become popular both in Europe and the US. So the idiomotor effect applies in the case of Ouija in that our bodies are making small subconscious movements that are guided by a suggestion or some subconscious knowledge. And so particularly once the first letter or two has been made apparent, then you kind of get an idea of what's going to come next. So if it was spelling out a name and it's spelled out the letter B and then an O, you might well within the nose because it's probably going to be Bob. And the idiomotor effect becomes magnified as more people play.

One of the very interesting things that happens when you talk to people who have played around with Ouija boards is that they will very often claim that they've got answers from the Ouija board that nobody around the board actually knew that. So that proves that it was some kind of external agency. Professor French says that what's happening here is that our subconscious mind does actually know the answer. Our conscious mind just can't access the information. And researchers are so convinced of this. They've even used Ouija boards to study our subconscious.

So for example, in one of these studies, participants were asked simple, fact-based questions. Like, it's Buenos Aires, the capital of Brazil. They got the answers right about 50% of the time, but when they used a Ouija board to help them answer the same questions, they actually got higher scores then. They got the answers right about 65% of the time. So in other words, they did know the answer even if they couldn't consciously access it. There have been all kinds of studies done on paranormal experiences and Professor French

says they never reveal an external or spiritual force at work. They always reveal an internal force at work, even if it's a subconscious one. I don't have any doubts in my mind that we can explain the vast majority of ostensibly paranormal experiences by looking to psychology. Whether or not we can explain every single one is the $64,000 question. Wasn't it over? Was it an F1? Yeah, F1. Was it an R?

Yeah. When we played Ouija at my house, the planchette seemed less to be governed by the idiomoder effect and more by the law of inertia. What's going on? Nothing. Essentially, it's not moving. And our experience wasn't terribly strange or creepy.

It was mostly just slow. Just kind of was, look, it moved a little bit. strange or creepy. It was mostly just slow. But merch has played enough times to have had some weird experiences. Some I think are just the person's pushing it and they don't know it. It's clearly itter your motor response. Other times it's answered things that just seem so bizarre that how would it know. You know, if you can talk to the spirit world, why wouldn't the Ouija board work? And the real question is, can you make contact with the spirit world? And that's a question that has been dugging humanity since the beginning of time, since the first time someone realized when they died, it didn't come back.

After everyone left my house that night, I was sitting on my couch by myself. It was really quiet. I hadn't blown out all the candles yet, so there was kind of a mood. And then one of my spring-loaded blinds slammed up and scared the sh** out of me. And I have to admit, I looked at the Ouija board, and I wondered, just for a second. It's just a game, isn't it? I have got to say hello to an old friend. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Katie Mangle with Sam Green span Avery Trouffleman and me Roman Mars. It was reported by Linda Rodriguez Migrabi and adapted from a piece she wrote for the Smithsonian magazine.

We are a project of many 1.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced of the offices of Arxon, an architecture and interior design firm located in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find this show and like the show on Facebook, all of us are on Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify, but to find out more about this story, including cool pictures and links, and listen to all the episodes of 99% Invisible. You must go to 99i.org.

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