After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Spooky Origins of the Ouija Board

Episode Date: June 27, 2024

Do you dare try? The Ouija board was invented in 1890. It was an idea lifted from Spiritualist devices for communicating with the dead. Find out the spooky origin story of the Ouija board and our attempts to pierce the veil between the worlds.Today's guest is Brandon Hodge - leading expert and collector of talking boards. https://www.mysteriousplanchette.com/(And here's his candy store! https://www.bigtopcandyshop.com/)Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ 

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Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. The Ouija board seems like an ancient device, its origins lost in the mists of time. But it is in fact a thoroughly American object, one with a history that mixes spiritualism with materialism. The story of how the Ouija board got its name is a good one. of how the Ouija board got its name is a good one. It's 1890 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Ideas guy Charles Kinnard and his business partner Elijah Bond are working on a patent application for a board that can talk to spirits in the great beyond. It's not a new idea. So-called talking boards have spread across America for more than a decade at this point. But these are the guys who are going to package it all up into the mass market commodity that will eventually take the world by storm. They

just need a catchy name. Stuck for ideas, they decide to consult the board itself, with the help of Elijah's sister-in-law Helen Peters, who happens to be a powerful medium. Helen, Elijah and Charles gather around the board, their fingers resting lightly on the moveable pointer or planchette. She asks how it wants to be known, and the planchette begins to trace its way among the letters on the board, slowly spelling out O-U-I-J-A. J. A. Ouija. And if you dig out US Patent Number 466054 filed on the 28th of May 1890, that is what you will see. A picture of the board we know today with the name Ouija. Interestingly, they decided to stick down a second name. Egyptian Luck Board. Presumably in case the spirits have been having an off day. This is one I've been looking forward to for quite a long time. Hello and welcome to After Dark.

My name's Anthony. And I'm Maddy. And today we are joined by Brandon Hodgen. There's no better man to be speaking to about the Ouija board, because Brandon is a leading collector and expert on the history of talking boards. And unrelated, but fascinatingly, he also owns and runs a sweet shop in Austin, Texas, which you can find at www.bigtopcandyshop.com. Brandon, I'm going to ask you about the sweet shop first. What could we expect if we came to your sweet shop?

Because I have a very, very bad sweet tooth. Oh, well, you would be in luck. Big Top is, I dare say, a world famous establishment. It's been around for about 20 years, although it looks like it's been there a lot longer. It is a circus and sideshow themed candy shop. And so it is festooned with all manner of sideshow banners, many of which depict former employees has thousands and thousands of individual products on its walls. It's rather large for a candy store. Many stores are quite small.

Anthony's reaching for his passport immediately. He's gone on the plane. If my orthodontist is listening to this, you can just forget, I'll never see you immediately. He's gone on the plane. My orthodontist is listening to this. You can just forget. I'll never see you again. That's I was going to Austin and that's that's going to be it. But let's get to the Ouija board, Brandon. First of all, for listeners who might not be aware, what is a Ouija board?

What is the purpose of it and how does it work? The Ouija board is a spirit communication apparatus, and it appears as a flat wooden or cardboard board that typically in its most classic layout has a double arc of letters, two rows of 13 letters each, along with the numbers one through nine and zero, one through zero, that would be arranged in any manner of ways. And then it has an indicator, which as Maddy said, is known as the planchette. And this little heart-shaped or teardrop-shaped indicator, the users will place their hands

upon it, and after a few minutes of quiet solitude, it will begin to move mysteriously. Now how it's moving is a long matter of debate with skeptics believing this is a scientific phenomenon, a biological phenomenon known as ideomotor response, where our muscles unconsciously respond to our subconscious thought, and believers believing that in fact, it is the influence of the spirits that move the planchette.

So after a few minutes of preparation, the indicator will typically begin to move under the fingertips of the participants. And as you ask the board questions, it will begin to respond, spelling out responses letter by letter in a very eerie and very convincing fashion that's helped enable it sort of crawl through the decades of history from the 1890s into the modern day. they look very much like a board game. So in your opinion, is this something for parlor room entertainment that has come from the 19th century that you know, is maybe a bit of fun after you've had a bottle of wine and you want to, you know, do something interesting with your evening? Or is this something that we should take a little bit more seriously?

So I'm, I consider myself a what I call sort of a soft skeptic, right? I believe in the scientific explanations of it. For all of these warnings, as you can see behind me, for the listeners, my home, my walls are covered in talking boards and other spirit communication apparatus, and yet no portals to hell have opened up on my living room floor and swallowed me up. So I am of the opinion the board is going to respond in the way you approach to it. So there are many who believe deeply that these boards carry some demonic influence or spiritual power. And then there are others who recognize it for what I believe it is,

and that is unconscious muscular movement. So those who bring sort of bad juju to the board, and I have seen in personal experience and workshops, those that approach it with a light-hearted manner and don't take it too seriously tend to have the best results, and then those who approach it with apprehension or this sort of gravitas often have negative experiences with the board. But that's also borne out by both the scientific and religious explanations of it. Again myself, I'm a skeptic, I think it's a fun parlor entertainment and that's borne through most of history. And also as a historian, and we'll go deeper into this, of course, how we approach and view the board is so heavily skewed by modern

media. It has a historical legacy reaching much further back than many give it credit for. But certainly so many of these we justitions, you must say goodbye, don't play it in a graveyard, you know, you can surround it with a circle of salt to keep the demons out. So many of these beliefs are thoroughly modern and thoroughly influenced by modern media and Hollywood depictions. I remember that you said that you were a soft skeptic, which I would probably count myself in that category as well. Generally, we talk about a lot of these types of topics and topics adjacent. I must ask, though, because the listeners wouldn't forgive me if I didn't, I presume you've been involved in using some of these boards or this equipment.

What is the event while using these things that has been the most impactful for you, if you don't mind answering that question, and how that has lent itself maybe to the softness of your skepticism. Right. So that was one formative event. This was in 2012 as well. It wasn't long after I debuted my website and I'd sort of entered the paranormal convention circuit as a lecturer, right? So I'm doing a lot of talks on this. And it was in Gettysburg, side of the famous Civil War battle here in the States. We were at a hotel there and part of my responsibility for being one of the guest lecturers was I had this obligation to do this overnight ghost hunt. Now I'm not typically one of your TV style paranormal ghost hunters, but I was sort of assigned to this and this particular event we set up and I thought,

well, I don't have the gadgetry, right? I don't have the EV detectors and all this, you know? So we bring a board along, myself and another collector, and invite people to use it. What that begun was about a four hour series of communications with multiple users, up to four people at a time, everybody changing out, an incredible four hours of communications.

You know, I remember one, you know, spirit, you know, the messages we received, it claimed it was a spirit representing a nurse. This house we were in, by the way, the Tilly House in Gettysburg is in the town, and it was used as a triage after the battle. So a lot of soldiers had died right there in that room where we were sitting.

They literally had died on the floor there. These messages indicated it was a nurse. She had died, I believe in 1869, if I recall. She talked about her husband the year he died. Her experience is there. She identified other presences in the room. Some were dark and didn't want to be identified, and we got seemingly miraculous details of this spirit's life.

Now, to me, being a skeptic, I am like, okay, we're asking yes or no questions by their very nature or leading. So we're getting information that way. If you ask a spirit that you have come to believe as a nurse during the Civil War and you ask it when she died, well, if you're going to go to the, your brain is going to go to the one immediately because she didn't live to the 2000s, right? And then probably at eight. So the way our brains collaboratively and collectively fill in these blanks, to me was no less miraculous than if it was spiritual influence. I was so taken by that, that my entire approach to how I read historical accounts of seances shifted in that moment. I began to take them at much closer to face value, because we were receiving communications. Now, whether or not we could verify all this information

with actual historical accounts and census records and a nurse by that name who died in that year, to me, that wasn't the point. It was seemingly miraculous, and it was fun, and our fingertips seemed to barely be touching that planchette, and it was moving with such grace and accuracy.

But also to sort of bring it back around to it is what you bring to it or what you make of it. At the end, what sort of soured those sessions was at the very end, we had these two younger women who were just freaking out about everything, every little noise and every, Oh my God, I just got a reading and da da da. And they were, they saw us using this board. They'd been upstairs and they come down and they were invited to use it. And they were like, you don't touch those things, you know, you've got to be careful, you know, you're opening doors you can't close, you know, you got to say, you know, all the

the modern we distitions that we've inherited from the exorcist and the witch board movies and modern paranormal television, they brought it all there. And they agreed to use the board. And no sooner did they do that, that it immediately turned negative. And that was a presence. And I'm watching you and I'm coming to get you. And of course, they freaked out and left. And it's tied this perfect knot on that idea that it's all about, you get the energy out of it that you put into it. So Brandon, let's go back then to the origin of the Ouija board in the 1890s. We're talking about Charles Kennard and Elijah Bond. What do we know about them?

Who are these people? Well, Charles Kennard, we is largely credited with the invention. And I'll say that in air quotes of the Ouija board. He is a fertilizer salesman in Chestertown, Maryland. So that's a little ways outside of Baltimore. It's kind of on the other side of the bay there. And he becomes sort of taken with this idea of this talking board, and he brings this idea with him to Baltimore, where he meets Elijah Bond, who's a local attorney, and they

begin to conceive of the marketing and production of this idea. Now, Charles Kennedy, in his historical recounting and reporting of Ouija's earliest origins, he fails to mention a few things. One of those is four years previous, so in 1886, there had been widespread news reports of the use of so-called talking boards among Ohio spiritualists in America. Ohio has long been a hotbed of spiritualist innovation. It was the home of Jonathan Coons and the Coons of Spirit Room, for one, and his infamous spiritual machine in the 1850s. These Ohio spiritualists began building on a previous craze for spirit apparatus,

and those were automatic writing planchettes, which had had an incredible search of popularity after the American Civil War in the late 1860s and into the 1870s. So by that time, these automatic writing planchettes were already a well-established thing, and in fact, Charles Kennard actually recounts in his recollections how he had used one as a child, and he fact Charles Kenard actually recounts in his recollections how

he had used one as a child and he was fascinated with that as well as table-tipping seance phenomenon. And for those who don't know, automatic writing planchettes will evolve into the indicator for the talking board, but rather than having an alphabet board to point out messages, they have a pencil that acts sort of as a third leg. So there are larger heart-shaped boarded wheels. The third leg is a pencil and they write out messages on paper in much the same way modern listeners would be familiar with the strange movements of a Ouija board. And so the country, both of our countries, the US and the UK, as well as Europe, predominantly France, had already experienced the

crazes for these writing apparatus. And these Ohio spiritualists sort of seeking to better decipher the scribblings of these automatic writing planches, which is you can imagine historical examples are a scroll of information that can be difficult to determine, begin to pair this with earlier incarnations of alphabet cards that mediums would use to spell out messages and seances. And so they begin to pair the automatic movements of the automatic writing planchettes with these alphabet boards.

And there are some initial news stories in 1886, first called the New Planchet, they call it. Planchet is simply nowhere, Ohio spiritualists say, compared to the new method of communication that's sweeping across the state. And so they have now paired these automatic writing planchettes as a new form of indicator to move in that same mysterious way, but to point out messages through the alphabet on the board. And these very sensational accounts of the spiritual messages being received spread across American newspapers and finally land in the New York papers, which as today are some of the most influential and widespread. And they are eventually given the name talking boards by the New York papers. And what's curious is that these stories were

certainly reprinted and we know for a fact they were reprinted in the Baltimore Sun, which was distributed in Chestertown, Maryland. So they see an opportunity, right? And they are businessmen, they see that this is something that's really exploding already. It's so people are being drawn into it. It's fascinating. And it's already very much, you know, it's taking different elements of spiritualist culture already in existence in America and combining it into what's going to be a product, essentially. what's going to be a product, essentially. Right. And certainly not in a vacuum. 1886 is actually the year that Charles Kennard says that he first had this idea. So he admits it. He just leaves out the fact that it was in all the newspapers across America. I mean, it is a very, very widely reprinted article.

And yet in an age before Google, where you couldn't just get on your phone and look things up, the collective memory seems to have just sort of forgotten that this had been news only four years previously. So that is the year he claims that he made his first board. He would later claim that he came up with the idea using a breadboard and an overturned saucer as an indicator and thought, oh, I was thinking

about using planchettes as a young lad and how similar this was and how much easier it would be to point to the letters. Well, that is a convenient backstory and a convenient origin story, but we also know, and we've often joked, collectors have often joked that he claimed he invented it in his kitchen, but it's more likely he invented it in the bathroom reading the morning paper, because that's where the idea lay. And Kennard's claims are that he sought out a local cabinet and coffin maker named E.C. Reisch, and that they shared an office in the Voshell House in downtown Chester town and that he basically solicited this carpenter to make, I believe, about 50 boards and that he sold them locally and they attracted

a lot of attention. And then he kind of puts the idea away for a few years. On the failings of his fertilizer business, he relocates to Baltimore. He's also in real estate, so he opens up a new real estate office that will become the first Ouija factory. He opens up a real estate office and starts to seek out others who might back this idea. And this is where he runs across now, he's a Freemason,

so that's important because he runs into some other Freemasons through their local lodge, and that includes Elijah Bond, a local lawyer who was the first sort of enthusiast of this idea. By his own account, it sort of laughed out of several investment offices, but this guy takes them seriously. They combine forces and they begin to work toward the earliest origins of what will become the Kenner Novelty Company in Baltimore. So these two, they partner up, they begin their earliest meanderings into sort of the commercial realm. They are not experienced in this regard.

They are experienced in real estate, but they don't have the money really to do a wide scale production. They take on some initial investors and there are some complicated arrangements at this point. It is unusual that Elijah Bond winds up being the patentee of what will become Ouija, for instance. So he's the one that takes on that sort of legal responsibility because he's putting up a lot of this initial money.

I believe it's about $500 at the time. They sign on his brother-in-law, Moppen, and then we get the origin story of its naming, which Matty already, you know, they had sort of a work in progress name, a working title, if you will, they weren't incredibly happy with, and they decided to ask the board in these early days what it would like to be called. And Helen Peters at work with the board spells out O-U-I-J-A. They ask, what does that mean? And it says, good luck. And so that will eventually lend its name to the sort of the Egyptian Luck Board moniker. So they have a product idea. They

have a name. Elijah Bond brings, we believe Helen Peters, he just says he brings his strong medium along. We believe that was Helen Peters to the patent office. We can tell from the patent documents he did have struggles patenting this device. Basically, the patent officer says, we're suspending the patent until you can prove that this thing works, as you offered. And by Bond's own later account, that is when he and Helen Peters traveled to Washington DC and met with the patent office.

And we don't know the exact details of what happened. But early advertisements do indicate that essentially, they worked it with the patent office. And the patent officer was so amazed at its operation that he approved the patent. I was going to ask about this because it seems like such a good marketing opportunity to have a medium come in and have the board name itself. I mean, that's the perfect origin story for your product, right? And is that a big part of the marketing? It's not. So they sort of jump back and forth over the fence with spiritualism itself. They're

trying to create a parlor entertainment board game really in the earliest years of the American board game industry. And they're looking for a hit, just like everyone else in that industry, as incomes are changing, lifestyles are changing. People are now have different types of jobs where they have a steady income and disposable income, very different than previous decades in history,

previous centuries. And so they are trying to tap into this market with this product. Yeah, those earliest advertisements, they jump back and forth over the fence of whether or not this is a spiritualistic device or not. And so you can see it on display in some and others, it's just the luck board.

Explore the nebulous vague mystery of what it may be. And they leave it vague. And that would repeat throughout its decades of marketing. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janica. And on Gone Medieval from History Hit, we explore all of the big questions like what have the Middle Ages ever done for us? The printing press? Yes, but apart from the printing press, what have the Middle Ages ever done for us?

The heavy plow? OK, apart from the printing press and the heavy plow. Mechanical clocks? Gothic architecture? Universities? Windmills? Exactly. Everything good comes from the Middle Ages. So join us for everything good, and a few bad guys too,

on Gone Medieval from History hit every Tuesday and Friday. Subscribe and follow Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts. It's really interesting what you're saying, Brandon, about this product because it is a product becoming part of the entertainment industry, that it's happening when the toy industry is growing and that it's being marketed as something that's maybe a little bit associated with spiritualism, that's maybe a bit frightening and has the potential to access those other worlds that some believe in, but also that it is a form of entertainment. Now you mentioned earlier that the talking boards have a history that goes back 50 years before this and that they become popular around the time of the American Civil War. And of

course in Britain, spiritualism very much starts in the 19th century, but it has this big boom after the First World War where people want to contact the dead who've died in the conflict. So that's really interesting to me. So let's maybe head back a little bit to the 1840s and the 1850s and to hear a little bit about that. To answer where the real origins of the Ouija Board lie, we need to go back to 1848 and an area of upstate New York known as the Burned Over District. It got the name because it had been the subject of so many religious revivals during America's second great awakening that people said there was no more spiritual fuel left to burn. Every convert had already been found. This is where the Mormons sprang from, where an apocalyptic sect known as the Millerites and the Seventh-Day

Adventists began. But then one last great spiritual spark flew from the embers of the Burndover district on the night of the 31st of March 1848. That night, two teenage sisters, Kate and Maggie Fox, began to hear strange noises in the cottage they lived in. They decided to investigate. The youngest sister, Kate, snapped her fingers three times. The spirits, for that is who it was, responded with an equal number of raps on the floors, the ceilings and the doors. When their mother asked the spirits how many children she had, they rapped the correct number. Kate and Maggie could barely believe what was happening. For the first time in a cottage in upstate New York, the veil between worlds had been breached.

Brandon, why is this such an important moment in how we understand the Ouija or talking boards more generally? This seems to be related, but not exactly talking board related. So can you join up the thinking for us? Absolutely. So essentially the haunting of the Fox Cottage, which is essentially what we would, you know, what the Germans call poltergeist activity, right? These strange knockings and soundings. To understand how Ouija comes from that and evolves from it, we're talking about a near 40-year history, we have to understand how you would communicate with nothing more than sound. So your house is making strange noises. You've asked it to repeat after you and it's responded in kind. You've asked it numerical questions.

And this is not actually even a new phenomenon. The British press in the early 1850s, when they begin to hear of this, they refer to the Fox Cottage hauntings as the American Cochlein Ghost. And in 1762, a nearly identical ghostly wrapping phenomenon had occurred in London on Cochlein, which is giving it its name. It was eventually exposed as a hoax. And so when the first press begins to percolate into the UK about this, it's kind of dismissed. They're like, oh, the Americans, you know, they're finally catching up 100 years, you know, too late, nearly 100 years later. So it's not a new phenomenon.

Hauntings are not a new phenomenon. Wrappings are not new phenomenon. You look in the newspaper and these strange noises are very, very common. They call them wrappings. You see these stories for decades before. There was a wrap, wrap, wrap. Then usually the punchline is, oh, it was a rat. In one case, it was a tomcat with a milk jug trapped over its head that was banging on the floorboards under the bed.

But in this case, the locals can't discover the source of these noises, and they finally communicate in a way that never occurred to the participants in the Cochlear and Ghost phenomenon. So you ask numerical questions, you know, wrap the ages of my children, for instance, what time of day is it? But they couldn't get anything beyond yes or no answers. Wrap once for yes or twice for no, for instance. But how can you get into more meatier answers than basic binary yes or no? And that is where some of the neighbors there in Hydesville, New York begin to investigate what is going on within this cottage and they come up with an entirely revolutionary method of communication that we call

alphabet calling. For the first time it occurs to us, okay, rather than asking positive-negative questions or numerical answers, let's call out the alphabet and allow these spectral noises to indicate an answer. So John, you call, you know, A, B, C, D, D. Okay, someone write D down. I would like to say you would need so much patience to do that. People have too much time on their hands calling out the whole alphabet. I think I would have stuck with the binary yes or no. Maddie, you get to the root of it. That's the answer to the question. So they're trying to expedite these spiritual wrappings. How can we make it quicker? And this is why I've always called the curious leapfrog because they invent it almost immediately.

And yet they're going to skip over it in favor of writing planchettes for four decades, nearly four decades. So they come up with, okay, so they're calling out the alphabet and they're doing this. But very quickly, someone says, Hey, wouldn't this be quicker? And there are many references to children's alphabet, alphabet boards, alphabet cards is the main one, where they go, okay, okay, okay, stop calling it out over and over because using that method, you can only spell out,

there were scientists at the time who were refuting spiritually wrapped novels that were being published. And they go, no, no, no, no, no, no. We can only get 240 characters, not words, characters an hour. There's no way you did a novel in the last three months. They begin to use alphabet cards.

So they will bring this to the table, okay? You hold the card and move a pencil over it pointing and then the spirits will wrap and indicate the letter they want to choose. And that's going to be a lot quicker than having to recite 26 letters over and over and over, you know, however many letters until you get a wrap. And they describe them even as two rows of the alphabet and a line of numbers. It's a talking board, right? It's right there. GEM Brandon, there's two things that are occurring

to me. One is that in this period, in the mid to late 19th century, we're getting the invention of things like the telegraph, these long distant ways of communicating. Eventually, we're going to get the telephone, where ghostly voices come down the line from somewhere very far away to you. There's an interesting parallel going on there. Now, the other thing to say is, and I wonder if you can speak to this a little bit, we've covered spiritualism on this podcast before. We've talked a lot about Arthur Conan Doyle and his fascination. In the formal settings of spiritualism, I'm thinking about seances, I'm thinking about people sat around a table, there's a performance, there's things you can expect to see. And one of those things is a medium, that there's

someone that spirits communicate through. But it strikes me with the Ouija board that actually it's quite a democratic process. Anyone can seemingly use it. And how does that sit with the development of spiritualism in the 19th century? Is it only mediums that use it, for example? Initially, as the news of the Fox sisters spreads, they moved to Rochester from Hydesville, so they move from the tiny hamlet to kind of the bigger city and then eventually New York itself, the news is spreading as you mentioned through the proliferation of the telegraph. Here in the States, we have the advent

of the Associated Press in 1845, just three years previous. So this news story doesn't stay localized. Like all those other stories of hauntings and poltergeists and wrappings, it doesn't stay localized. It spreads nationally and it creates a craze. And everywhere news of these, what they become known as the Rochester knockings, everywhere news of the Fox sisters and the Rochester knocking spread, particularly young women, begin to discover their mediumistic powers. And so it begins to spread exponentially. As the news spreads, suddenly it's like, did you hear that in, you know, households across America?

And so the idea that there are these sensitive individuals that work in between worlds, mediums. And so that's certainly the telegraph, not only the conception of it, but something begins to develop in these early spiritualist years that is going to create that a different sort of autonomy in the seance chamber. And that is the discovery of autonomous movements. And it's first noted in 1851, 1852, as tables in the seance chamber begin to move mysteriously. And so you're attending a wrapping seance. The medium will be here any minute. And what they begin to discover just a few years into the movement is that the tables begin to sort of shudder and move in an

eerie and mysterious fashion. The same sort of movement that we witness as modern participants or witnesses to the planchette on a Ouija board. You know, and we have sort of a pre-history of that with dowsing, with magic pendulum use in France, but for the first time, the seance sitters begin to recognize, well, did you feel that? Are you moving it? No, no, no, you moved it. No, I didn't move it.

You must have moved it. What's going on here? And in the same way we see those startling, uncanny movements of the Ouija board planchette across the board, the tables begin to move and chairs begin to move and top hats and all manner of items begin to move mysteriously under seance sitters' hands. And it's only a matter of time before the seance sitters with their alphabet cards and their pointing pencils that are doing it in a voluntary fashion begin to feel their hands and fingertips seized by a mysterious force, and it seems

to begin moving on its own. So this is the beginnings of that. But actually, one of the things I want to just pick up on there, because you mentioned it and it's quite intriguing, is that there are these instruments, shall we say, that are predating even this movement that's reliant on movement. And one of the things that producer Freddie has highlighted to us, which we'd love to hear a little bit more about because I actually don't know what this is, but he's mentioned that you have a Dr. Hare spiritoscope from 1855. Tell me what this is,

because I am intrigued by this title. Yeah. So, and perfect timing, because at this time, you have scientists, particularly in America and the UK at first, that begin trying to debunk this phenomenon. It's not the first time, but in this era is when the term ideomotor response will be coined as the scientific explanation. You have British professors like Michael Faraday that are stepping forward going, no no no this is unconscious muscular movement, this is nothing to be alarmed about. But curiously many of these scientists don't try to directly dispel spiritualism. They just say, this table-tipping phenomenon by the way way, is really the, probably the second great craze of spiritualism.

First, it's the Rochester knockings and the spread of wrapping mediumship. Then table-tipping phenomenon takes over America, spreads to the UK. The summer of 1853 is the summer of talking tables. It's in the newspapers. It is as viral as any modern phenomenon could have been. You know, maybe Pac-Man fever in the 80s or the rise of TikTok now.

It's like, you know, what everybody is doing. And so at this time, you have a very prominent American scientist, a contemporary of Michael Faraday, who believes with his theories. He's a prominent American chemist. his name is Dr. Robert Hare, and he retires from the chair. He's a chemistry professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He retires from his chair and he decides to set his scientific acumen toward debunking this whole table-tipping nonsense. And so he creates a series of devices, the first of which emulates some of Michael Faraday's work in the UK, but he adopts this sort of alphabet convention

of using the tables to transfer the movement of these tables into alphabetic spelling. And so he leans on the very first generation of devices that utilize an alphabet. And it's not alphabet cards. Alphabet cards are a part of it. In Berlin, you have Adolphus Wagner creates the psychograph, this weird stilted slat work of an indicator that would point to the alphabet. You have many spiritualists that are attaching cables and pulleys to tables with an alphabet on the wall and tipping it back and forth.

And most importantly here in America, Isaac Pease creates the first commercial product here in the States, and that's the Isaac Pease Spiritual Telegraph Dial, which is a tabletop apparatus as the table tips back and forth. It has a counterweight and a pulley, and it has a rotating clock-like hand that moves around the dial to point out the alphabet. So these are our earliest spiritualist inventions, and they inspire Dr. Robert Hare, who sort of moves into this movement and says,

Okay, this is like Stephen Hawking or Neil deGrasse Tyson saying, All right, I'm on the case now. saying, all right, I'm on the case now. And so he begins to create first these large tables that mediums would use and he tested, you know, Kate Fox of the Fox Sisters, Maria Hayden and many others, prominent mediums of the day that would sit at these tables that was often a shield so that they couldn't see the alphabet and as the table moved back and forth or tipped up and down, the dial would turn around and spell out letters. So he begins documenting and scientifically recording these. Now tables are a little hard to move. So inspired by Pisa's spiritual telegraph dial, he cleans up the design of it, he keeps the alphabet and the numbers, but he discards like the piece,

Spiritual Telegraph, to have music notation on it. We don't have any surviving ones to know what that looked like, but we do have illustrations of them in Dr. Hare's book where he adapts some of those, but he eventually takes this design, this sort of remix design to a local foundry and has them cast the circular faceplates in cast iron and attaches them to these rolling boards and cantilevers and these are more portable so now he can run around the country and unfold these devices and test people on the spot rather than trying to cart around the table. And unfortunately the viewers won't be able to experience this directly, but... For the benefit of listeners,

Brandon is now showing us an item that he owns in his collection. I mean, it's incredible. It's on a wooden base. It's got what looks like a metal face to it. Oh, it's got it. There's a stand. There's a stand of some kind.

It's a wooden base with three wheels. The central wheel is an axle that attaches to a pulley. So the base is about nine inches square, maybe 10 inches square. It has two fixed wheels, and then the third wheel is an axle. And that turns a little primitive pulley, and that pulley goes to the central dial

of a metal, a cast iron plate that is mounted at a 90 degree angle from the base and on that plate is printed around its perimeter. The alphabet as well as the numbers 1 to 0 and a number of short phrases including must go, mistake, spell over, don't know, think so, and of course yes and no. This is a scientific test apparatus. And so the board would actually, you would not face the plate towards you. It would have faced away from the medium who was using it, who would kind of wrap their hands around the sides and place them on the board, and the face would be viewed by Robert Hare as he recorded the communications,

which were coming from discarnate entities, spirits, angels of all sorts. And he was recording, and he's doing this through all these different mediums. So he's gathering this through all these different mediums. So he's gathering what he considers scientific data to initially debunk what was table-tipping phenomenon. What is interesting about this case is that through these communications, Dr. Hare comes to believe that he is indeed speaking to angels and and in particular, the spirit of his deceased father, because he is receiving such intimate communications and revelations of his private life and upbringing from these mediums

that when he publishes the result of these tests, his book is called Spiritualism Scientifically Demonstrated. And so this is the equivalent of Haw tests, his book is called Spiritualism Scientifically Demonstrated. And so this is the equivalent of Hawking, coming out with a book that says, all right, we've done all the math, we've seen the evidence, we've been to the large Hadron Collider, we have evidence.

On the other side of black holes is heaven or hell. And I mean, it was that earth shattering. The scientific community doesn't know what to do because one of their greatest and most visible proponents has now come out on the side of religion and not science. And so that device there has not only held the hands of some of history's most famous mediums, but it is directly responsible for one of the largest scientific revelations of the era. I think that's the fascinating thing about the Ouija board. For a lot of people, it seems to open up a space of, I don't know, opportunity,

that there's a question mark, maybe, that it leaves in people's minds. Before we go, Brandon, you're obviously a huge collector of these items. And I'm absolutely amazed by our conversation of how many Ouija adjacent items there were made in the 19th century. And of course, I can I can see from speaking to you here that there are so many in the background hanging on your walls. Can you just tell us briefly a little bit about your collection, how you go about sourcing these items, but what the collection means to you, why it's important to have all these things gathered in one collection and your relationship to them, as you say, a soft skeptic. So my earliest beginnings in this were actually in magic performance. I had gotten a job at a shop

that had a magic counter and ended up kind of taking over that counter and eventually I acquired my first items and this was back in my college days where I was studying this to get my degree in history. I was studying these topics and researching early spiritualism. I gathered my first items for essentially a haunted antiques show at a time when the concept of haunted antiques was not particularly prevalent, you know.

Of course, now we see haunted dolls and you can find 50 of them. No, you can find 500 of them on eBay at the moment. But I always wanted to use true antiques rather than modern magic apparatus. So I acquired my first items sort of as an outgrowth of that show to lend an air of authenticity. And while I gave up magic performance by the late 90s, I hadn't even emerged from my 20s at that point and decided performance wasn't necessarily in my blood, the collecting and the research continued at that time. So my collection built up slowly. I kind of flirted with it. And it just grew and grew as my knowledge of these devices grew. It wasn't until 2012 that I debuted MysteriousPlanChat.com, my website,

that's sort of my repository for not only my collection but my research. And at that point, started to meet other collectors. And so that's certainly one avenue. It's just, oh, you have something I want and I have something you want. Maybe we can work something out. Of course, the auction sites are always highly competitive and have opened up entire worlds of collecting across so many different avenues. And that certainly was, you know, starting in 1997 when I first

got into this was eBay's earliest years. And I still have early auction photos that are kilobytes in size from those early auctions that in many cases still represent the only visual evidence of the existence of some of these items. They're still floating around my hard drive from the late 90s when we thought, oh, we'll see that one again. And, you know, it's disappeared. It's in somebody's closet or on somebody's mantle at this point. My specialty, although I have certainly one of the top talking board collections in the country, my specialty and true love was always automatic writing planchettes,

which for many years did not have any other collectors. There was a larger body of talking board collectors, but they weren't into the writing planchettes as much. And so I began gathering those. Most of my collection was gathered relatively cheaply. I didn't have anyone competing against me until my website debuted in 2012. And I like to think made them cool. Drew more attention to them as I started to go more and more public with my research. So you never know where it's going to come from. I can get random text wondering how in the world somebody got my number with an item.

I received an email just yesterday from a gentleman with an item. We've only ever seen three or four of them. I've got another one on the way from people who contact me through my website. I maintain a network, an international network of pickers and dealers and relic hunters, essentially, to bring stuff to my doorstep. And of course, there's always, you know, just classic online sales. You say people don't, you don't know where people are getting a number from, but clearly the boards, the boards. Right, right.

Just, just, just ask Ouija. Brandon, it has been an absolute pleasure to speak to you about the history of this. This is one that Maddy and I have been chatting about with Freddy, the producer for quite a while, so we're delighted to have had you on. So thank you so much for that. If you have enjoyed listening to this episode, and we've had a lot of new listeners, particularly from America, actually, this last month,

which is so, so exciting for us. Thank you for joining us in After Dark Towers. But we love making this show, and we love that you come and spend your time listening to it with us. So if you're enjoying it, then please do leave us a review. Tell your friends. It helps people to find us and to experience some of the spookier, darker sides of history as we go through it. We also love hearing from you. So if you want to get in touch, you can do so at afterdark

at historyhit.com. That's afterdark at historyhit.com. Until next time, we'll see you soon. Until next time, we never give you anything, you can also get your first three months for £1 a month when you use the code AFTERDARK at checkout.