Just Guyton

There was a time when getting an answer from the dead supposedly required a lot more patience.

No board.

No pointer.

No alphabet laid out in front of you.

You sat down.

You asked a question.

And you waited for a knock.

Which, naturally, made me wonder how we got here.

Not whether people can actually communicate with the dead. I’m not opening that door today. You can decide what you believe all by yourself.

I wanted to know where the séance came from.

Why were people sitting around tables asking questions into seemingly empty rooms?

Who started this?

And what exactly were they expecting to happen?

So I started digging.

And our story begins in 1848 with two young sisters, a house in Hydesville, New York, and something that apparently would not stop knocking.

Maggie and Kate Fox were fourteen and eleven when their family began reporting strange rappings inside their home.

The noises weren’t simply random bumps in the night, according to the family.

They appeared to respond.

Questions were asked.

Knocks followed.

The family developed ways of communicating through them, and neighbors were brought in to witness what was happening.

Word spread.

Soon the Fox sisters were giving public demonstrations, and the mysterious rappings helped ignite what became Modern Spiritualism in the United States.

Now, people had been trying to communicate with the dead for thousands of years in different cultures and religious traditions.

The Fox sisters did not invent talking to dead people.

Humans had that covered.

What happened in the nineteenth century was different.

Communicating with spirits became part of a rapidly growing movement.

Mediums appeared.

People gathered for séances.

Messages were supposedly delivered from dead relatives.

And the living started asking questions.

But before we go any farther, we need to deal with those knocks.

Because forty years later, Maggie Fox did something rather inconvenient.

She said they had faked them.

In 1888, Maggie publicly confessed that the famous rappings had been fraudulent and demonstrated how she said the sounds had been produced.

Okay.

Pack it up.

Mystery solved.

Except—

A year later, Maggie withdrew her confession.

Ma’am.

So this is where we’re going to do what we always do around here.

Keep the receipts and tell the truth about what they actually say.

People reported hearing the rappings.

Maggie publicly confessed that the sounds had been faked.

Then Maggie recanted that confession.

All three things happened.

What I am not going to do is fill in the part history cannot prove just because it makes the story cleaner.

And honestly, whether the original Fox rappings were genuine spirit communication, tricks, or something else doesn’t change what happened afterward.

The movement had already taken off.

Séances became increasingly popular.

And when I started looking at why people were drawn to them, this story stopped being quite as spooky.

It became sad.

Because people were grieving.

The Civil War alone killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Men died far from home.

Families sometimes didn’t get a final goodbye.

And now imagine someone telling a mother who buried her son that maybe he wasn’t completely gone.

Maybe she could speak to him.

Maybe he could answer.

Would you sit at the table?

I understand why some people did.

Mary Todd Lincoln did.

After her eleven-year-old son Willie died in 1862, Mary turned to Spiritualism and participated in spirit circles and séances.

There were séances held in the Lincoln White House.

And I know how easy it is to hear that and immediately jump to:

Abraham Lincoln. White House. Ghosts.

But there was a mother underneath that story.

Her child was dead.

Whatever you believe about what happened in those rooms, her grief doesn’t require any supernatural explanation.

That part was real.

And apparently, while everyone was trying to contact the dead, the furniture decided to get involved.

By the 1850s, table-turning had become a craze.

People placed their hands on tables and reported them tilting, rotating, moving, or responding to questions.

At which point science walked into the room and essentially asked:

Who is moving the table?

In 1853, physicist Michael Faraday investigated table-turning.

His experiments indicated that the people touching the table could unknowingly produce the movement themselves.

That’s an important detail.

It doesn’t mean everyone was sitting there secretly pushing the table and pretending to be shocked.

People could contribute to its movement without consciously realizing they were doing it.

In other words, someone could sincerely say:

“I am not moving this table.”

And still be helping move the table.

Remember that.

We’re going to come back to it.

Meanwhile, spirit communication was getting upgrades.

Because apparently knocking and moving furniture wasn’t giving everybody enough information.

People began using devices called planchettes.

And the early versions weren’t exactly what most of us picture today.

Some had pencils attached.

People rested their hands on the device, it moved across paper, and writing appeared.

Those messages could then be interpreted as communication from spirits.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Knocking could give you simple answers.

Writing could give you an entire message.

And somewhere along the way, somebody had a thought that was actually pretty logical:

Why make the pointer write the alphabet…

when you can put the alphabet in front of the pointer?

Enter the talking board.

Letters.

Numbers.

Yes.

No.

A movable indicator.

And this is the moment when I realized:

Wait.

Is THIS how we ended up with the Ouija board?

Yep.

The Ouija board didn’t just appear one day as some mysterious ancient object with an unknowable past.

We can actually follow the trail that led to it.

Rappings.

Séances.

Moving tables.

Automatic writing.

Planchettes.

Talking boards.

And then—

Capitalism.

You knew somebody was eventually going to sell this thing.

In 1890, Elijah Bond filed a patent application for a talking board.

On February 10, 1891, the United States granted Patent No. 446,054.

And because I know better than to trust every “Did you know?” floating around the internet, I went looking at the patent.

It’s there.

And do you know how this mysterious device was categorized?

A “toy or game.”

Excuse me?

We just traveled through decades of people attempting to communicate with dead relatives, moving tables, automatic writing, and alleged spirit messages…

and now we’re in the toy department.

The patent describes an “Ouija or Egyptian luck-board” with letters, numbers, and a movable indicator.

There is paperwork.

Dates.

Names.

A patent number.

This is why I love receipts.

And while we’re here, we need to talk about the name.

You’ve probably heard that Ouija comes from combining oui, the French word for yes, with ja, the German word for yes.

It makes sense.

It’s neat.

It’s also not the only story—and historical accounts connected to the board tell a different one.

According to the story, Elijah Bond’s sister-in-law, Helen Peters, was using the board with the others when they asked what it wanted to be called.

It spelled:

O-U-I-J-A.

So according to one of the earliest origin stories…

the Ouija board named the Ouija board.

I don’t know what you want me to do with that.

I’m just telling you what they said.

And I’m calling it an origin story rather than a proven fact because that’s what the evidence allows me to call it.

Receipts have rules.

Now remember our moving table?

This is where it comes back.

Once people began resting their fingers on a planchette, researchers faced essentially the same question Faraday had asked about tables.

Who is moving it?

There is a psychological phenomenon called the ideomotor effect.

Thoughts, expectations, and suggestions can result in small muscular movements without us consciously intending to make them.

Which means someone sitting at a Ouija board can say:

“I swear I didn’t move it.”

And they may be completely sincere.

That doesn’t prove a spirit moved it.

It also doesn’t require the person to be lying.

Their hands can help create movement without them consciously deciding to move.

Researchers have even used Ouija boards in experiments involving unconscious knowledge.

And I need everyone to appreciate what has happened here.

We started with people using a board to study the dead.

Scientists turned around and used the board to study the living.

Meanwhile, the séance itself had become much more elaborate than a couple of knocks on a wall.

People reported automatic writing.

Slate writing.

Spirit photography.

Objects moving.

Voices.

Apparitions.

Physical manifestations.

Some people sincerely believed they had witnessed communication from another world.

Some mediums were caught using tricks.

And people wanted to know how to tell the difference.

In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was founded in London to systematically investigate claims involving psychic and paranormal phenomena.

That part fascinated me.

Because the nineteenth century wasn’t divided neatly into:

People who believed everything.

And people who thought all of it was ridiculous.

There were people saying:

Let’s investigate it.

Let’s test it.

Let’s see what survives scrutiny.

And then we get to Harry Houdini.

If you’re running a fraudulent séance, I cannot think of many worse people to see sitting in your audience.

A professional magician knows things the rest of us don’t.

Hidden mechanisms.

Misdirection.

Audience perception.

How to make something impossible appear to happen right in front of somebody.

During the 1920s, Houdini investigated mediums and exposed techniques he believed were being presented as supernatural events.

And his problem wasn’t simply that people believed in life after death.

He was particularly critical of people he believed were exploiting grieving families by pretending to deliver messages from their dead loved ones.

Which makes his friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle especially interesting.

You know.

The man who created Sherlock Holmes.

Conan Doyle was an ardent Spiritualist.

So history somehow gave us:

The creator of the world’s most famous fictional detective defending Spiritualism.

And the professional illusionist investigating the mediums.

I don’t make the casting decisions around here.

Their disagreement over Spiritualism eventually helped damage their friendship.

At one point, Conan Doyle’s wife, Jean, performed automatic writing that she believed came from Houdini’s deceased mother.

Houdini was not convinced.

Among the problems he identified was that the message was written in fluent English even though his mother had spoken very little English.

The writing also began with a Christian cross despite his mother’s Jewish background.

Sherlock Holmes would have had follow-up questions.

Apparently Houdini did too.

Then Houdini died in 1926.

And somehow he still wasn’t finished with séances.

Before his death, Houdini and his wife, Bess, had arranged a coded message that could be used to verify his identity if he managed to communicate with her afterward.

After he died, attempts were made to receive it.

Finally, on Halloween in 1936, ten years after Houdini’s death, Bess participated in one final highly publicized séance.

The agreed-upon communication didn’t arrive.

She ended the decade-long attempt.

By this point, the Ouija board was no longer some strange new invention.

It had become entertainment.

And this is where our modern perception of it gets really interesting.

Because for much of its commercial history, Ouija wasn’t universally treated as the terrifying object many people think of today.

In 1920, Norman Rockwell painted a young couple using one for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.

Look at the image and you’re not exactly getting:

WE HAVE SUMMONED SOMETHING AND NOW WE HAVE TO MOVE.

It’s basically date night.

The boards continued selling.

After Parker Brothers acquired the rights to Ouija in 1966, about two million boards were sold in 1967, reportedly outselling Monopoly.

And then came 1973.

The Exorcist.

In the movie, young Regan uses a Ouija board before the story descends into demonic possession.

And that movie helped change the board’s cultural reputation dramatically.

Now the Ouija board wasn’t simply mysterious.

It was dangerous.

Don’t touch it.

Don’t use it alone.

Don’t forget to say goodbye.

Don’t open doors you can’t close.

And if somebody at a sleepover pulls one out at two in the morning?

Suddenly everybody remembers they have somewhere else to be.

Hollywood kept feeding that image.

Which is wild when you follow the thing all the way backward.

The terrifying board people warn each other not to touch didn’t begin with The Exorcist.

It didn’t begin with Parker Brothers.

It didn’t even begin with the Ouija patent.

It grew out of something much more human.

People were trying to talk to people they had lost.

That’s what I kept coming back to while researching all of this.

Yes, there were frauds.

There were people caught using tricks.

There were scientific explanations for some of the movements.

There were researchers trying to test extraordinary claims.

There were businesses making money.

There were movies making everything scarier.

And there were things people reported experiencing that we can document as reports without pretending we can prove what caused them.

But underneath all of it was a question that hasn’t changed much in thousands of years.

Where did they go?

The methods changed.

A knock.

A moving table.

A pencil.

A planchette.

A board.

But the person sitting on the other side of it was still hoping for basically the same thing.

One more answer.

One more conversation.

One more chance to know that goodbye wasn’t really goodbye.

And I think that’s why the history of the séance is much more interesting than the spooky version we inherited.

Because whether you believe anybody ever answered from the other side isn’t really something history can settle for you.

What history can show us is why people kept asking.

And eventually, after all the knocks, tables, mediums, scientists, skeptics, grieving families, inventors, patents, and movies, the question got shortened to two little words printed right there on the board:

YES.

NO.

Turns out the history behind those two answers is a whole lot more complicated.

But there’s another part of this conversation we haven’t had yet.

Today, we followed the history.

Saturday, it gets personal.

Because while I can research séances, Ouija boards, mediums, and all the strange things people have reported experiencing over the years, there’s a reason I personally don’t participate in any of it.

And that reason didn’t come from the history.

I have my own experiences.

So if you’ve enjoyed following the history with me today, come back Saturday.

I’m going to tell you what happened.

—Guyton