Spirit Board

Spiritualism, table-turning and the planchette

Smithsonian Magazine links the spirit board to American Spiritualism, the belief that the dead can communicate with the living. It dates the modern movement's beginning to 1848 claims by Kate and Maggie Fox in upstate New York, and says Spiritualism drew many followers during the Civil War, when people sought contact with relatives who had died. Contact methods it lists include automatic writing and table-turning parties in which participants placed their hands on a table while letters were called out.

The Psi Encyclopedia, published by the Society for Psychical Research, says the board descends from Spiritualist alphabet calling and table-tipping that spread in the early 1850s, and that the planchette was first used in Parisian séance circles in 1853. It reports that in 1886 Ohio Spiritualist groups paired modified planchettes with alphabet boards, which newspapers called New Planchette and then Talking Boards.

The 1890s company and the patent

According to Smithsonian Magazine, Charles Kennard of Baltimore gathered four other investors, among them the attorney Elijah Bond, in 1890 to form the Kennard Novelty Company, which would make and sell talking boards. A 2024 blog post from the Strong National Museum of Play calls the firm the Ouija Novelty Company and also describes its creators as businessmen rather than Spiritualists, so the sources differ on its name.

Smithsonian Magazine reports that Bond received a patent on February 10, 1891, for a toy or game, and that the patent text did not explain how the device operated. The Strong blog introduces the board as patented in 1890, while a 1908 Bond advertisement it quotes gives an application date of May 28, 1890, patent number 446,054, and the 1891 issue date.

On the name, Smithsonian Magazine states that the word is not a blend of the French oui and German ja, an explanation the Psi Encyclopedia also rejects. Drawing on the researcher Robert Murch's reading of the founders' letters, it says Bond's sister-in-law Helen Peters supplied the name during a session, and that a locket bearing a woman's name may have been its real source.

Popularity and changing reputation

Smithsonian Magazine says Kennard and Bond left the company within a few years and that William Fuld, an employee and stockholder, came to run it. The Strong blog says the Fuld family made the boards from 1898 to 1966, when they were sold to Parker Brothers, and that popularity peaked around 1920. Smithsonian reports 50,000 boards sold by one New York department store over five months in 1944.

Both Smithsonian Magazine and the Strong blog tie a shift in public image to The Exorcist, though they date it differently: the Strong blog says Parker Brothers dropped the ghost image in 1971 after the book appeared, and Smithsonian dates the film's effect to 1973. Smithsonian quotes Murch as saying that earlier film and television treatments of Spiritualism were usually comic, and that afterward the board became associated with evil in horror fiction and in some religious denunciations.

Names in use

This page uses spirit board and talking board as general names. Talking Boards was the term newspapers used in 1886 for the Ohio devices, according to the Psi Encyclopedia, and an 1891 advertisement quoted by Smithsonian Magazine billed the product as Ouija, or the Wonderful Talking Board. The Strong blog states that the trademark for the original board passed to William Fuld, which is why Ouija is treated here as a product name used by a manufacturer rather than as the generic term.

The pointer is called a planchette. Smithsonian Magazine describes it as a teardrop-shaped device, usually with a small window in its body. The word entered Spiritualist use in the early 1850s according to the Psi Encyclopedia, and it is also the English term that scholars of Chinese religion use for a different device, covered below.

Fuji and related Chinese terms

In Chinese religions, the practice of spirit-writing is called fuluan, literally supporting the phoenix, and also fuji, literally supporting the planchette. Lai Chi-tim, writing in the Journal of Daoist Studies in 2015, describes it as an oracular technique that channels communication between the realm of deities and groups of devotees. Li Guoping's 2023 article uses the same two terms for the movement in the Chaozhou region.

None of the sources opened for this page asserts a historical link between fuji and the American talking board, and the two are treated here as separate practices with parallel features: a hand-held implement, a surface for characters, and messages attributed to a spirit or deity. Readers should not infer descent or influence from the shared English word planchette.

How sessions are described

Smithsonian Magazine describes the board as a flat board with the alphabet arranged in two arcs above the numbers zero through nine, with yes and no in the upper corners and goodbye at the bottom. Two or more people rest their fingertips on a planchette, ask a question, and observe the planchette move from letter to letter. Andersen and colleagues describe sessions in similar terms and add that responses are usually believed to come from supernatural agents, often deceased relatives or former residents of the place where the session is held.

The same sources note that participants commonly report that they are not moving the planchette themselves. Andersen and colleagues treat that reported sense of not generating the movement as a feature that supports the belief in an outside source. This page does not describe how to hold a session.

Chinese spirit-writing as a separate practice

Lai describes a fuji session in which one or two mediums, called principal phoenix disciples, hold a writing implement, usually a Y-shaped wooden stick, that is believed to be directed by a deity to reveal characters in a sand tray. A reader calls out the characters and a scribe records the message on paper. The session usually takes place in the inner sanctuary of a shrine before the central image of the deity, with devotees present to observe.

Lai contrasts this literary form of mediumship with the martial form associated with tang-ki mediums in Taiwan and elsewhere. The setting, the religious framework and the community role differ from those of the American talking board, which was sold as a product for use in homes.

Uses described for the talking board

An 1891 advertisement quoted by Smithsonian Magazine claimed the board answered questions about the past, present and future and acted as a link between the known and the unknown. Smithsonian says it was marketed both as a mystical oracle and as family entertainment, and that Murch attributes its appeal to people's wish to express a belief that something else exists beyond ordinary experience.

Smithsonian Magazine also describes literary uses. It reports that the poet James Merrill, whose Ouija-inspired poems received a 1983 book award, publicly implied that the board acted more as a magnifier of his own thoughts than as a line to spirits. The Psi Encyclopedia reports that the Christian writer J. Godfrey Raupert argued it is never possible to conclusively identify a communicating spirit, which he thought might be mischievous or evil.

Uses described for fuji

Li reports that spirit-writing was used to compose morality books from as early as the late twelfth century, and describes nineteenth-century spirit-writing cults as centered on moral reform. In the Chaozhou region, the cults presented revelations received through the planchette as guidance on doing good deeds and averting disasters. Lai describes lay Daoist spirit-writing groups from the early seventeenth century that emphasized personal devotion and self-cultivation.

Place within Divination and related pages

On Machipedia the spirit board is a member of the Divination family, which is covered on its own page. Messages that participants attribute to spirits also appear in the practices described on the Mediumship and Channeling pages, and Psychic Reading is a separate page on readings given by a person. Pendulum Healing and Dowsing are separate pages on other hand-held tools. This page does not carry any finding from one of these practices to another.

Faraday's table-turning experiments

Michael Faraday 1853 paper, published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute that November, concerned table-turning rather than talking boards. He used layered cardboard joined by soft cement, and later a lever with an indicator, to detect hand movement. He reported that the hands moved before the table did, that participants who could not see the indicator pressed sideways while believing they pressed down, and that the effect stopped once they could see it.

Faraday concluded that he found no sign of a new natural force, only mechanical pressure exerted without the sitters awareness, and he pointed readers to William Carpenter 1852 lecture on suggestion and muscular movement independent of the will. The Psi Encyclopedia notes that this automatistic interpretation leaves open whether information could be gathered by extrasensory means. Shenefelt describes Chevreul and Carpenter as pioneers of the scientific account of ideomotor movement.

Ideomotor action and nonconscious knowledge

Gauchou, Rensink and Fels defined ideomotor actions as behaviors that are unconsciously initiated and express a thought rather than a response to a sensory stimulus. In a 2012 study, participants answered yes or no general-knowledge questions both verbally and with an Ouija board response. When participants believed they were guessing, verbal accuracy was at chance (50 percent) while board accuracy was 65 percent. The authors concluded that implicit semantic memory can be expressed through ideomotor action.

Moga and Dienes replicated the procedure in 2022 with a hand-held pendulum in place of the board. Questions rated as guesses were answered at about chance levels by both ideomotor action and verbal response, and the authors cautioned that ideomotor action may elicit only conscious knowledge. The studies disagree on whether ideomotor responses carry knowledge beyond verbal report, and neither tested spirit communication.

Sense of agency in real sessions

Andersen and colleagues ran a field experiment at a paranormal conference in which Ouija enthusiasts wore eye trackers. Participants were significantly less likely to look ahead to letters during board sessions than when told to spell words deliberately, and believers reported a lower sense of agency than skeptics. Prediction improved as responses unfolded, and meaningful responses were accounted for only by considering interaction within the pair.

The authors suggest that meaningful responses may be an emergent property of interacting and predicting minds that impose structure on initially random events. They note that empirical studies of real sessions were absent before this one.

What the sources reviewed do not cover

Searches of PubMed for the term Ouija and web searches for authorship or stylometric analysis of spirit-board or automatic-writing texts found no systematic reviews, no clinical trials of any use of the board, and no peer-reviewed authorship-attribution study. Robert Murch research and any museum collection were not examined beyond how Smithsonian Magazine reports his work.

Reported psychological effects

Escolà-Gascón, Dagnall and Denovan reported a quasi-experimental study of 21 board sessions with four participants each, 84 people in total, with anxiety, altered states of consciousness and perceptual disturbances measured before and after play. Believers in the paranormal had higher scores than nonbelievers on all post-session measures, and their anxiety rose by 25.5 percent compared with nonbelievers. The authors say the setting may have raised anxiety and suggestibility among believers, and that this should be controlled in future research.

The authors state that scientific literature on the psychological effects and risks of such activities is scant. A single study of this design cannot show how often distress occurs, how long it lasts, or what happens outside a research session, and the abstract does not report clinical outcomes.

Historical reports and disputed claims

Smithsonian Magazine reports that in 1921 the New York Times described a Chicago woman who was sent to a psychiatric hospital after what the paper called religious hallucinations induced by a board. The same article says similar incidents appeared in newspapers for years. These are newspaper accounts of individual cases and do not establish how often harm occurs or whether the board caused it.

The Psi Encyclopedia records divided views. It cites one researcher's comparison of using a board to picking up strangers in a bar and another's claim that many people had serious difficulties with it, and it cites a third who argues that the view of the board as dangerous grew mainly after the mid-1960s and that documented examples are hard to find. It links the board's frightening image partly to The Exorcist.

Suitability and care boundary

The sources reviewed do not identify medical contraindications or screening guidance for use of a board, and this page gives none. The studies above included adult participants at a conference or in laboratory settings, and none examined children, people in acute grief, or people with a mental health condition. Smithsonian Magazine notes that Spiritualism drew followers who were seeking contact with the dead after wartime losses, which indicates the setting in which grief and the board have been connected historically but does not measure effects.

People who experience persistent distress, anxiety or unusual perceptual experiences after any such activity may wish to speak with a physician or mental health professional, and a session is not a substitute for care that a person already needs.

Christian positions

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2116, states that all forms of divination are to be rejected, naming recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead, and recourse to mediums among its examples. Paragraph 2117 states that spiritism often implies divination or magical practices and that the Church warns the faithful against it. The Catechism does not name the talking board; applying it to the board is an interpretation made by commentators.

Smithsonian Magazine reports that Christian groups remain wary of the board, citing scripture against communicating with spirits through mediums, that Catholic.com called it far from harmless, and that the broadcaster Pat Robertson said in 2011 that demons can reach people through it. It also notes that early Spiritualism was widely considered compatible with Christian belief. Positions of other denominations, and of non-Christian traditions, were not found in the free sources reviewed here.

Spiritualist and popular perspectives

Smithsonian Magazine says the people who disliked the board most tended to be spirit mediums, because it promised access to the spirit world without an intermediary. It also says even some in the paranormal community regarded the board warily, and that Murch was once asked to leave antique boards at home when speaking at conventions because they frightened people. The Psi Encyclopedia reports that the Christian writer and Society for Psychical Research member Raupert disapproved of its use while later conceding that evidence suggested genuine contact was possible.