The Occult

The Ouija Board and Automatic Writing

Spirit Communication · 10 min read

Two technologies for spirit communication stand out for the way they took the medium out of the ritual and put the message in the hands of the sitter. The first is the Ouija board, a printed board with letters, numbers, and the words “yes” and “no,” together with a small wooden pointer or “planchette,” which became the most popular household occult tool in twentieth-century America. The second is automatic writing, the practice by which a person’s hand is supposed to be moved by an outside intelligence to produce text. The two practices are not, strictly speaking, the same; the board is a tool, the writing is a process. They share a common ancestor in the table-turning and rapping of nineteenth-century Spiritualism, and a common afterlife in twentieth-century psychology, art, and popular entertainment. The literature on the board is now substantial: John Beloff’s The New Believers (1990) and Logie Barrow’s Independent Spirits (1986) cover the wider history, while the patent history itself is documented in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office archives.

The Planchette and the Talking Board

The planchette — a small heart-shaped or triangular piece of wood on casters, with a pencil or marker attached — was the technological ancestor of the Ouija board. Planchettes were sold in Paris in the 1850s, the decade of the great European table-turning craze, and were advertised as a way to receive messages from the spirit world without a full séance. The user placed the planchette on a piece of paper, rested the fingers lightly on it, and waited for it to move. In many cases, it did, and the literature on the ideomotor effect — the principal modern explanation for the motion — begins in these years. William Benjamin Carpenter’s 1852 paper to the Royal Institution, “On the Influence of Suggestion in Modifying and Directing Muscular Movement, independently of Volition,” is the classic early statement.

The “talking board” — the combination of the planchette with a printed board — was first patented in the United States on 10 February 1891 (U.S. Patent No. 446,054; the application had been filed on 28 May 1890, hence the often-cited “1890”). The patent was filed by three Baltimore businessmen, Charles W. Kennard, William H. Springer, and Charles F. Fuld, with Elijah J. Bond named as the assignee who organised a company to manufacture the device. Bond is the most often-cited name in the standard history; Kennard, Springer, and Fuld formed the Kennard Novelty Company to produce the board. The word “Ouija” is, by tradition, said to have been spelled out by the board itself during an early demonstration, in answer to the question of what to call it. Whether this story is true is uncertain; the word looks like the French oui and German ja for “yes,” and most etymologists take it as a confection combining those two elements. In 1901, the Fuld family took over the company; William Fuld ran it as a near-monopoly until his death in 1927, and his brother Isaac continued the trademark through the 1930s. In 1966, the trademark was sold to Parker Brothers, and in 1991, Parker Brothers itself was acquired by Hasbro, which continues to manufacture the board and to market it, somewhat ambiguously, as “America’s favourite board game.”

The board was not a specifically Spiritualist product. The Spiritualist churches of the late nineteenth century were sceptical of it, partly because they preferred the testimony of a trained medium to the testimony of a parlour toy, and partly because they suspected the boards of being commercial exploitations of a sacred practice. The board was, however, a tremendous commercial success. The Fuld company, then Parker Brothers, and later Hasbro sold millions of them. The board became a fixture of American suburban adolescence in the twentieth century, and was the object of suburban sleepover parties, of classroom demonstrations, and of theological controversy. The 2007 patent-law case on the Ouija trademark (Hasbro Inc. v. Clue Computing Inc.) confirmed Hasbro’s exclusive right to the mark, which is the canonical modern legal reference.

How the Board Works

The user places the board on a table, lays the fingertips on the planchette, and asks a question, usually aloud. The planchette, after a delay, is supposed to begin to move across the board, sliding from letter to letter and spelling out an answer. The board works because of the ideomotor effect: the user’s hand, without conscious direction, makes small movements that, by their cumulative effect, appear directed. The phenomenon was systematically described by the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter in 1852, more than forty years before the patent of the Ouija board, and has been confirmed many times since. In controlled experiments in which the user is blindfolded, or in which the board is replaced with a sheet of paper, the planchette still spells out answers, often in the same distinctive style as before, because the user is unaware of where the planchette is on the board and is supplying the answers from his or her own knowledge or expectation.

This is not the end of the question. The same ideomotor effect that explains much ordinary board use is also the mechanism by which users occasionally produce information that they could not, in any obvious way, know — for example, when a group produces a string of consistent personal information about a “spirit” that one of the participants has not mentioned. The classic case is the “cold reading” effect, in which a single sitter supplies most of the information and the rest of the group projects it onto an external intelligence. Psychologists have studied these effects in detail. The board is an unusually effective tool for the production of what researchers call “anomalous information” because of the way it focuses attention on the output rather than the input, and because of the strong social pressure to produce answers.

The Ouija board has been the subject of a remarkable run of films, novels, comic books, and songs. The 1973 film The Exorcist opens with a Ouija session in a quiet suburban house in northern Virginia, and the scene has fixed the popular image of the board in the popular imagination. Subsequent horror films, including Witchboard (1986), Long Time Dead (2002), and Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016), have repeated the trope. The board has also appeared in rock music: the Doors’ “The Crystal Ship” (1967), the Who’s song “Boris the Spider” (1966, the B-side of “Substitute” and later collected on A Quick One — not, as is sometimes said, an album cover), and Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” (1969). The 1999 concept album Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory by Dream Theater centres on a murder revealed through a Ouija session. The board is a long-standing prop in teenage horror fiction, and is treated as the most common ritual object of the modern occult.

The board is also, in many Christian pastoral writings, an object of serious concern. The Catholic Church’s 1973 statement on channeling, issued by the Committee for Pro-Life Activities of the United States Catholic Conference, discouraged the use of the board, and many evangelical and Pentecostal writers in the United States have warned that the board is a “portal” to demonic activity. These warnings have themselves been the subject of sociological study, and are best understood as part of the long history of Christian discernment of spirits rather than as a literal description of the board’s function. The folklorist Joe Nickell investigated the Catholic and evangelical claims in The Magic Detectives (1989) and the Skeptical Inquirer, and concluded that the board’s actual effect is more parsimoniously explained as the ideomotor phenomenon described by Carpenter. Theological and pastoral concerns about the board are addressed in is the Ouija board dangerous?.

Automatic Writing

Automatic writing is the practice by which a person’s hand is supposed to be moved by a non-physical intelligence to produce text. The medium generally holds a pen or pencil, often with the eyes closed, and either waits for the hand to begin to move on its own or surrenders the hand consciously to an imagined external impulse. The result is writing that is often claimed to differ from the writer’s ordinary handwriting and to contain knowledge, ideas, or styles that the writer could not, in any obvious way, have produced.

The practice was familiar to nineteenth-century Spiritualism. The most famous case in the early twentieth century was the American medium Pearl Curran (1883-1937), who began, in 1913, to receive what she claimed were dictated novels from a spirit named “Patience Worth,” a seventeenth-century Englishwoman. Over the next two decades, Curran produced an enormous body of material: novels, plays, poems, and proverbs attributed to Patience Worth, much of it in a distinctive seventeenth-century diction. The material was investigated by scholars, including the Harvard psychologist William McDougall, who found no ordinary explanation for the consistent and unusual stylistic features of the texts. Whatever Curran was doing, the psychologists concluded, it was not simple fraud or conscious invention. The Patience Worth transcripts are still studied as a case in the history of dissociation and creative process; Louis Breger, in From Instinct to Identity (1974), gives a useful account of the case in the wider framework of early-twentieth-century psychology.

The Surrealists adopted automatic writing as one of the founding techniques of the movement. André Breton, the author of the first Surrealist Manifesto (1924), defined “psychic automatism” as the central method of Surrealist art, and the writing experiments of the 1920s and 1930s — by Breton, Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, and others — were modelled on the Spiritualist practice. The Surrealist “exquisite corpse” was an extension of the same idea. The Surrealists explicitly credited the Spiritualists with discovering the technique, and Breton treated the writing of the mediums as a serious literary resource, even as he was sceptical of the literal claim of spirit authorship. The Surrealist adoption of the technique is an important early example of an avant-garde art movement appropriating an occult practice for literary purposes, a pattern that recurs throughout the history of modern occultism.

Automatic writing was also a foundational technique in the early psychology of the unconscious. Pierre Janet, the French psychologist, described it in his work on dissociation — most thoroughly in L’automatisme psychologique (1889) — and developed the concept of “automatisme psychologique” as a master category for the mediumistic phenomena. The 1934 monograph Para-Psychology and Criminology, by the philosophers George Humphrey and Wendell Johnson, is one of the more interesting early academic attempts to relate automatic writing to forensic questions. Sigmund Freud made use of free-association in his self-analysis in the 1890s and discussed automatic phenomena in his early papers on hysteria. Carl Jung drew a series of mandalas and wrote down the contents of his fantasies in what he called “active imagination,” a method that is technically a form of automatic writing. The link between the medium’s automatic script and the analyst’s free association was noticed by the early psychologists themselves, and the study of dissociation, suggestion, and the unconscious mind is in part a long, slow reckoning with the mediumistic literature.

The twentieth century saw automatic writing used in a great many contexts. Many writers, including W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), the Nobel laureate, experimented with it. Yeats’s wife Georgie Hyde-Lees began producing automatic script in 1917, and much of A Vision (1925; revised 1937) is a philosophical gloss on what came through at those sessions. In Brazil, the medium and author Chico Xavier (1910-2002) produced an enormous body of channelled literature between 1931 and his death in 2002, much of it attributed to the spirit “André Luiz” and including the novels Nosso Lar (1944), Os Mensageiros (1945), and Missionários da Luz (1945), which became best-sellers in Brazil. The New Age channelling movement of the 1970s and 1980s often involved the delivery of printed transcripts of the channelled text, indistinguishable in form from the earlier Spiritualist automatic writing. The practice continues in many contexts today, including contemporary channelling, certain Christian contemplative traditions, and various forms of art therapy. For an account of the wider cultural presence of the occult, see the occult in popular culture.

Sources and Further Reading

  • John Beloff, The New Believers: Sects, Cults and Alternative Religions (London: Batsford, 1990) — covers the Ouija in the wider context of the Spiritualist and New Age movements.
  • Logie Barrow, Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1855-1910 (London: Routledge, 1986).
  • Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
  • Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
  • Tatiana Kontou and Morag Martin (eds), Spirits and Spirituality: Material and Metaphysical Currents in British Spiritualism, 1840-1930 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
  • Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1996).
  • Jenny Hazelgrove, Spiritualism and British Society between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
  • W. B. Yeats, A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1925; rev. 1937) — the most literary deployment of automatic writing by a major twentieth-century poet.
  • Joe Nickell, The Magic Detectives (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989).
  • Encyclopedia of the Unexplained: Psychic Phenomena, Spirit Possession, Ectoplasm, Materialization, Levitation, Telepathy, Clairvoyance (London: Routledge, 2002).