What Are the Origins of the Ouija Board?

Whether a tool for séances, a spooky sleepover game or a horror movie trope, the Ouija board has been part of American culture since the late 19th century. Featuring an alphabet, numbers and a sliding planchette, the seemingly simple device promises something extraordinary: a way for ordinary people to communicate with the spirit world.

Ouija boards emerged as part of spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the dead. Although spiritualist beliefs have existed for thousands of years, spiritualism gained prominence as a movement in the United States in the mid-19th century, particularly during and after the Civil War as many Americans were grieving.

In 1848, young sisters Maggie and Kate Fox claimed they could communicate with a spirit that produced unexplained knocking sounds within their family home in Hydesville, New York. The Fox sisters gained celebrity status and, under the management of their older sister, Leah, toured the country to demonstrate their gift. Their success helped fuel a burgeoning spiritualist movement and other “mediums”—people who claimed they could serve as intermediaries between the living and the dead—began conducting séances of their own.

Among those drawn to spiritualism was first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who attended séances and hosted them at the White House.

Mediums used various methods to facilitate spiritual contact, such as “table-turning.” Participants placed their hands on a table while calling out the alphabet, awaiting a spirit to shake the table to spell out words.

In 1886, newspapers reported a new tool spreading through Ohio Spiritualist camps that sped up otherworldly communication: a “talking board” consisting of a wooden slat with letters, numbers and a device called a planchette. To use it, two or more people typically rested their fingertips lightly on the planchette and asked a question. The planchette would then appear to move across the board, pointing to letters one by one to spell out words and indicate numbers or responses such as “yes” and “no.”

Baltimore businessman Charles Kennard saw an opportunity to develop and market a version of "talking boards" to capitalize on grieving Americans’ interest in spiritualism. Kennard teamed up with undertaker and neighbor E.C. Reiche to create their own prototype, but Kennard soon cut Reiche out of the deal. Instead, he gathered investors to start the Kennard Novelty Company. One of those investors was Baltimore attorney Elijah Bond, who made improvements to the device and filed a patent application in 1890, assigning the rights to Kennard and fellow investor William H. A. Maupin.

According to legend, medium Helen Peters, Bond's sister-in-law, asked the board for a name and it gave “Ouija.” Asked what the word meant, the planchette reportedly spelled out “good luck.” It's said Peters had a locket around her neck with an image of a woman and the word “Ouija” written below. Some scholars believe the woman depicted was writer Maria Louise Ramée, whose misread pseudonym was "Ouida."

The patent was granted on February 10, 1891, after Peters demonstrated the board’s spiritual “efficacy” to a patent officer. Although users may perceive the planchette as moving on its own, researchers attribute movement to the ideomotor effect, in which a person makes small, unconscious muscle movements without realizing it.

Wildly popular when first released, the Ouija board appealed to all sorts of people who wanted access to spirits without mediums. The novelty’s popularity spiked after devastating wars, particularly World War I and II. Another boom occurred after Parker Brothers acquired the rights to Ouija in 1966, coinciding with the Vietnam War.

The Ouija board wouldn’t widely be considered an object of fear until 1973, when it was used as a major plot tool in the film The Exorcist.