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"Ouija board, Ouija board, will you work for me?" Spirit seekers have been asking that question of the mysterious talking board for over a century. Though we don't know if Ouija boards really contact the Great Beyond, we do know an excellent web site to answer your question. The Museum of Talking Boards provides a comprehensive history of the Ouija board and its predecessors. Some sources claim the board has an ancient heritage, but no reliable proof has been found. According to the well-researched web site, Ouija boards started in the mid 19th century when spiritualism
became wildly popular in the United States and Europe. This obsession with the occult led people to hold séances to contact the dead. Spirits supposedly knocked on the table, moved objects across the room, and spoke to the living. Parlor games were invented to help interpret the spirits' voices, and one of the first was the planchette. The word means "little plank" in French, and the device was a small piece of wood (usually heart-shaped) with three small legs or wheels. Early planchettes had a pencil for a third leg, and when you put your fingers on the planchette, spirits were supposed to move your hand to make the pencil write out messages. Around 1886, people began modifying the planchette. They removed the pencil
and set the planchette atop a message board printed with all the letters of the alphabet, the numbers one through ten, the words "yes" and "no," and the phrases "good evening" and "good night." Players would place their fingers on the planchette and allow spirits to move it around the board to spell out words or dates. The spirits could also answer yes or no questions. "Good evening" and "good bye" were for courtesy (the Victorian inventors didn't want to anger the spirits with bad manners). In 1891, Elijah J. Bond, Charles W. Kennard, and William H. A. Maupin were granted the first patent for a Ouija board. No one knows if they designed the board or simply copied an existing fad. Regardless, in 1890, Kennard founded the
Kennard Novelty Company and produced the first commercial talking boards. He was also the first to call it a Ouija board, claiming that "ouija" (pronounced "wE-ja") was Egyptian for "good luck." While the word doesn't mean "good luck," the name Ouija stuck, and the boards were sometimes called Egyptian luck boards. Kennard didn't reap much good luck from the Ouija board, however. In 1892, a hostile takeover forced him out of his own company, and a former employee, William Fuld, became the new owner. Fuld changed the name of the business to the Ouija Novelty Company and invented a new history for the talking board to add to its mystery. Fuld's name has been connected to the Ouija board ever since and was often used to market the game, even after his death in 1927. In 1966, Fuld's
heirs sold Ouija to the game and toy company Parker Brothers, which still owns the trademark and continues to make Ouija boards. Since the late 1800s, many others have manufactured and sold some form of talking board as well. But we think Parker Brothers had the best advertising slogan: "It's just a game -- isn't it?"
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