Speak of the devil: a history of the Ouija board
Date
2024
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
The Ouija board as we know it today was patented in Baltimore in the year 1891. Its development and success were closely tied to the rise of the American Spiritualist movement following the Civil War, but the men who patented and popularized the divination tool as a parlor game were not Spiritualists, but capitalists. Charles Kennard and Elijah Bond seized upon an opening in the market. At a time when the desire to contact the dead had coalesced into a religious movement, these men recognized that a board game could do the work of a medium and make twice the profit. The Ouija board continued to rise in popularity and notoriety over the century following its patenting. In the late 1960s, it even outsold Monopoly. However, only a few years later, the publishing of The Exorcist in 1971 signaled the final stage in the board’s transformation from Spiritualist relic to harmless parlor game to allegedly demonic instigator of real-life violence. This thesis seeks to determine where that dark reputation originated. Through a combination of archival research and object-centered material culture approaches, I chronicle the 1890s origins of Ouija and its gendered and racialized cultural perception in the early twentieth century. I find that Ouija was not originally associated with the demonic but with Eastern religion, feminist movements, and popular culture like Jazz. Finally, I investigate the cultural shifts that facilitated its transformation into an object that we encounter more often in horror movies than in the toy store.
Description
Keywords
Ouija board, Spiritualists, Civil War, Real-life violence