Name: Why the Ouija board became so famous
Uploaded: 2018-10-16T02:13:33.000Z
Duration: 6 min 9 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Ouija is not overrated just because the board's powers aren't real.

We know it's powered by the psychological ideomotor effect — a type of subconscious

But that doesn't explain why this kinda crappy board is such a big part of our lives

and why Ouija and Ouija ripoffs are what you see over and over again in TV and movies.

OK, but the real shock is that this piece of cardboard has a story that spans two centuries

and actually says something about our history and our culture.

“There is no Death! What seems so is transition;

this life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the Life Elysian

The same legendary poet who wrote about the midnight ride of Paul Revere.

In the 1800s, spiritualism and Americanism were intertwined in weird ways.

Though what we call spiritualism started in the early to mid 1800s in Europe — seances,

ghost stuff, etc — it really picked up in the US in the 1850s and 1860s.

The Civil War caused around a million casualties.

This chart shows life expectancy from 1850 to 1910.

Hundreds of spiritualism newspapers like Banner of Light.

It even had a column filled with messages that claimed to be from the spirit world beyond.

That Longfellow poem was the epigraph to a hit book in 1891 - the bestselling “There

For that, you have to go to the patent office.

These are all talking board patents from the 1890s and 1900s.

This patent from 1891 is the direct ancestor to Ouija.

Fittingly, the game has a murky origin, but Americans Elijah Bond and Charles Kennard

It has all of the ingredients: the board with Yes and No,

and a planchette - that's the name for the pointy thing that picks your letters.

There are theories about the name — some say it was for the novelist Ouida — that's

Others claimed the board itself spelled its own name.

But the most likely explanation is that it was Egyptian sounding, since that's how

it was marketed and explained on that first patent.

The next year, entrepreneur William Fuld patented his own talking board.

But Ouija was the brand that took off - so Fuld and company bought it.

He fended off tons of competitors — including his own family members — and built a name.

He had legal backing, like this 1915 patent, as Ouija took off.

The spirit world finally had what had eluded it in life: a solid brand identity.

When the Washington Times did a puff article on mental trouble in DC, they didn't mention

“talking boards” - they mentioned “Ouija".

When Pearl Curran claimed to have written novels by channeling her Ouija board —

Alright — She wrote under the name of the spirit she

This brand kept Ouija going through the 20th century, along with Fuld's legal maintenance.

The spirit world went corporate, further merging pop culture and the occult.

Today, Ouija is a little horror, a little kitsch, and a little fun.

There have been corporate shifts, but the board is a staple, which is a pretty impressive

journey for a simple image and a piece of plastic.

That journey was powered by the beliefs of people like Longfellow and the mysterious

forces of the United States patent system.

And we are being spoken to, in a way, by people from the past.

Not through messages from the spirit realm, but through the history of a decorated piece

Ouija might be overrated, and it's not real.

There are many great Ouija stories out there.

One of my favorites is that in 1921, William Fuld was forced to admit Ouija was a children's

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Why the Ouija board became so famous

mental

entrepreneur

constant

journey