The board was invented in the United States during the mid-1800s when the Spiritualist craze was at its peak. It was patented in 1891 by Elijah Bond and Charles Kennard, but in 1901 production was taken over by William Fuld, whose name these days is that most closely associated with the “Ouija” trademark. The precise origin of the board’s peculiar name is lost in legend, but one of the nicest stories is that the Ouija board itself dictated the name to Kennard.
It was 1981 when I first used the principles of Ouija to make contact with a spirit. I remember the song Ghost Town by The Specials was playing on the TV as I sat nervously at my parents’ dining table with some friends. Today, I have a classic 1970s version of the board, produced by Parker Brothers, which a fellow magician bought through eBay and permanently loaned to me (I suspect because he’s too scared to keep it in his own house.) I did not have a proper board back then, so instead we cut out squares of paper and wrote on the letters with felt-tipped pens. For a planchette we had an upturned jar that had once contained pickled cockles. It worked just as well and scared me just as badly as any commercially-produced board.
I was never certain who was pushing the jar, but definitely someone was. I never believed it moved “of its own accord”, or that it wouldn’t stop the moment we took our fingers away. The rational explanation for how Ouija works, routinely repeated by debunkers, is “the ideomotor effect”.1 This is the psychological principle, established by controlled experiments, that muscular movements can occur independently of our conscious awareness or intention. In other words, one or more members of the group push the planchette but do not know they are doing it.
Looking back, if we were truly talking with disembodied spirits, they were extremely patient and uncommonly interested in the affairs of 13-year-olds. The events that we asked the spirits to predict—who would marry whom; who would take whom to the next school disco, etc.—consistently failed to come true, with no exceptions, consolidating my impression that it was merely mortal hands at work.
There was one entity who showed up whenever we used the board, supposedly my mother’s long-dead great uncle, named “Jack”. He insisted on communicating even though in life he had been illiterate and apparently had not learnt much since he had died, to judge from the meaningless jumble of letters he served up. Sometimes he hinted that more literate spirits were queuing up behind him, but he never let them take a turn.
Despite explaining the Ouija board to myself as an instance of “the ideomotor effect”, it still gave me sleepless nights. Maybe I was dimly aware of the fine line between explanation and “explaining away”. Okay, maybe it was our muscles moving the planchette without us being aware, but then who was instructing our muscles to move? Evidently, no one that we or the scientists who had made the experiments could locate or put a name to. Which was more bizarre: Uncle Jack steering the cockle jar, or this unnameable “other” working us like meat puppets without our permission?
My friends and I soon upped the ante. We ditched the Ouija and asked the spirits to signal their presence through direct physical manifestation. At first, the results were disappointing, until one day my sister came in from school looking scared and beckoned me away from our parents.
“Touch the air around my hand,” she said.
I reached out and my fingers encountered something peculiar. The space around her arm was “alive”. It felt vibrant, like static electricity. It gave me that tingling sensation you feel on the surface of a television screen, or on a rubber balloon after rubbing it against nylon clothes. But, more than that, it was warm. The sweat glands on my hand prickled in response to its heat.
“Hot, isn’t it?” said my sister.
I nodded. But even as she had spoken, the sensation passed, as if my hand had pierced a delicate membrane and destroyed it. I groped in the air around her arm, but couldn’t find it again.
“It’s granddad,” she whispered.
During their lunchbreak at school, she and her friends had each summoned a dead relative. Each girl’s dear-departed had manifested as a kind of thermal bangle, which had lasted—on and off—for the remainder of the afternoon.
This was the first time I felt that unique rush, which I always get from bumping up against the paranormal. Many experiences expose us to the otherworldly: drugs, illusions created by various forms of entertainment, but the “feeling” of the paranormal (for me, at least) is quite distinct, composed of amazement yet also of a creeping sense of danger, because what is happening is supposed to be outside the everyday world, and yet it’s here. And it’s real.
When you reach out to occult forces and receive a response, not only does it feel “super-real”, there is also an experience of sentience. To say it feels like you’ve touched something “alive” is the wrong word, but thereis a sensation that it is certainly out there, and it knows you are here. It is talking to you and sees you where you are.
A month after my sister came home wearing granddad, I was idly rolling a couple of dice across the lounge carpet, when I wondered if they might also be used for spirit communication.
I stared hard at the little plastic cubes and mentally commanded them: Dice, I request that you move if the next throw is a double six.
Nothing happened, of course, but I rolled them anyway. The score was reassuringly random. Once they had come to rest I repeated my command and rolled them again. I don’t know how long I sat there. I simply decided I wouldn’t budge until I had a result. I’d got it into my head that the dice must perform because I wasn’t going anywhere until they had. After I’d repeated the sequence so many times that I wasn’t thinking anything any more, suddenly I sat bolt upright.
The dice had been lying on the carpet where they fell, close to each other, but had then “jumped” apart. You might argue—like the man on the train—that they simply hadn’t finished rolling yet. But it was not that. I’d allowed a good few seconds between each roll whilst I mentally repeated my “command”. It was a movement of a couple of centimetres; exactly the kind of movement you would expect to see if two magnets had been placed side by side with their like-poles facing, so that each repulsed the other.
Nervously I picked them up and rolled again. They felt quite normal as I set them loose. Was it imagination, or did they seem to tumble more slowly than gravity ought to have allowed? But beyond doubt was the result: double six.
So there it was. The most astounding, most mind-blowing paranormal experience I’ve ever had in my life: two plastic dice rolled on a carpet. There were no witnesses and it happened only once. Despite my best efforts, the dice never repeated their feat.
Moving dice that predict their own score? Dead relatives returning as thermal bracelets? Twenty years later when I decided to take up magick it was these experiences that had bubbled up into my mind. How—I reasoned—could I possibly sign away my days to a job, family life, the government, and all the other institutions that decide for us what existence is and how it should be lived, when—obviously—the reality they decree is nothing like the full story?
I once talked over my dice experience with a rational friend. The only way she could fit it into her world-view was to suggest it must’ve been a “false memory”.
I’ve thought long and hard about this. Of course, it’s a possibility. If she’s right then I’ve thrown away my career and filled my head with trash because of something that never happened. But the more I thought, the more I realized that the difference between a memory and an actual event isn’t the issue, because even if it hadn’t happened the way I remembered, nevertheless I’d lived my life since that moment exactly as if it had. That day shook my beliefs to their roots, influencing what I thought, the books I read, the life-decisions I made. So what was the difference between an accurate memory of what happened and a false one? In terms of how I’d lived my life, it had indeed been “true”. And even if I decided now that it had been “false”, the only way to do that was to make a conscious choice it had been so, and change my behaviour once again from that point onwards.