My aunt Mxyzptlk Btfsplk scoffs at you.
Reminds me of the arc in the series Dark Shadows were Victoria Winters travels back to the past while playing with Tarot cards.
They also used the I Ching to travel in time in that wonderful show. The original Men In Black miniseries had an issue where kids playing D&D accidentally summon a demon with a D12.
I hate when that happens!
Let that be a lesson, kiddies. Stick to the d20.
The story is NOT played for comedy. The demon does massive property damage and kills a child. Kay only cares about neurolyzing everybody and making it look like a tornado. Jay is upset about the property damage and dead child.
“I may be a Man In Black now- but I’m nothing like you Kay.”
The take from the Smithsonian Magazine:
“Communicating with the dead was common, it wasn’t seen as bizarre or weird,” explains Murch. “It’s hard to imagine that now, we look at that and think, ‘Why are you opening the gates of hell?’”
But opening the gates of hell wasn’t on anyone’s mind when they started the Kennard Novelty Company, the first producers of the Ouija board; in fact, they were mostly looking to open Americans’ wallets.
As spiritualism had grown in American culture, so too did frustration with how long it took to get any meaningful message out of the spirits, says Brandon Hodge, Spiritualism historian. Calling out the alphabet and waiting for a knock at the right letter, for example, was deeply boring. After all, rapid communication with breathing humans at far distances was a possibility—the telegraph had been around for decades—why shouldn’t spirits be as easy to reach? People were desperate for methods of communication that would be quicker—and while several entrepreneurs realized that, it was the Kennard Novelty Company that really nailed it.
In 1886, the fledgling Associated Press reported on a new phenomenon taking over the spiritualists’ camps in Ohio, the talking board; it was, for all intents and purposes, a Ouija board, with letters, numbers and a planchette-like device to point to them. The article went far and wide, but it was Charles Kennard of Baltimore, Maryland who acted on it. In 1890, he pulled together a group of four other investors—including Elijah Bond, a local attorney, and Col. Washington Bowie, a surveyor—to start the Kennard Novelty Company to exclusively make and market these new talking boards. None of the men were spiritualists, really, but they were all of them keen businessmen and they’d identified a niche.
But they didn’t have the Ouija board yet—the Kennard talking board lacked a name. Contrary to popular belief, “Ouija” is not a combination of the French for “yes,” oui, and the German ja. Murch says, based on his research, it was Bond’s sister-in-law, Helen Peters (who was, Bond said, a “strong medium”), who supplied the now instantly recognizable handle. Sitting around the table, they asked the board what they should call it; the name “Ouija” came through and, when they asked what that meant, the board replied, “Good luck.” Eerie and cryptic—but for the fact that Peters acknowledged that she was wearing a locket bearing the picture of a woman, the name “Ouija” above her head. That’s the story that emerged from the Ouija founders’ letters; it’s very possible that the woman in the locket was famous author and popular women’s rights activist Ouida, whom Peters admired, and that “Ouija” was just a misreading of that.
That was Croesus, king of Lydia in the sixth century BC, and source of the saying “rich as Croesus”. The story is that he consulted the Delphic oracle before attacking the Persian empire, and the oracle told him that if he attacked, he would “destroy a great empire”. The empire he destroyed was of course his own.
Ah. Thanks for info!
I want Jumanji, myself.
Now that seemed fun.
Light as a feather, stiff as a board. I played that several times, and it’s creepy as heck when it works.
I want to be able to say I’m not superstitious. Intellectually I don’t believe in any of this stuff. But I’m still shook because a wild bird flew into our house a couple of days ago.
And the ouija board absolutely gives me the creeping willies. The hair stood up on the back of my neck just reading this thread. I don’t believe in haints, but I’m not going to say it too loud, and it can’t hurt to paint the porch ceiling blue just in case.
Exactly. On the blue ceiling.
Love that.
Blue is a nice color. Apparently I painted my house, with the porch and its ceiling, haint blue before I knew about haint blue.
I want to make it clear that I do not believe that haint blue will repel wasps.
I wanted white clouds on my blue porch ceiling. But was boo’d out by the peanut gallery.
I agree a blue ceiling on a porch does not repel any creature. Real or demonic.
Do you have any clue about why sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t? (I don’t.)
If I think they’re around, I talk to them; in a friendly manner. Usually not if any live human can hear me; though that depends on who it is.
It works. Not in the sense that they answer me out loud; but in the sense that they stop feeling angry or otherwise upset, and start feeling like they accept my being there.
The front of my head thinks I’m just talking to the back of my own head. The back of my head isn’t so sure. But in any case it’s good to have the front and back of one’s own mind on speaking terms.
The back of my head has also taken me the hell* away from several places. The front of my head didn’t think strongly enough that I needed to be there to argue.
[*no, I don’t believe in a literal hell. We’ve certainly created some metaphorical ones.]
I’ve never been able to understand why anyone would think that there’s anything supernatural about it, not even in a make-believe sense one would expect of a children’s game. It’s moving because the people holding it are moving it. It’s exactly as mysterious as why the mouse on my computer moves.
It moves while the people holding it don’t feel like they’re moving it.
That is, sometimes somebody is deliberately moving it. But even if nobody intends to, it’ll move anyway; probably because few if any people can actually keep their hand dead still in that fashion for very long. You’re not, IIRC, resting your hand or arm on anything other than the indicator; and it’s designed to move very easily.
Well, let’s not be scared of the Ideomotor effect.
(Again, from the Smithsonian:)
But the real question, the one everyone wants to know, is how do Ouija boards work?
Ouija boards are not, scientists say, powered by spirits or even demons. Disappointing but also potentially useful—because they’re powered by us, even when we protest that we’re not doing it, we swear. Ouija boards work on a principle known to those studying the mind for more than 160 years: the ideometer effect. In 1852, physician and physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter published a report for the Royal Institution of Great Britain, examining these automatic muscular movements that take place without the conscious will or volition of the individual (think crying in reaction to a sad film, for example). Almost immediately, other researchers saw applications of the ideometer effect in the popular spiritualist pastimes. In 1853, chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, intrigued by table-turning, conducted a series of experiments that proved to him (though not to most spiritualists) that the table’s motion was due to the ideomotor actions of the participants.
The effect is very convincing. As Dr. Chris French, professor of psychology and anomalistic psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, explains, “It can generate a very strong impression that the movement is being caused by some outside agency, but it’s not.” Other devices, such as dowsing rods, or more recently, the fake bomb detection kits that deceived scores of international governments and armed services, work on the same principle of non-conscious movement. “The thing about all these mechanisms we’re talking about, dowsing rods, Oujia boards, pendulums, these small tables, they’re all devices whereby a quite a small muscular movement can cause quite a large effect,” he says. Planchettes, in particular, are well-suited for their task—many used to be constructed of a lightweight wooden board and fitted with small casters to help them move more smoothly and freely; now, they’re usually plastic and have felt feet, which also help it slide over the board easily.
“And with Ouija boards you’ve got the whole social context. It’s usually a group of people, and everyone has a slight influence,” French notes. With Ouija, not only does the individual give up some conscious control to participate—so it can’t be me, people think—but also, in a group, no one person can take credit for the planchette’s movements, making it seem like the answers must be coming from an otherworldly source. Moreover, in most situations, there is an expectation or suggestion that the board is somehow mystical or magical. “Once the idea has been implanted there, there’s almost a readiness to happen.”
But if Ouija boards can’t give us answers from beyond the Veil, what can they tell us? Quite a lot, actually.
Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Visual Cognition Lab think the board may be a good way to examine how the mind processes information on various levels. The idea that the mind has multiple levels of information processing is by no means a new one, although exactly what to call those levels remains up for debate: Conscious, unconscious, subconscious, pre-conscious, zombie mind are all terms that have been or are currently used, and all have their supporters and detractors. For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll refer to “conscious” as those thoughts you’re basically aware that you’re having (“I’m reading this fascinating article.”) and “non-conscious” as the automatic pilot-type thoughts (blink, blink).
Two years ago, Dr. Ron Rensink, professor of psychology and computer science, psychology postdoctoral researcher Hélène Gauchou, and Dr. Sidney Fels, professor of electrical and computer engineering, began looking at exactly what happens when people sit down to use a Ouija board. Fels says that they got the idea after he hosted a Halloween party with a fortune-telling theme and found himself explaining to several foreign students, who had never really seen it before, how the Ouija works.
“They kept asking where to put the batteries,” Fels laughed. After offering up a more Halloween-friendly, mystical explanation—leaving out the ideomotor effect—he left the students to play with the board on their own. When he came back, hours later, they were still at it, although by now much more freaked out. A few days post-hangover later, Fels said, he, Rensink, and a few others began talking about what is actually going on with the Ouija. The team thought the board could offer a really unique way to examine non-conscious knowledge, to determine whether ideomotor action could also express what the non-conscious knows.
“It was one of things that we thought it probably won’t work, but if it did work, it’d be really freaking cool,” said Rensink.
Their initial experiments involved a Ouija-playing robot: Participants were told that they were playing with a person in another room via teleconferencing; the robot, they were told, mimicked the movements of the other person. In actuality, the robot’s movements simply amplified the participants’ motions and the person in the other room was just a ruse, a way to get the participant to think they weren’t in control. Participants were asked a series of yes or no, fact-based questions (“Is Buenos Aires the capital of Brazil? Were the 2000 Olympic Games held in Sydney?”) and expected to use the Ouija board to answer.
What the team found surprised them: When participants were asked, verbally, to guess the answers to the best of their ability, they were right only around 50 percent of the time, a typical result for guessing. But when they answered using the board, believing that the answers were coming from someplace else, they answered correctly upwards of 65 percent of the time. “It was so dramatic how much better they did on these questions than if they answered to the best of their ability that we were like, ‘This is just weird, how could they be that much better?’” recalled Fels. “It was so dramatic we couldn’t believe it.” The implication was, Fels explained, that one’s non-conscious was a lot smarter than anyone knew.
Exactly. It does feel like it’s just moving by itself when you’re playing with it. It doesn’t feel like someone is deliberately moving it. I mean, last time I played with it I was in high school, and that was enough to freak me out and make me uninterested in playing with it again, even though, logically, I have no reason to fear the divinations of the ideomotor effect.
This states the case so beautifully; thank you. I don’t THINK so, but I can feel it. My lizard brain is a dang psychic.
Oh no, you don’t even know. I played piano as a kid, and had excellent coordination. I could make that thing go anywhere on the board and nobody could see my hands move. The whole thing STILL creeps me out. Anything to do with spirits and the supernatural does. I don’t even walk down the horror aisle of the bookstore.