I was wondering if someone could explain what Ouija is all about and how has it become a “crystal ball” to see the future? - Jinx
I don’t know about anyone else, but I tend to cheat just to see the reactions of other people to the little piece of plastic “moving on its own”
Isn’t the weejee board supposed to be only a medium of communicating with the dead, and not a direct way of seeing the future?
Hey, it’s a universal device! I’ve heard of it being used both ways.
Maybe it all depends on if you have a medium or not! You know, if you believe it can predict the future, maybe it can be tested by asking specific questions about the past…something only the asker could possibly know. And once it’s shown that it can’t predict the past correctly, how can it possibly be something to believe in regarding the future??? - Jinx
When I was sixteen my Ouija board predicted the winner of a horse race scheduled for the following day. I told my dad, he played the horse and won $700.00.
This is the truth.
I prefer to use a vacuum funnel (can’t remember the real name). It seperates the crap out so quickly and easily.
Even Ouija boards get lucky.
Ouija is a parlor trick invented in the 1880s. Originally, there was no Ouija board; you had a planchette (the pointer) with a pencil in it, and it moved around and wrote things on paper on the table. This rarely worked, so sometimes around 1885 someone came up with the idea of putting letters on a board and pointer could just point to. It was originally marketed and sold as “Ouija” by a guy named Charles Kennard.
The Ouija pointer is moved, subconsciously, by the people touching it. It moves a little, involuntarily, and so your hands move to stay with it, which in turns moves it, and pretty soon you’re spelling stuff out yourself and not even realizing you’re doing it.
Everything about Ouija boards is designed to do this. That’s why the pointer has felt “feet” - it means the pointer will move easily with the slightest twitch of your muscles. That’s also why Ouija works well with two people touching the pointer but poorly with one; if two people move the pointer neither notices THEIR movements are directly correlated to what it points to.
This is known as the “ideomotor effect” - subconsciously causing physical movement that is then ascribed to external forces. The phenomenon of subconsciously doing this sort of thing can be observed in other ways, such as dowsing rods, spiritual pendulums of all sorts, and facilitated communication..
RickJay hit it right on the head, great explaination.
Just FYI, it is pronounced WE-JA, French for Yes and German for No.
Ja is german for yes, and that annecdote isn’t true anyway.
My understanding is that the ouija board was originally created for communication with the dead or spirit world. I believe that it’s dangerous. I’ve got a book by Rose Warnke called “The Great Pretender”. She’s married to Mike Warnke who used to be a satanist. Here is a quote from the book. Quote "The Ouija board was created in the late part of the last century as a religious artifact for the Spiritualist Church. It was never intended to be a game. It was used by spiritualist mediums. At that time in history there was a big revival of spiritualism in this country. The Ouija board was developed as a religious artifact to use to contact the spirits of the dead.
What happened was that a game company saw it and said, ‘Hey, we can make a lot of money with this.’ People are really strange, in that we will buy anything that’s wrapped up in cute. We have to have it in our homes. If you do enough advertising, you can get people to buy anything. I’m talking ‘pet rocks.’ You know what I’m saying? Cans of stuff they call slime - good grief, if you can sell that to people you can sell anything.
The thing about the Ouija board is that is is divination, and so it is expressly forbidden in the Word of God. The things that God forbids us to do - He doesn’t do because He’s mean and doesn’t want us to have any fun. He does this because He knows that these things are inherently dangerous. I don’t think that demons are going to jump out of the Ouija board and get hold of kids and drag them down through a little hole - and that’s the end of it. To ‘dabble’ in this sort of thing, this seemingly simple thing, leads to heavier and heavier involvement and curiosity of supernatural and demonic activity."Quote
Another good bood to read on this subject is “The Ouija Board, a doorway to the occult” by Edmond C. Gruss. These books are from a Christian/Biblical perspective. I’ve read stories in some of these books about people who’ve messed with these boards for awhile and started hearing noises and knocking on the walls and eventually wound up demon possessed. I wouldn’t recommend messing with them IMHO.
Hey, guess what? My friend’s friend told us about her mom and her mom’s cousin, who was using a Ouija board, and their grandmother caught them, and took the board away and burned it, and that night, she found it under her pillow!
So like, it’s really bad!
Guys, it’s a friggin’ piece of cardboard. It’s just a stupid game. Well, it’s fun to mess with at a slumber party, but other than that…
(Although, this girl DID tell me the above story. I thought it was bullshit then, and I still do).
A good number of Ouija Board experiences can be explained in terms of ideomotor movements-- movements by the controllers of the planchette which may be so subtle that the people making them may not consciously be aware they are occuring.
A good experiment in this regard is to try using a board and, if one comes up with replies which are not gibberish, try again with your view of the board blocked so that an independent observor can record what is spelled out even though you can’t see it. I’ve never tried it myself, but I’ve read that people who have tried such experiments consistently find that the messages become unintelligible once the users cannot see the board as the planchette spells out their answers.
Reliance on ideomotor movements as a means of divination is very, very old. In ancient Roman times people tried suspending a pendulum by a tether pinched between their thumb and forefinger; the way in which the pendulum swayed was supposed to be taken as a sign that the gods (or whoever) were giving one answer or another to a question. A Roman emperor (I don’t recall which one) once put some people to death for using a pendulum in an effort to determine who would be his successor, and how soon that person would come to power.
There remain a good many superstitions in current use regarding the use of pendulums for divination purposes. For instance, one is supposed to be able to determine the sex of an unborn child by holding a pendulum over the belly of a pregnant woman–I recall there was a scene concerning this on the situation comedy Roseanne once. One story I’ve heard is that the pendulum is supposed to sway vertically to indicate one sex, and hori- zontally to indicate the other. Alternatively, I’ve heard that it is supposed to matter if the pendulum makes circles or ovals. Such methods are said to work about 50% of the time–but then, any random method should.
One can make a pendulum make circles, sway in a straight line, go clockwise, go counterclockwise, reverse itself, or do pretty much anything else you want with a little conscious effort, and all with the appearance that your hand is remaining steady. It would appear that the same would apply to a planchette.
People often ask yes or no questions of a board, especially as they have the words “yes” and “no” printed right on them. This means that one has a fifty per cent chance of guessing the right answer, regardless of how probable or improbable the right answer is. For instance, suppose there is a million-to-one chance that I will win a lottery. I ask the board if I will. Regardless of whether I will eventually win the lottery (which is very improbable) or I won’t (which is very, very probable), the board has a fifty per cent chance of coming up with the right answer purely at random.
Sooner or later a person guessing at random is bound to have a lucky streak. The chances of winning if you bet black or red on a roulette wheel is a little less than 50% (since there is also a zero and, possibly, a double zero square on the wheel which is not red or black). Yet people have lucky days when they win several times in a row betting on a color–and so too one can have a streak of luck at a ouija board. Certainly you can pick which horse in a race will win.
It is not at all hard to find stories of this kind involving boards. It is also not difficult to find more improbable stories–for nstance, accounts of how a board told someone that a celebrity was dead and they later found out that the person really had died at right about the time that they received a message. The best (that is, the most improbable) story of this kind I have heard was of how an American soldier stationed in Germany asked some friends what kind of luck they were having with their board. Terrible, they said; all it would repeat that night was a nonsense word. Unknown to them, the nonsense word was a secret password the soldier had been given that day.
People of a stern religious outlook sometimes point to such stories as proof that the boards are the work of the devil; it seems very unlikely that God is going to stoop to helping out in a parlor game to spell out what stocks to invest in or whether the family spinster will ever marry. So that leaves the devil and all his lies and all his empty promises; the argument is that even if he does not know the future, he has been around long enough to be a good guesser, and, besides, may have alot of inside information to rely on.
Of course, we have to take people’s word for it that they are not making up these stories about amazing revelations, and that they remember them accurately.
My late mother recalled how, as a student at an all-girl Catholic high school, her class was subjected to a lecture once on the evils of the Ouija Board. They were told in no uncertain terms that it was a foul abomination, and they were to have nothing to do with it. They were left in such terror that none of them had the nerve to ask what a Ouija Board was anyway; some weren’t sure but that it might be some kind of a birth control device.
Even if ouija boards are purely a simple matter of self-delusion, there are still arguments for staying away from them as self-delusion can plainly be a bad thing. For instance,the boards have figured prominently in at least two American murder cases. In one case a man said he killed his wife in self-defense; she had tortured him to confess after her board told her he was spending a nonexistent cache of money on a nonexistent mistress. In a case which was a cause celebre in the 1920s, a woman told her teenage daughter she had no choice but to kill her stepfather after the board told them she would she would shoot him, and would get away with it. Interestingly, they testified at trial that they asked the board what kind of gun to use.
A final note: according to tradition, there are three questions you should never, never ask a Ouija Board: where to find hidden wealth, when you are going to die, or anything to do with the existence of God.
When I was at school, we heard a story that some girls from the convent school down the road did a Ouija board, and there was a noise, and they all shut their eyes, and then they opened them, and one of the girls was gone, and then they looked at an old photograph on the wall, and the girl was trapped inside it.
True Story!
Warnke’s claims to be a reformed satanist have been extensively investigated and thoroughly discredited. Neither he nor his wife can be considered credible authorities.
When we were about 9 or 10, my best friend Pam and I used to play with a Ouija board. We contacted a ghost who told us his name was Donald and that he died in 1600 when a tree fell on him.
I believed it sincerely at the time. As a grown-up, however, I suspect that Pam was pushing.
Perhaps you may be right about Mike Warnke, I don’t know. But it’s still my opinion that the Ouija board is a dangerous occult tool. I’ve read stories in other books about what’s happened with some people who’ve become involved with them. It’s still my opinion they should be stayed away from as communication with the dead is forbidden by God. But, of course, I know there are those who believe it can all be explained away by involuntary muscle movements, etc. In some cases that may be true but I don’t beleive so in all cases.
Perhaps it’s worth reminding people that, if you have any real, tangible, objectively-demonstrable proof of something paranormal happening when you use a ouija board, there’s a nice man called James Randi who will give you a million dollars if you show it to him.
The most dangerous tool the Devil has in this world is ignorance.
I don’t for one moment believe that a Ouija board has any occult powers, but I’ll agree that it can be dangerous to a true believer. It can become a way to release monsters from the id, albeit without the cool Forbidden Planet FX.
I don’t for one moment believe that a Ouija board has any occult powers, but I’ll agree that it can be dangerous to a true believer. It can become a way to release monsters from the id, albeit without the cool Forbidden Planet FX.