SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
Our host; Dr.G had his first paranormal experience at only eight years old. With over five decades of storytelling, magic and paranormal story collection he is an award winning story teller on a mission to revive firelight and the telling of stories!
SPIRIT TALES AND MAGIC
From Parlor Game To Portal: The Ouija Board’s Psychology, History, And Hype
What if the power of a Ouija board lives less in the wood and more in the wanting? We crack open the psychology, the history, and the folklore behind a game that became a ritual—and a ritual that became a thousand late-night stories. Starting with the ideomotor effect, we show how tiny, unconscious movements can feel like messages from beyond when a group is primed by silence, low light, and shared expectation. Then we track the board’s rise from 1890s patents and parlor rooms to its postwar boom, fueled by grief after World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic. Along the way, we connect it to older practices like Song Dynasty Fuji spirit writing and to modern marketing that promised “mystery” at scale.
We don’t stop at belief or debunking—we explore both. From clever tricks with magnets and repurposed electric football tables to the kind of moments that turn into family folklore, the line between “proof” and “personal truth” gets blurry fast. Propaganda research shows how repetition can lock in a worldview, even after a lie is confessed, and that insight matters when you swear the board spelled a name only you knew. Not every tale is dark: some sessions feel kind, even childlike, offering comfort and closure. Others bring a wave of dread that vanishes the moment the planchette goes back in the box.
If you’re curious to try, we offer practical guardrails—clear consent, light touch, a clean close, and a willingness to walk away. If you’re skeptical, we suggest simple tests that separate vision, suggestion, and group dynamics. And if you’re grieving, we talk honestly about why this tool can feel so compelling and why caution might be the kindest choice. The real link isn’t etched on cardboard; it’s written in the mind, where expectation, culture, and longing collaborate. Press play for a grounded take on paranormal claims, parlor tricks, and the very human need to make meaning. If this resonated, subscribe, share with a friend, and tell us your Ouija story—we’ll feature our favorites next time.
Hey everybody, it's Dr. G, Spirit Tales, and Magic. I hope this finds you well. And don't forget, before we get into everything we're going to do today, the website's there, 24-7. On that website, you can send me your story, or you can book us for an event. Or you can click podcast on the top of the website, and you'll wind up here. Today we were going to talk about Stephen King's It and the real life character that characters, I should say, that spawned it. We're going to change that up a little bit because today we're going to talk about the Ouija board. And here's why. I understand why a lot of people leave social media sites. We have created a monster with that one. So I made a comment about the Ouija board being a toy. Was manufactured as a toy. The barrage of things that were directed at both myself and my company after that were incredible. Including, you must be too dumb to know about the board. Yeah, you're probably right. I have more time in the study of the mind than anybody you know or will ever meet, unless you're talking to me. So we're just gonna let that go. But let's discuss something called an ideomotor or ideomotor, however you want to say it, effect or response. What is that exactly? It's the unconscious movement of the muscles in your fingers and hands that guide the planchette around the board. This is further enhanced by the belief of the players that they are not moving the planchette, which helps to pay attention, clear the conscious mind, and allow the subconscious mind to take over. There are thousands of those boards produced at one time. How does the devil get in each one of those? I wonder. Does he clone himself? Or come on, guys. Um, I made a comment online that if you believe the devil lives on a piece of masonite or in a record or in your grandfather's sock drawer, um go see a psychologist and not a parapsychologist, because we don't really want to hear about it. Modern spirit boards, let's talk about those for a minute. In 1886, the first talking board prototypes, similar to what would become the Ouija board, appeared in Chestertown, Maryland. Now they were inspired by the American spiritualist movement. Don't get me started on the spiritualist movement. Look up Harry Houdini and what he did toward the end of his life. I'm in that camp. So if you allow any one person, I don't care who it is, me, your dead grandfather Pete, and that's purely just something that I say it has no reference to any actual grandfather named Pete, living or dead. You allow that one person to take over your life, you're doing yourself a disservice. Go to the Winchester Mystery House. What one of the spiritualist guys did for Mrs. Winchester. In 1890, a group of businessmen, including Eliah Bond, patented the board and began manufacturing it in Baltimore, popularizing it as a new game. Post-World War I, a lot of folks died. The Ouija board saw a massive surge in popularity following both the war and don't forget, and I believe it was 1918, we had quite a flu pandemic. A lot of people died. As people sought a way to connect with lost loved ones. Those people didn't get out of bed one morning and say, gee, I should go buy this board because maybe it can help me talk to my dead uncle Ralph. Spiritualist folks got in that, and people who produced the boards got in that, and they took a very big advantage of your fears and your need to have closure. Now, if you want to go back ancient spirit boards, I want to say it's the 10th or the between the 10th and the 13th century AD. And you can look that up because I haven't looked it up. That's from memory. And I believe it was the Song Dynasty. The practice of Fuji or spirit writing was used in China, and it involved a sieve or a tray that they had attached a stick to. Two people held the top of it and traced things in the sand or in ashes. And the writing, they say, was produced by the gods. So let's look back at the history of our friend the Ouija board. There are a lot of Ouija board stories that will keep you up at night. We're not trying to pass judgment on them, whether they're true or whether they're false. However, here's a couple of things I would like you to know. The KGB, that's a very real organization. If you don't know what it is, look it up. The KGB did a study. If I feed you lies long enough, whether it be propaganda or I have you held against your will and I tell you, you know, the sky is green, the sky is green, the sky is green, and you're here 24-7 for half your life. When I take you outside finally and pick off your blindfold and you look up and you see that the sky is blue, I'm going to say, I lied to you. The sky is blue. And you will say, How'd you get that to be blue? It's supposed to, we all know that it's green. So when somebody admits to telling you the lie, you're not going to believe it. Why? Because there are two parts to your mind. This is a great oversimplification. And you'll hear about this all the time on the show. I call your conscious mind the part of your mind that causes you to do all things. Then there's your subconscious mind. That's your filing cabinet. So I throw a wet towel at you. And in a nanosecond, your conscious mind says, Hey, there's a wet object coming at my head. What should I do? And your filing cabinet says, duck or get out of the way. And your conscious mind says, good idea, and you duck or get out of the way. That all happens very quickly. Here's your thing about the subconscious mind. You can change it. You can program it. You can cause it to have a different response. And all you Freud guys out there, we're not talking about behavior modification. Keep it simple. It's just, you know, I'll change this response so that I don't do this thing and do this thing instead. Very possible. So the Ouija board started appearing in the late 1800s. In fact, I believe the first board that was ever sold was sold in a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania toy shop. And it was almost identical to the boards of today. It's a board with letters A through Z, numbers zero through nine. Most of them have the word goodbye, yes or no. And some of them have a tear-shaped planchette. Some of them are heart-shaped. I've seen them, you know, perfectly square, to move around the board with a window in the center or nothing in the center but a hole to view letters, numbers, or whatever you're going to view. The advertisement for the Ouija board in a newspaper in New York mentioned that the board was proven to work at the patent office and described it as being mysterious. So let's look at that. Proven to work in the patent office. Set the board on the table. Say, look, this is a planchette. And when it sits on the board, move the planchette around. You can see that this freely moves about the board. Take the planchette off the board, turn the board around and say, look, there's no levers, wires, strings, nothing. Now, this is back in the day before all the nano electronic stuff, so didn't even have to be mentioned. But look, this is just a piece of masonite that's painted. But this little thing, the planchette, it works. Look, I can slide it all around the board. Yeah, that works. Well, that was proven to work. It was described as being mysterious. Look up the definitions of mysterious, I guess. And although the Ouija boards sold today aren't quite as sturdy as the boards sold back then, a few things hold true from the initial advertisement. They're marketed as mysterious. And the patent was proven before it could go through at the patent office. And many, many people, including experts in the field of paranormal and parapsychology, believe that these deceptively simple boards can offer a link between our world and the next. But here's the thing: the link does not occur on the board. The link occurs in your mind. Ouija board stories started cropping up as soon as the first boards were sold. Now, many of them no scientific explanation. And you know, I can get behind that. There's a lot of things that don't have a scientific explanation. You'll hear about those all the time on the podcast. Victorian Seance. When we talk about board experiences or think about stories of the Ouija board gone wrong, we need to think back to why the boards were invented. Back in the 19th century, excuse me, Americans were more than a little bit obsessed with spiritualism. And this was, by and large, born out of the need to have some closure, perhaps to communicate with a lost relative, largely due to the fact that the average lifespan was less than 50 at the time. Spiritualism fits well with Christianity, and activities such as seances would occur right after a Sunday sermon. Now, for all of those of you on my feed who want to lynch me now, look that up. Pretty unlikely. People started to use Ouija boards to communicate with lost loved ones, and their own board experiences started to cement what they'd always thought. That spiritualism could help them communicate with the dead, and that once someone had passed on, it didn't mean that they were gone forever. This helped many, and still does help many people, find some sort of solace in loss and in death. Although, of course, there were many people that took advantage of these people, faking paranormal events in order to gain money and exposure. And that still goes on a lot today. Although some of the events surrounding the Ouija boards were definitely exaggerated or outright completely faked, we've heard of enough true board stories to realize that there's definitely something spooky about the wooden board. There are plenty of stories out there. A quick Google search, and you're gonna find hundreds almost immediately. One of the ones I'm more familiar with is this one. It's from a BuzzFeed list about Ouija board stories, which also includes a nice little antidote about shadow figures. I should have printed it and set it in front of me, and I didn't. But uh I think I can do this one from memory. I begin it, I believe it begins, my brother's friend always starts out like that, doesn't it? Played with one at his house, and frankly, all hell broke loose. The family would see pennies and marbles being thrown down the hallway. And one day, his mom was doing yard work and saw a dog. When she called the dog, she said that it suddenly had an old man's face. Things got so awful that they had to call a priest to do an emergency exorcism. To this day, they still see black shadow figures follow them. Remember the Slender Man? I believe there's at least one episode that we did about the Slender Man. Then came the day that the guy that invented the Slender Man said, you know why they can't take this anymore. I faked it, I made him up. No, you didn't make him up, we've seen him. Okay, but I it's fictitious. I I did it. Kinda sounds like uh a Dybbuk box, and we're not gonna go into that right now. So there are other board stories. I got an email after the onslaught on the internet. Doc, I also have my own Ouija board story. I have a very close friend whose mother practices White Wicca. So we followed some of the instructions for setting up the Ouija board with around four or five other girls. We were around 14 at the time. One girl was the leader, and she had to set up what was known as the safe circle, a circle of salt that enclosed us, the Ouija board and the table we were working on, and the glass we were using as the planchette. The salt, according to Wiccan lore, was to keep out negative spirits that meant to do us harm. Only the leader could break the circle using a knife to cut it, sprinkling the salt back down to seal up the circle. Now, although my story isn't particularly scary, it's safe to say that it was the night that I truly realized that I believed in the supernatural. We communicated with about five different spirits. We learned a few names and felt a tickle on the back of our necks. A few of us also had our hair pulled, and we realized after using the board for another hour or so that it was likely that the spirit pulling our hair was a toddler who just wanted to play. None of us felt scared, and even though I was initially just a little bit worried that I wouldn't be able to sleep, or that I'd lay awake worrying about everything that had happened. All of the spirits in the house, it ended up being one of the most peaceful night's sleep that I've ever had. I have never had my hair pulled in a haunted location. I have been shoved, I've been scratched, and I have heard my name called on the USS Lexington, as a matter of fact. Are Ouija board stories real? Bad board stories and scary stories can be the stuff of nightmares. But they can also be the stuff of folklore. Whenever Ouija boards are discussed with people and with certain skeptics, you always get one response. Someone at the table was pushing the glass. Back when the original game was popular at parlor events, it was not uncommon for a small child to hide under the table with a magnet and move the planchette around with the said magnet. Now, personally, I once knew a collar young lady. Her child had one of the old-time electric football games. So that was a thing with a it was a table with a vibrator under it and a whole bunch of rods. And your little football men, you could pull the rods and you could make them go forward and make them turn and that sort of thing. They didn't last very long. So she takes one of those, takes it apart. On each one of those rods, she puts a little rare earth magnet, a neodium magnet, if you will. She takes a little bit of hot glue. Every rod has a magnet on it. And she has a seance at her house. Her son gets under the table, and he's pulling those things. They rehearsed it very well. So she has a planchette that has a neo diem magnet in it, and it's dragging this planchette all over the table, and it stops in one place and then it goes another direction because he's pulling a different rod. Some of them went north and south, some of them go east and west. This person asked me at the time I was a traveling illusionist. I was on a tour, but I happened to be in the same town she was in, and I had a night off. She says, Hey, could you come over and watch this and let me know what you think? Sure. So I watch it. I just shook my head. It's you're not going to actually do that to people, are you? And she goes, Well, it's it's not real. She said, they know that coming in. She said, This is an expose on how, you know, a fraudulent medium would have done something. You know, okay, under those terms, I'll probably accept it. That's fine. The kid comes out from under the table. Now, last time I saw this guy, I could hold him in one arm. I had his head in my hand and his feet reached my elbow. He was a tiny baby. I'm like, wow, you grew up fast. And he laughed. And she goes, you know, you should move that a little slower. And he goes, I didn't move it at all. Now the look on her face when he said that, she was terrified. And then about three seconds later, he said, I'm just kidding you. Of course I was moving it. Who else would have been moving it? Then he kind of laughed. She did that for about three or four shows and she threw it away. She didn't throw it away because it was demon-possessed. She threw it away because he got tired of being under the table and pulling the rods. So there's that. Skeptics and psychologists alike tend to believe that even if no one at the table believes that they're pushing the glass, they may well be subconsciously giving it a little nudge simply because everyone at the table wants something to happen. In fact, everyone at the table might be pushing it. But how can everyone be pushing it when you're putting only the tiniest bit of pressure on the glass or on the planchette? Placing just your fingertip onto it and making sure that you don't place any weight onto it. Well, we'll never know for sure, will we? But when we hear stories of the board, of the ghost of the board, it's easy to believe the lore. So where are we going with that? In conclusion, I would say many people have stories of the Ouija board going wrong. Like this quick tale from the same Budfees, BuzzFeed list that I mentioned earlier. Yeah, I actually got an email that was very close to this. So I think they saw it and just sent me the email. But in high school, my best friend, and this is not me, this is the I'm reading the thing. In high school, my best friend and I bought a Ouija board. And we got into a car to go to the park to play with it. After a few minutes, the feeling of absolute dread came over me. It felt like someone I loved had just died. I felt nauseous, then I had a heavy heart. It was so sudden that it startled me. Because I I'd just been so pumped. I suddenly couldn't stop crying and bawling. So I turned to my friend and she was crying too. Without even speaking, we were experiencing the exact same thing. We turned the car around, and as soon as we did, the feeling stopped. It took us years to finally touch that board again. And that was to throw it out. It isn't uncommon for spooky or downright terrifying paranormal activity to occur when a Ouija board is used, but they can also be used for good. Not all Ouija board experiences are scary. Not all board stories are evil, some are perfectly peaceful. Encounters that help to bring closure between relatives or friends from the other side. Some, admittedly, are a little scarier than others. If you pick up a Ouija board, make sure that you take it with reasonable precautions. As the Wiccan outlines mentioned above, if you're still unsure, it's probably the best idea to leave the board entirely alone. There was an experiment that we did long, long time ago in class, and put you under hypnosis. So you're under hypnosis, you're seated at a table with me on the stage, and all the other students are in a semicircle around us. And I take an ice cube and I say to you, I'm holding a lit match, and I touch it to your hand. Then we wake you up. Your body produces a burn on your hand. You can look that up. I'm sure some of the psychology or parapsychology classes today are still using that sort of an experiment. You're not injured in any way. And I don't like to give things about the show away, but I have a little thing I do called I am the fire. If you participate in that, all of this will make you go, Wow, that's that's my mind doing that. And I'll tell you what a turn I can be. When I was very young, you you hear a lot of of history about the way I grew up and and things sometimes. But my sister Ada and her sister Pat. We won't go into all the mechanics of that, but when I'm 16 I find out she's my aunt Ada and that Pat is actually my mother. But at the time. So they buy a Ouija board. And they bring it home. And Pap goes nuts. Get that thing out of my house. You know, get it right, take that down to the burning barrel right now, right now, and burn it. So Ada takes the board out, she throws it in the trunk of her car, walks down to the burning barrel with a bag full of trash. And I grew up in a place where people burn trash. It was back in the 60s and 70s. So anyway, she sets the bag on fire, and everybody can tell there's a fire, you know, the fire's burning, the windows are open. So he doesn't ask her if she burned the board. He just assumes that she did, because he told her to. The board doesn't come back in the house. Ada, about two weeks later, is out on Interstate 70, coming out of a little town called Wheeling, West Virginia, heading for home. And a tractor trailer just drifts over a little bit and put a wheel mark on the side of her car. This happened in a place that we call the Narrows back then. Gee, how did it get that name? Well, it was very narrow. You had about an inch between you and the car next to you. Shouldn't have been a two-lane road. And it's Route 2, you can look that up. Route two in West Virginia, the Narrows. Tons of auto accidents, very bad place. It's been since repaired. So Ada comes home and there are tire marks on the side of her car. And Patty says, within earshot of the old man. You think it was a Ouija board? Jerry Springer at any given moment in his life would have stopped what he was doing to come to one of our Sunday dinners or to be around when an event like that took place. Now, I told you that to tell you this. Ada and I were never super close until right about the end of her life. But in the beginning of it, she would do whatever she could do to get me in trouble until I became her alibi for you know going to the magic shop because the guy that owned the shop, his son, was a Bridgeport football player and he'd had a crush on him. So, but up until that point, you know, if she could get me in trouble, she'd certainly do it. So he goes out to the car, he makes her open the trunk, he sees the board, he makes her take it down to the burning barrel. Now he had a lawn tractor that he mowed our lawn with. He looked at me and he's like, Boy, go get me the gasoline. I always joke that I never had a name. You could, you know, because it was always boy. I'm gonna send the boy, hey boy, get this. You know, so I get him the gasoline and he pours it all over the board and so you know that's fuming up, and when you light it, it's going to explode, right? So he lights it, and you know, he watches the board burn. I mean out of masonite, and it's gasoline-coated, so it's gone, it's burned up. He makes her take the ashes, a scoop of ashes out of the thing, and he makes her say a prayer and scatter the ashes. Couple weeks later, I can't remember what it was that she did to me, but it got me in a lot of trouble. I had to go outside and get the switch, and after that, I had to go sit in my room for two hours to contemplate, you know, how stupid I had been. So this is where revenge comes in. So I'm at a friend's house, and I'm telling him about the Ouija board. He goes, Oh, we've got a couple of those laying around. I said, Do you want to part with one? He's like, Yeah, we don't use them anymore. He said, Stupid. I'm like, Can I have one? He's like, Yeah, now there was a dairy queen right across the street, small town. You know, that's that's the big attraction. There's a dairy queen. So he goes, Yeah, a chocolate milkshake. I'm like, oh you sure, let's do that. So now I get in possession of this board, right? Paps at work. Grandma is cleaning uh the Masonic Temple building, which she did for extra money. Ada's at school, Ohio State University, and Patty is at work. So there I am, home alone. So I take this board and I get some lighter fluid, and I set it on the ground by the burning barrel, and I very carefully and strategically place the lighter fluid in certain areas, and I light it, which causes the edges of the board to be a little bit burned. And I'm only doing this like an inch at a time. So I blow it out, and then I have a bunch of paper towels, and I'm wearing a glove, and I rub the paper towel on the burnt part, which just makes it look even worse. So when I get that all done, I turn the board over, and with the lighter fluid, I write no and I burn that for a second. Smear it. Then I take the board and I put it under Ada's mattress. Now she doesn't know it's under there. She doesn't make the bed, grandma does. So all I have to do is wait. So one Sunday we're gonna have one of those dinners at the house where entirely too many people are invited, and you know, I don't even want to be there because I know that Ada's gonna do something stupid and it's gonna lead to a fight and all that stuff. So we hear grandma scream. The old man goes, What's wrong up there? So she tells him she finds this Ouija board, the one that he put in the burning barrel, under Ada's mattress. It would take me another two hours to tell you all the details of what went on, but I can tell you that it was about a month before Ada ever tried to do anything to get me in trouble again. But you know what? It wasn't because of something that was living on the board. It was some young man being a bit of a well, a bit of a dick. What's your Ouija board story? Do you have one? Because we'd like to hear about it. What object did you get that someone gave a bad rep to that it was possessed or something of that nature? You can tell us on the website. And remember, my friends, there is indeed a world unseen. It's a world that exists all around us all the time. And every now and then we catch a glimpse of it. And the dead get in. And hey, tell a paranormal story, even if it's about a board that was made to be a game, because it's good for ya. Talk tomorrow.
