Indeed. I understand the dynamics.
Yesterday, I visited a relation and she had on her bookshelf a book titled “The Paranormal an Illustrated Encyclopedia” by an author named Stuart Gordon - first published in 1992.
I looked up “Talking Boards” but there was nothing there. I looked up “Ouija Board” and there was an entry for that, which included “A device, often used casually as a party game, for communication with the dead” and went on to describe what the board consisted of and how the device is used and also included “Sceptics may accuse others of deliberately moving the glass [pointer] (which no doubt occurs)” and continued with “yet often those who thought it a party game become disturbed or frightened, either by accurate answers, or by unexpected and apparently psychokinetic manifestations (sudden cold drafts in closed rooms, articles falling off tables, etc) that suggests the presence of a genuinely inexplicable force”
It goes on to give an account from a chief medical doctor who recalled a night when in medical school where he and six other students were “fooling around” with a ouija board for the first time (in November 1941) and they asked when the invasion would take place that would stop Hitlers Reich and the answer was “June 6” and when the Normandy invasion actually took place on that date on that date in 1944, “we called each other, remembering the ouija prediction”. The Doctor finished with “I truly can’t explain this incident.”
The entry finishes with “Frivolous of this an similar devices is not recommended.”
The overall point being, that the timeline of popular use of talking boards is
Early prototypes and homemade versions of talking boards sparked a craze in spiritualist camps in Ohio. People wanted a faster way to communicate with the dead after the massive loss of life during the American Civil War.
Commercial Patent (1890–1891): Businessman Elijah Bond and entrepreneur Charles Kennard patented the first official Ouija talking board in Baltimore in 1890, with the patent granted in February 1891. The Kennard Novelty Company manufactured them en masse.
World War I Surge: Popularity spiked again significantly during World War I, driven by grieving families searching for connection with lost soldiers. By 1920, the boards were a regular part of mainstream pop culture, featured on magazine covers like The Saturday Evening Post.
Thus the marketing had an overall effect on the collective consciousness of - mainly American Culture - to such an extent that it shaped the beliefs and continues to shape the beliefs of millions of individuals throughout the world.
This is why (or one of the reasons why) I decided to create this thread. To explore popular myth/misinformation about this device and about the so-called “paranormal” in general.