The Board That Named Itself: A History of Spirit Boards and the Men They Destroyed

On the evening of April 25, 1890, three people sat around a table in a Baltimore boarding house and asked a piece of wood what it wanted to be called.

The planchette moved. It spelled four letters: O-U-I-J-A.

“What does that mean?” asked Charles Kennard, a fertilizer salesman turned entrepreneur who smelled money in the Spiritualist craze sweeping the country.

The board answered: Good luck.

The woman whose fingers rested on the planchette was Helen Peters — a Baltimore medium, a stockholder in Kennard’s fledgling company, and the sister-in-law of patent attorney Elijah Bond. Around her neck, she wore a locket. Inside the locket was a portrait of a woman with a single word inscribed beneath the image. According to talking-board historian Robert Murch, that woman may have been the British novelist Maria Louise Ramée, whose pen name was “Ouida.” Kennard may have simply misread the cursive.

Whether the name came from the spirit world or a piece of jewelry, it stuck. The Kennard Novelty Company incorporated the day before Halloween, 1890. Within months, they were selling two thousand boards a week.

And within forty years, the board would kill the man who made it famous.

The Patent That Required a Séance
The story of the Ouija board is, at its root, a story about American commerce dressed in a dead woman’s veil.

Before Bond could secure U.S. Patent No. 446,054, he had to prove to the chief patent officer in Washington, D.C., that the device actually worked. Bond brought Helen Peters with him. The patent officer — whose name, according to the application filed May 28, 1890, and granted February 10, 1891 — demanded that the board spell out his own name, a name supposedly unknown to both Bond and Peters.

The planchette moved. It spelled his name correctly.

The officer, reportedly pale, granted the patent on the spot.

Whether this story is embellished or not — and Murch, who has spent decades in the Kennard Novelty Company archives, considers it credible — it captures something essential about the Ouija board’s place in American culture. It has always existed in the uncomfortable space between parlor trick and genuine unease. Even the patent officer, a man whose entire profession was built on rational categorization, could not watch those letters appear without flinching.

Before the Board: A Longer History Than You Think
The Kennard Novelty Company did not invent spirit communication. They commercialized it.

Planchette writing — the use of a small, wheeled pointer to channel messages from the unseen — had been a feature of European and American Spiritualist practice since at least the 1850s. The French Spiritist Allan Kardec documented the use of talking boards in The Spirits’ Book (1857), and planchettes were widely sold in both France and England throughout the 1860s.

But the roots go deeper. Chinese historians have documented the practice of fuji (扶乩) — spirit writing through a suspended stylus — as early as the Song Dynasty, around 1100 AD. The practice involved a planchette-like device suspended above a tray of sand, through which spirits were believed to trace characters. The practice was widespread enough that the Qing Dynasty eventually attempted to suppress it.

In the ancient Mediterranean world, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus recorded a ritual from 371 AD in which Roman conspirators used a device strikingly similar to a modern spirit board — a tripod and ring suspended over a dish inscribed with the letters of the Greek alphabet — to ask the spirits who would succeed Emperor Valens. The board spelled out the letters Θ-Ε-Ο-Δ. The conspirators interpreted this as “Theodorus.” They were executed for treason. The actual successor turned out to be Theodosius — whose name also began with those four letters. The board, if we take Marcellinus at his word, was technically correct.

What Kennard and Bond did in 1890 was not invention. It was packaging.

William Fuld and the Factory the Board Told Him to Build
Charles Kennard was a businessman, not a mystic, and he was also not very good at being a businessman. By 1893, he had been pushed out of his own company. Control passed to William Fuld, a former varnisher and customs inspector who had joined the Kennard Novelty Company as a foreman and stockholder.

Fuld was a Presbyterian. He was also a pragmatist. He stamped “Original Ouija Board” and “Inventor” on the back of every board he manufactured, despite never having invented anything of the sort. By the end of his life, he held over thirty-three patents, trademarks, and copyrights — most of them related to the board and its accessories, including a line of “Ouija Oil” marketed as a cure for rheumatism.

But Fuld was also, by all accounts, a true believer.

In a 1919 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Fuld claimed that the Ouija board itself had told him to “prepare for big business.” Following this instruction, he purchased an entire city block across from his old address at 1208 Federal Street and constructed a thirty-six-thousand-square-foot factory at the corner of Harford, Lamont, and Federal Streets in Baltimore.

The board’s business advice proved sound. The twin catastrophes of the Great Influenza pandemic and World War I had left the nation in mourning, and the bereaved turned to Spiritualism in staggering numbers. Ouija boards outsold Monopoly. Norman Rockwell painted one on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Fuld became wealthy.

And then, on February 24, 1927, the board’s luck ran out.

Fuld climbed to the roof of his three-story factory — the factory the board told him to build — to supervise the replacement of a flagpole. The iron railing he leaned against gave way. He fell backward, grasping at a factory window on the way down before striking the ground. An employee rushed him to the hospital.

The injuries were catastrophic: concussion, five fractured ribs, a broken arm, a fractured leg, and lacerations across his body. One of the broken ribs pierced his heart. William Fuld, the man who had built an empire on a piece of wood that promised “good luck,” died on the operating table. He was fifty-six years old.

On his deathbed, he made his children promise one thing: never sell the Ouija board.

They kept that promise for thirty-nine years. On February 24, 1966 — the exact anniversary of their father’s death — William Fuld’s children sold the entire business to Parker Brothers.

The Feud That Lasted Nearly a Century
William Fuld’s death ended one story but not the bitterness that had preceded it.

Before his fall, Fuld had spent two decades in legal warfare with his own brother, Isaac. The two had co-founded Isaac Fuld & Brother in 1897, but by 1901, William had cut Isaac out of the Ouija business entirely. The resulting lawsuits ground through the courts for years.

Isaac Fuld’s resentment ran so deep that during a renovation of the family cemetery plot, he had his own baby daughter’s remains exhumed and moved to a different gravesite — rather than let her rest in soil shared with William’s side of the family.

When Isaac died in 1939 at the age of seventy-four, the Baltimore Sun ran his obituary under the headline: “Claimant to Title of Father of Ouija Board Craze Dies.”

The two branches of the Fuld family did not speak to each other for ninety-six years. They finally reconciled in 1997.

A piece of wood. Two brothers. Nearly a century of silence.

The Ideomotor Effect: What Science Found Under the Planchette
In 1852 — nearly four decades before the Ouija board was patented — British physician William Benjamin Carpenter published a paper titled “On the Influence of Suggestion in Modifying and Directing Muscular Movement, Independently of Volition.” In it, he coined the term ideomotor action to describe a phenomenon that would eventually explain, at least to the satisfaction of most scientists, how spirit boards work.

Carpenter’s argument was elegant and unsettling in equal measure: the human body can produce muscular movements in response to ideas and expectations alone, without any conscious intention or awareness. Your fingers move the planchette. You simply do not know you are doing it.

His colleague Michael Faraday had already demonstrated this principle with table-turning experiments — another Spiritualist staple — showing that the sitters themselves, not spirits, were producing the force that moved the table. Carpenter extended Faraday’s findings to planchettes, dowsing rods, and pendulums. In every case, the instruments only produced accurate results when the operators already knew the correct answers.

The American philosopher and psychologist William James synthesized these findings in The Principles of Psychology (1890), proposing that merely thinking about an action is sufficient to trigger its physical execution, even if the movement is imperceptible.

For the skeptic, the ideomotor effect is the whole story. The board does not speak. You speak through it, and you do not know you are speaking.

For The Archivist, I will note only this: Carpenter’s explanation accounts for the planchette’s movement. It does not account for Pearl Curran.

The Case of Patience Worth: Four Million Words from a Dead Woman’s Mouth
On the evening of July 8, 1913, a thirty-year-old St. Louis housewife named Pearl Lenore Curran sat at a Ouija board in her home with her friend Emily Grant Hutchings. They had been doing this for nearly a year with no meaningful results — nothing but random letters and meaningless fragments.

Then the planchette moved with unusual force. It spelled:

Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name. Wait, I would speak with thee. If thou shalt live, then so shall I. I make my bread at thy hearth. Good friends, let us be merrie. The time for work is past. Let the tabby drowse and blink her wisdom to the firelog.

Pearl Curran had dropped out of high school after what she described as a nervous breakdown. She played piano, went to the movies with her husband John, and played cards with neighbors. She was not, by any measure, a literary woman. One acquaintance described her reading habits as limited to the daily newspaper and the occasional magazine.

Yet over the next twenty-four years, the entity identifying itself as Patience Worth — a seventeenth-century Englishwoman from Dorsetshire who claimed to have been killed by Indians after emigrating to Nantucket — dictated nearly four million words through Pearl Curran. The output included seven novels, approximately five thousand poems, a full-length play of seventy thousand words, and volumes of short stories and conversation.

The quality was not amateurish. Five of Patience Worth’s poems were selected for the 1917 Braithwaite anthology of the nation’s best verse. The New York Times praised her first novel as a remarkable literary achievement. Dr. Usher, a professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis, called The Sorry Tale — a 350,000-word novel set in biblical Palestine — one of the greatest stories of the life and times of Christ written since the Gospels.

Scholars who examined the texts found historically accurate details and archaic language patterns that they considered beyond the capacity of a woman with a ninth-grade education to fabricate. Walter Franklin Prince, a psychical researcher for the Boston Society for Psychical Research, spent years studying the case and published his 509-page report in 1927. His conclusion: “Either our concept of what we call the subconscious mind must be radically altered, so as to include potencies of which we hitherto have had no knowledge, or else some cause operating through but not originating in the subconsciousness of Mrs. Curran must be acknowledged.”

Pearl Curran died in California on December 4, 1937. Twenty-nine volumes of transcripts — four million words that should not exist — remain at the Missouri Historical Society. They have never been adequately explained.

The Board Today: From Parlor to Pop Culture to Your Grandmother’s Attic
Parker Brothers manufactured the Ouija board from 1966 until the company was absorbed by Hasbro in 1991. Today, you can buy a glow-in-the-dark version at Target for twenty dollars.

The domestication of the spirit board into a mass-market toy has not diminished its hold on the American imagination. It remains the only board game in history that comes with a genuine warning from religious authorities. The Catholic Church has consistently cautioned against its use. Multiple evangelical denominations have classified it as an instrument of divination prohibited by Scripture. In 2001, the board was among the items publicly burned by a congregation in Alamogordo, New Mexico, alongside copies of Harry Potter.

The entertainment industry has feasted on the board’s reputation. Its appearances in film and television — from landmark horror productions to network television series — have reinforced the narrative that the board is a gateway to forces beyond human control. The board’s power in popular culture does not rest on evidence. It rests on the same thing that has sustained it since 1890: the irreducible human suspicion that the dead have something to say, and that we might have built the machine to hear them.

What the Archive Tells Us
Here is what the historical record confirms:

A fertilizer salesman, a patent attorney, and a medium sat in a Baltimore boarding house and asked a board what it wanted to be called. The board answered. A patent officer watched it spell his own name and turned white. A businessman built a factory because the board told him to, and fell from the roof of that factory and died. His children sold his life’s work on the anniversary of his death. His brother’s family did not speak to his family for nearly a century. A housewife in St. Louis channeled four million words of literature through the board, literature that scholars could not explain and that remains, unread and unsolved, in a Missouri archive.

The ideomotor effect explains the movement. It does not explain the silence that follows when the planchette stops.

I am The Archivist. I have shown you what the records contain. What moved the planchette — your fingers, your unconscious, or something waiting on the other side of the alphabet — is a question the archive cannot answer.

That question belongs to you.

Dead is So Alive.