Our good friend Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America and an upcoming book on the positive thinking movement, has previously written about the history of the Ouija Board, both for our print anthology Darklore and also here on TDG. For those with tl;dr syndrome though, the six-minute video below that Mitch helped create as part of the Midnight Archive series is a nice little introduction, charting the development of Ouija through to its heyday in the 1960s when it outsold Monopoly, as well as including fascinating anecdotes regarding the board’s influence on some well-known poets.
On a related note, readers might also like to check out a recent BBC Future article which attempted to answer the question “What Makes the Ouija Board Move?” in terms of modern consciousness research, and also this response: “Ouija Board Explained, Magicians Unsurprised”
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