THE OUIJI BOARD

Did you ever try one of these? Did you ever have someone you really trust lightly resting their fingers on the other side of the planchette and have it start whirling about the board spelling out messages while your best buddy swears to you they're not doing it and you swear to them neither are you? I tried it a couple of times when I was a kid. Creepy. I saw a blurb the other day about Ouiji Boards and decided to research them a little. I was disappointed to learn that they were the dream-child of American entrepreneurs from a little over a hundred years ago; Bond and Kennard in the 1880's, not unearthed from some ancient mystical civilization. 

There are a litany of differing opinions about what makes the planchette move, everything from demons or restless spirits, to you're willfully doing it on your own or it's your subconscious mind making your fingers move without you knowing it. Er, what? This came from a learned doctor of psychiatry . . . and yet, how does your subconscious mind make your fingers move without you knowing they're moving? Picking your nose is not an autonomic response. Moving your fingers is not an autonomic response. 

Or is it? There is this: "The clinical term is "ideomotor response." A person may not realize that they are moving the message indicator, but they are. This is similar to autonomic writing, also known as automatism, a well-understood psychological phenomenon. A spirit medium, in years past, would hold a pencil in one hand and pay no attention as it wrote furiously. Some believed that these written messages came from spirits. Others felt that the messages came from a clever medium. At any rate, most proponents of the Automatism Theory think that it is very possible to move the planchette unconsciously. They claim that the Ouija board opens a kind of shortcut from the conscious to the subconscious mind."* Hmmm.

What are these professional skeptics saying, then? If the subconscious mind is coming up with all these horror stories through the board that people keep writing about, are the the professionals hinting there are a lot of demented people out there? We already knew that.

Not so sure about the 'Automatism Theory.' However, interestingly enough, the articles I read also stated that if you blindfold the duo at the planchette, the message that comes through is completely garbled, making a case that somehow the people using the planchette are controlling it, and when they can no longer see, the game stops working. When confronted with that 'gotcha' moment, some believers theorized that, like in my book, perhaps the spirits see through the eyes of their human conduits and so blindfolding the person blinds the spirit communicating through them as well. Another hmmm.

There are two schools of thought here; the believers and the skeptics. Surprisingly, for the most part both agree on one point: You shouldn't use it. The believers speak of hauntings and actual spirit stalkings, while skeptics say that if you're coming up with these crazy horrific stories, it means your mental state is teetering right there . . . on that teeny little ledge . . . and the board could acerbate your mental state right into a straight jacket. Which category do you fall into, hmmm? Skeptic or believer?  Share some stories here, if you dare! Later, friends!

* from the "Museum of Talking Boards"