Ouija board
A lettered board with a sliding pointer that ghost hunters and others use to put questions to spirits.
- What users say it does
- Users put questions to a spirit and feel the planchette, the sliding pointer, move on its own toward yes, no or a series of letters that spell a reply, as Robert T. Carroll's Skeptic's Dictionary describes.
- What it measures
- Wikipedia and Smithsonian Magazine explain the pointer's motion as the ideomotor effect: small muscle movements that users make without being aware of them.
Elijah J. Bond of Baltimore, Maryland, filed a patent in 1891 that describes the board as a new toy or game.
Smithsonian Magazine writer Linda Rodriguez McRobbie notes that physician William Carpenter reported on unwilled muscle movements to the Royal Institution in 1852, and that researchers soon applied the idea to Spiritualist pastimes. Wikipedia says scientists class the paranormal claims made for the board as pseudoscience.
Sources
- US446054A Toy or game (Ouija board patent), Elijah J. Bond, US Patent Office (1891), via Google Patents
- The Strange and Mysterious History of the Ouija Board, Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, Smithsonian Magazine (2013)
- Ouija, Wikipedia
- Ideomotor phenomenon, Wikipedia
- Ouija board, Robert T. Carroll, The Skeptic's Dictionary