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You are here: Home / Archives for Ouija

Ouija

Should We Be Afraid Of Ouija Boards – Alchemy Of The Stones – Paranormal Podcast 674

February 23, 2021 By Jim Harold

Should we fear Ouija Boards? Ouija expert Karen A. Dahlman joins us to discuss that topic and share some compelling history of spirit boards.

Click the play button or the icon of your favorite podcast app to listen NOW!

In part two, Robert Simmons talks to us about the magical, mystical properties of stones!

You can find Karen’s books HERE at Amazon and Robert’s book here:

Thanks Robert and Karen!

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The Calm app is a great way to improve your sleep in 2021. I know I love it and I think you will too!

For listeners of the show, Calm is offering a special limited time promotion of 40% off a Calm Premium subscription at Calm.com/jim

Thanks Calm for your sponsorship of The Paranormal Podcast!

Filed Under: Latest and Greatest, The Paranormal Podcast Tagged With: Jim Harold, karen a dahlman, Karen A. Dahlman, karen dahlman, Ouija, Ouija Board, ouija board podcast, Ouija Boards, ouija boards podcast, Paranormal Podcast, paranormal podcasts, spirit board, spirit boards

Are Ouija Boards Dangerous – Campfire 347

April 12, 2018 By Jim Harold

Are Ouija Boards dangerous? Our caller says…you’ll have to tune in to find out! Shadow people, strange dreams, UFOs and more on this super sized Campfire. Enjoy!

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Filed Under: Jim Harold's Campfire, Slider Tagged With: Board Games, campfire, ghost stories, Jim Harold Campfire, Ouija

Conversations With Ghosts: The Ouija Board Experience – Micah Hanks Writes

October 31, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

Micah Hanks
Micah Hanks

“Where are you?”, the couple asked, as they watched the planchette begin to slowly move again across the lettered board. The arrow passed several of the symbols, before clearly coming to rest on the letter “H”. Hovering there for a moment, the arrow began drifting to the left, now hovering over the letter “E”. After a pause, the couple felt the planchette moving beneath their fingers again, this time more purposefully, gliding sharply to the right and coming to rest on the letter “L”, where it stayed.

“Hell,” she read aloud to him, looking up to meet his frightened gaze.

Chris had never believed in the supposed “power” of Ouija boards. When he agreed to play this game with Jessica, rather than going out to the movies as they normally would on a Friday night, he had done it mostly for her amusement. But within the first few moments after the planchette began to move eerily amidst the symbols across the board, he became fascinated—if not a bit unsettled—at the story which seemed to now be revealing itself to them.

Through their questions, and the movement of the planchette, a narrative emerged, as told from the perspective of a young girl, saying she had died more than a century ago in a small town in the Western United States. She, like many others at that time, had been a victim of consumption; but this apparent conversation with a ghost hadn’t been what frightened them. In addition to being aware of her death, the girl also expressed a desire to be reborn, and through the lettered face of the Ouija board, told Chris and Jessica she would come into the body of their eventual firstborn child.

This hadn’t set well with the young couple, hence prompting Chris to ask about the child’s whereabouts.

“HEL”

“Why are you in Hell, if you died as a child?” Chris then asked.

“I” was the first letter the planchette indicated, followed by a pause. It then slowly drifted over to the next sequence of letters, “K”, “I”, and “L”, where it stopped again.

“I kill?” Jessica gasped. Chris had already felt her fingertips trembling across from his on the face of the planchette.

“What are you?” Chris asked. The planchette moved again, spelling the letters “D”, “E”, “M”…

Goodbye.

It would be the final word the planchette rested on that night, in addition to marking the last time either of them ever touched a Ouija board. The experience, though badly frightening for them, certainly opened the couple’s minds to the strange kinds of experiences Ouija boards seem to be able to elicit, as so many others have described over the years.

Among all the modern implements of the occult, perhaps there is nothing else that remains so disturbing in people’s minds as the Ouija board. Despite their sale as common playthings in most department stores today, there are a striking number of individuals, like Chris and Jessica’s story above illustrates, who claim to have had unsettling experiences with the devices. Thus, even in modern times there are many look to biblical passages as evidence of their wicked nature, such as that which appears in Deuteronomy 18:10-11, reading: “There shall not be found among you anyone… that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.” Similarly, many interpret this passage from the Quran to be in reference to such things, which it calls an abomination: “O ye who believe! Intoxicants and gambling, (dedication of) stones, and (divination by) arrows, are an abomination; of Satan’s handwork: eschew such (abomination), that ye may prosper.”

Perhaps the earliest historical mention of Ouija-like devices began to appear in China at around 1100 BC, although the rise of the Ming Dynasty coincided with the use of a stick or stylus crafted from the branch of a willow or peach tree called the “Fuji method”, which roughly resembled a dowsing-rod. By around 540 BC, Pythagoras and his students were widely believed to have used some sort of table mounted on wheels to communicate with the spirits of the dead.

The modern Ouija board, despite its similarity to ancient divination practices, appeared only as recently as the 1890s when two business-men, Elijah Bond and Charles Kennard, leapt on the idea to combine the popular planchette of spiritualist practices with a board covered in letters of the alphabet. On May 28, 1890, the duo filed for patent protection of their new idea, which became the first official Ouija board to be marketed and sold, with production duties handed to an employee named William Fuld in 1901.

The famous “talking boards”, as they became known, would first be marketed under the name “Ouija” by Fuld, who also rewrote the history of the devices, claiming that not only that he was the true inventor, but that his employers Bond and Kennard had stolen the idea from him. Once other companies began to produce the Ouija boards, Fuld sued many over the use of what he believed to be “his” design, until his death in 1927. In 1966, William Fuld’s estate sold the rights to the Ouija name to the famous maker of children’s games, Parker Brothers, who today holds all official trademarks and patents for the item.

Despite being generally marketed and sold as a plaything, the Ouija boards have remained controversial, due in no small part to the negative experiences so many have claimed to have with them. The famous esotericist Manly P Hall was quoted as far back as 1944 in Horizon Magazine saying that, “During the last 20-25 years I have had considerable personal experience with persons who have complicated their lives through dabbling with the Ouija board. Out of every hundred such cases, at least 95 are worse off for the experience.”

Some of the stories related to me personally over the years do seem to underscore the strange, and often unsettling nature of the Ouija experience. My earliest experience with such a tale dates back to my childhood, when my mother talked about an experience she had with a neighbor of hers, Nancy, while experimenting with a Ouija board. The story related to them during the experience involved a young man who, about a decade earlier, had become trapped under his convertible after he drove off the side of a bridge; pinned beneath the wrecked car, he drowned before help could arrive. After this experience, my mother maintained a strong aversion to Ouija boards, and was resolute in telling me not to use them, either.

On one occasion, a young man in Australia named Artemis wrote to me years ago, asking about whether I thought Ouija boards were “safe” to use. This was just after an experience he had with one he had obtained recently, believing his deceased grandfather had spoken to him through the device.

“What did he tell you?” I asked.

“He told me not to play with Ouija boards!” Artemis said. I figured that the response he received was more or less self-evident.

Perhaps the most unique story about Ouija boards ever shared with me was told by the American singer and songwriter Ellis Paul, who I met in 2007. “I have a song called ‘Conversation with a Ghost’ that’s about my one weird paranormal experience,” Ellis told me, during a live radio interview in Asheville, North Carolina. “I was out for a run with a buddy of mine named Vance in Boston, and he said ‘why don’t you come over for dinner?’ I said sure, and before we left we sat and had a glass of eggnog, since it was around Christmas time.”

“Once we got over to his place, his girlfriend, Margaret, was working on dinner in the kitchen, and I said ‘Well what have you been up to?’ She said, ‘I just bought this Ouija board for a dollar at a garage sale.’ She said she’d kinda been addicted to it, talking to some ‘spirit’ with a friend of hers named Beth. She’d been on it like most people get on the Internet, just going haywire. I told her, ‘You know, I’m kind of a doubter on that kind of thing, so why don’t we get it out as part of the dinner party?’ I thought we’d take it for a spin, and see what happens.”

“There were about fifteen of us there, and we went into the living room. I was the one asking questions to the ghost, whose name was ‘Pug’—Margaret Putnam was her real name, but ‘Pug’ was sort of a handle she apparently used communicating through the Ouija board. I asked Pug, with Beth and Margaret on either side of the board handling the little wooden triangle, ‘what song did I play last night?’ It spelled out R-A-I-N. Sure enough, the night before I had played a song called ‘Let it Rain’.”

Initially Ellis laughed about this, and noted that “if you’re gonna pick a title for a song, ‘rain’ might be in a good percentage of them.”

“Then, I asked ‘what’s the name of my booking agent’, which was something I knew neither of the women operating the Ouija board new. It spelled out G-E-R-M-A-N-E, or Germaine.” Indeed, this was the name of his booking agent at the time, despite the name being “misspelled it by one letter.”

The final question Ellis asked the board was, “What did Vance and I have to drink before we came over here?” As the planchette moved, it spelled out the letters N-O-G.”

“I got up and I locked myself in the bathroom for a while, freaked out,” Ellis confided to us. “I ended up writing a song about it, based on someone who had passed away, using a Ouija board to communicate.”

Ellis Paul’s unique story didn’t end here, though. “What’s even weirder about that story,” he told me, “is that after I calmed down a bit, I decided to go down to the Courthouse and dig through records to see if I could find this ‘Pug’ anywhere in Boston’s history, since she had told Beth and Margaret a few things about herself. For instance, she had been married to a doctor, and also described roughly the time and circumstances of her death. Sure enough, looking around I found that a Margaret Putnam had not only existed, but had lived there in Boston, and even married a prominent doctor operating in town at the time. I was floored.”

When considering stories like those of Ellis Paul and countless others, it becomes difficult to rule out the possibility that Ouija boards may indeed serve as a mode of communication between this world and the next. The view of modern science attributes no such “mystical” capacities to the function of the board, however, instead suggesting that a psychological effect known as ideomotor phenomenon can explain this, which similarly explains such spiritualist practices as automatic writing, dowsing, and other varieties of facilitated communication that purportedly links the living world to the afterlife in some way. The term was first used by researcher William Benjamin Carpenter in 1852, after which an alternative name for the phenomenon, “The Carpenter effect”, was derived.

Could the Ouija board truly be nothing more than a simple device, designed as a parlor game and long heralded since its conception as a tool of divination, which relies on mysterious functions of our deeper psyche? In truth, if this were indeed all there is to the “magic” of the Ouija board, one might argue that it would make the strange devices—and the bizarre stories associated with them—no less interesting. Whether their mystery stems from this world, or worlds beyond our own, it seems that there is much about the function of the human mind that eludes us… and hence, the inner space within each of us seems to remain, at the end of the day, the greatest mystery of our time.

—

Micah Hanks is a writer, podcaster, and researcher whose interests include history, science, current events, cultural studies, technology, business, philosophy, unexplained phenomena, and ways the future of humankind may be influenced by science and innovation in the coming decades. With his writing, he has covered topics that include controversial themes such as artificial intelligence, government surveillance, unconventional aviation technologies, and the broadening of human knowledge through the reach of the Internet. Micah lives in the heart of Appalachia near Asheville, North Carolina, where he makes a living as a writer and musician. You can find his podcasts at GralienReport.com and his books at Amazon.com

Filed Under: Micah Hanks, Slider, The Paranormal Braintrust Tagged With: Jim Harold, Micah Hanks, Ouija, Ouija Board

Demon Haunted – The Paranormal Podcast 449

September 27, 2016 By Jim Harold

The Haunted Collector John Zaffis joins us along with Rosemary Ellen Guiley to discuss true stories from his files.

You can find John & Rosemary’s book at Amazon.com: Demon Haunted: True Stories from the John Zaffis Vault

In part two, Janet Boyer talks to us about everyday divination.

You can find Janet’s book at Amazon: Reading the Mind of God: Divination, Prophecy and Fortunetelling for Everyone

Thanks John, Rosemary and Janet!

–PROGRAMS 90 DAYS OR OLDER ARE AVAILABLE AT JIM’S PARANORMAL PLUS CLUB–

Filed Under: Slider, The Paranormal Podcast Tagged With: Demon Haunted, divination, fortune telling, Haunted Collector, haunted objects, Janet Boyer, Jim Harold, John Zaffis, Ouija, paranormal, Paranormal Podcast, psychic, Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Tarot

All About Ouija – Paranormal Podcast 434

June 6, 2016 By Jim Harold

The world’s foremost expert on Ouija, Robert Murch, joins us to talk about the mystery of talking boards, their history and why Ouija boards are loved and hated by so many!

–PROGRAMS 90 DAYS OR OLDER ARE AVAILABLE AT JIM’S PARANORMAL PLUS CLUB–

Filed Under: Slider, The Paranormal Podcast Tagged With: Jim Harold, Ouija, Ouija Boards, Robert Murch, Talking Board

Ghostly Flowers – Campfire 256

March 11, 2016 By Jim Harold

An incredible ghost story involving flowers, a haunted house, a friendly Ouija entity and more highlight this super sized Campfire!

–PROGRAMS 90 DAYS OR OLDER ARE AVAILABLE AT JIM’S PARANORMAL PLUS CLUB–

Filed Under: Jim Harold's Campfire, Slider Tagged With: campfire, Campfire stories, ghost stories, haunted house, Jim Harold's Campfire, Ouija

The Woman In White – Campfire 211

February 4, 2015 By Jim Harold

A listener shares a poignant story concerning “The Woman In White” who is said to foretell death. Ron Hood joins us to read one of his “Amazing Stories”…this one on missing time. Plus, a party where the guests were levitating! This and more on this edition of Campfire!

–PROGRAMS 90 DAYS OR OLDER ARE AVAILABLE AT JIM’S PARANORMAL PLUS CLUB–

Filed Under: Jim Harold's Campfire, Slider Tagged With: ghost stories, Jim Harold, Jim Harold's Campfire, Ouija, Shadow Person, Woman In White

Spirit Communication Devices and Ouija – The Paranormal Podcast 368

February 2, 2015 By Jim Harold

Research and historian joins us for a fascinating discussion of planchettes, Ouija, and spirit communication devices.

Thanks Brandon!

–PROGRAMS 90 DAYS OR OLDER ARE AVAILABLE AT JIM’S PARANORMAL PLUS CLUB–

Filed Under: Slider, The Paranormal Podcast Tagged With: Brandon Hodge, Jim Harold, Ouija, Planchettes

Ghostly Voices – Campfire 188

June 12, 2014 By Jim Harold

A man’s family home vibrates with echoes of the past, a young woman has other wordly encounters, an Ouija board story, a beloved cat returns, a dark figure appears to a young man and more on this edition of the Campfire!

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Filed Under: Jim Harold's Campfire Tagged With: campfire, Ghosts, Jim Harold, Jim Harold's Campfire, Ouija, Ouija Board, Ouija Boards, paranormal, Shadow Person

You Scared Me – Campfire 164

October 16, 2013 By Jim Harold

Ouijaologist Karen A. Dahlman tells us of a spooky specter from Mexico, and much more on this edition of the Campfire!

–PROGRAMS 90 DAYS OR OLDER ARE AVAILABLE AT JIM’S PARANORMAL PLUS CLUB–

Filed Under: Jim Harold's Campfire Tagged With: Ghosts, Karen A. Dahlman, Ouija, shadow people

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