It also came with a small heart-shaped planchette which was used in seances whenever a spirit wanted to write a message on the board. The result was a board marked with the letters of the alphabet, as well as the numbers 0-9 and the words ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘good bye’. In 1890, Elijah Bond, a local attorney and entrepreneur in Baltimore, Maryland, decided to capitalise upon the craze, and so he formalised and patented a commercial talking board. Before the formal invention of the Ouija board, the use of talking boards was so common that by 1886 the news reported the phenomenon taking over spiritualist camps in Ohio. The first mention of fuji or ‘planchette writing’ dates to around 1100 AD in historical documents from the Song Dynasty in China. The emergence of an ‘automatic writing’ form of spiritualism, whereby words are seemingly created by an external force, was not new. The result was a generation who were desperate to connect with their lost friends and relatives, which made for fertile ground for spiritualism – and the opportunity to commune with the dead – to fully take hold. More widely, life expectancy hovered at around 50 and childhood mortality remained high. ![]() In late 19th-century North America, the sorrowful aftermath of the American Civil War was keenly felt. Far from being widely feared, spiritualist practices were regarded as dark parlour games, with advocates including President Lincoln’s wife Mary, who held séances in the White House after their 11-year-old son died of a fever in 1862. Spiritualism had been popular in Europe for years when the trend spread to North America in the mid-19th century. ![]() Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Museum of Talking Boards The original Ouija board design, created around 1890.
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