{"id":24454,"date":"2024-06-14T12:39:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T16:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.museumofplay.org\/?p=24454"},"modified":"2024-06-21T10:16:44","modified_gmt":"2024-06-21T14:16:44","slug":"s-t-r-o-n-g-investigating-the-history-of-the-ouija-board-at-the-strong-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.museumofplay.org\/blog\/s-t-r-o-n-g-investigating-the-history-of-the-ouija-board-at-the-strong-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"S-T-R-O-N-G: Investigating the History of the Ouija Board at The Strong Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Ouija board as we know it today was patented in Baltimore in the year 1890. Its development and success were closely tied to the rise of the American Spiritualist movement following the Civil War, but the men who patented and popularized the divination tool as a board game were not Spiritualists, but capitalists. At a time when the desire to contact the dead had coalesced into a religious movement, a group of entrepreneurs including Charles Kennard and Elijah Bond recognized that a board game could do the work of a medium and make twice the profit. However, though Bond\u2019s sister-in-law was a successful medium, neither man believed that the board could be used to contact spirits. In fact, the Ouija board was never advertised as a tool for spirit communication, gaining this reputation from its use in Spiritualist circles rather than advertisements, which focused on the board\u2019s ability to answer any question without specifying who was doing the answering. Thanks to a generous fellowship from The Strong Museum, I was able to continue researching this fascinating interplay between the Ouija board\u2019s reputation as a supernatural and sometimes dangerous pseudo-religious object and the manufacture and sale of Ouija as a harmless board game at the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Illustration
An ad for the Swastika talking board created by Elijah J. Bond with a notice concerning William Fuld\u2019s claim to the Ouija patent. Playthings, June 1908.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Kennard and Bond left the Ouija Novelty Company soon after its founding, each creating his own knock-off Ouija board to cash in on the game’s growing popularity. Meanwhile, the trademark for the original Ouija board landed in the hands of William Fuld, who gained a reputation for litigiously defending it against copycats. Charles Kennard attempted to sell a variety of knock-off boards until Fuld finally sued him into submission, but Bond was smarter. He waited until just after Ouija\u2019s original patent expired to launch the Swastika Novelty Company\u2019s Nirvana board, using symbols that were then associated with Indian religions rather than fascist regimes. Fuld routinely claimed to be the \u201cinventor and exclusive manufacturer\u201d of the Ouija board in his ads. Perhaps afraid of ending up like Kennard, a year after the release of the Nirvana talking board, Bond dedicated one-third of his ad in the industry trade magazine Playthings to correcting Fuld\u2019s interpretation of the patent:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reference the notice of William Fuld, which appears on page 121 of the February issue of \u201cPlaythings.\u201d Would say, that William Fuld is not the inventor of OUIJA. The Ouija talking board was invented by Elijah J. Bond, and said invention was patented by him February 10th, 1891, under patent No. 446,054, application for which was filed by said Elijah J. Bond May 28th, 1890, serial No. 353,410. William Fuld never had any title in said patent, by assignment or otherwise, and had no legal right to manufacture same prior to February 10th, 1908, the date of expiration of aforesaid patent. We make the above statement to the trade in the interest of honest competition and fair business methods, and to protect our business from any injury that might be caused by falsifying the facts in regard to the original patent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the time Ouija reached the height of its popularity in 1920, Kennard, Bond, and several other former employees of the Ouija Novelty Company had all written into the Baltimore Evening Sun claiming to be the original inventor of the Ouija board. None of them were. The most likely candidate for the inventor of the Ouija board is actually a cabinet maker named E. C. Reiche, who, having died in 1899, was unable to defend himself in the paper. By staying out of this public debate and steadfastly asserting his own claim to the Ouija board, Fuld managed to make Ouija his legacy. From 1978 to 1989, Parker Brothers\u2019 product magazine cited William Fuld as the inventor of the Ouija board in its advertising copy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like his predecessors, Fuld was no Spiritualist. When asked if he believed in the Ouija board by the Baltimore Sun in 1920, Fuld responded, \u201cI should say not. I\u2019m no spiritualist. I\u2019m Presbyterian.\u201d However, though Fuld\u2019s advertisements were careful to never mentioned spirits, after his death, his son made one concession to the public\u2019s perception of Ouija as a way to speak to the dead. In the year 1941, the Fuld company introduced a new box design that featured a blue ghost, modeled after the 1909 sculpture Eternal Silence by Lorado Taft, a monument that stands in Chicago\u2019s Graceland Cemetery. The Fuld family manufactured Ouija boards from 1898 to 1966 when they sold Ouija to Parker Brothers. While Parker Brothers continued the tradition of leaving ghosts out of their advertising\u2014focusing instead on Ouija\u2019s ability to answer questions and, later, insisting that it could tell the future\u2014the blue ghost on the box remained.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Illustration
An advertisement for Ouija featuring the \u201cblue ghost\u201d box and several other related divination games in the issue of Parker Brothers catalog released in 1971 the year The Exorcist book came out. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n
\n
\"Illustration
An advertisement for Ouija in the 1972 issue of Parker Brothers catalog. The \u201cblue ghost\u201d box has been replaced with an image of several hands holding a planchette, and the accompanying divination games are no longer being advertised. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Throughout the years Fuld spent protecting his legacy, Ouija had developed a legacy of its own, mired in ghost stories and eventually tales of demonic possession. What\u2019s most surprising given modern perceptions of Ouija is how recently its reputation soured. While it always had its detractors, for most of its history Ouija was seen as harmless haunting fun. The year Parker Brothers bought Ouija, it was so widely adored that it outsold Monopoly, but five years later Ouija was on people\u2019s minds for a different reason. In 1971, William Peter Blatty wrote a novel based on a 1949 case where a child was allegedly possessed by a demon after using a Ouija board with his Spiritualist aunt. The Exorcist sold 13 million copies and cemented the Ouija board as the dangerous demonic pop culture symbol it is today. The blue ghost had been synonymous with Ouija for three decades, but the year after The Exorcist was published it was gone, as were the other divination-based games Parker Brothers had been advertising alongside Ouija for the previous two years. The new box featured an image of two people\u2019s hands on the board and absolutely no suggestion that Ouija was remotely supernatural in nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, Hasbro holds the patent for Ouija and occasionally releases movie tie-in special editions of the board, like 2017\u2019s Stranger Things Edition Ouija Board. But the company doesn\u2019t sell the Ouija board as part of its regular line of products. If you search \u201cOuija\u201d on the Hasbro website, nothing comes up. Despite Ouija\u2019s 130 years of notoriety\u2014or perhaps because of them\u2014even the most stalwart board game manufacturers have been scared off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Dorian Cole, <\/em>2023 Mary Valentine-Andrew Cosman Research Fellow<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ouija board as we know it today was patented in Baltimore in the year 1890. Its development and success were closely tied to the rise of the American Spiritualist movement following the Civil War, but the men who patented and popularized the divination tool as a board game were not Spiritualists, but capitalists. At a time when the desire to contact the dead had coalesced into a religious movement, a group of entrepreneurs including Charles Kennard and Elijah Bond […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"8026,8501,9307,9257,8588,7860","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[51,47,369,368],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-board-games","category-brian-sutton-smith-library-and-archives-of-play-at-the-strong","category-guest-blogger","category-research-fellow","entry","has-post-thumbnail"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nS-T-R-O-N-G: Investigating the History of the Ouija Board at The Strong Museum - The Strong National Museum of Play<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.museumofplay.org\/blog\/s-t-r-o-n-g-investigating-the-history-of-the-ouija-board-at-the-strong-museum\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"S-T-R-O-N-G: Investigating the History of the Ouija Board at The Strong Museum - The Strong National Museum of Play\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Ouija board as we know it today was patented in Baltimore in the year 1890. 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