a Ouija Ponders Itself
Not until Helen named me
did I become
the spirit bridge known as
Ouija.
An illustration of a talking board in use from a 1948 issue of Ladies Home Journal. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Helen Peters Nosworthy
pulled the strange name
from a hat, or maybe a
locket.
Helen Peters Nosworthy, the spirit medium who named the talking board "Ouija" during a seance. She asked the board what it should be called, and the response was "O-u-i-j-a." The talking board suggested that the word meant "good luck." Some suggest she was influenced by a locket that contained a signed portrait of the English novelist, Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé). Public domain.In eighteen and ninety-one
in Baltimore
I was the Wonderful
Talking Board.
In nineteen and seventy-one,
The Exorcist
and the Satanic Panic,
ended that.
The William Fuld Manufacturing Co. in Baltimore was the first company to trademark and sell talking boards as “Ouija boards.”"
My reputation was ruined
No more Norman Rockwells;
No more parties in velveted
parlors.
A 1920 Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover illustration that depicts a blushing couple whose knees are touching as they manipulate a Ouija board together. This was a time when the Ouija board enjoyed a less fearful and more playful reputation than that which followed its incorporation into the Horror films and Satanic Panic of the early 1970s. I miss my pre-Ouija days
in Ohio
with its rustic spiritualist
camp scene.
Those Ohioans knew me
as something more
than the phenomenon called
ideomotor.
Excerpt from a March 1886 article in the New York Tribune about a new spirit-communication technology called the "talking board," which was being used by Ohio spirit mediums at Spiritualist camps. The word "Ouija" was not yet associated with talking boards when this article was published. Public domain.