Category: Parlor Devices

• The "OUIJA" Board Possession

  The "OUIJA" Board Possession theory was a 1920s-era occult panic that treated the Ouija board not simply as a parlor game or séance device, but as a real receiving instrument capable of tuning the human mind to hostile intelligences beyond ordinary reality. In its more extreme form, the board was interpreted as a telepathic receiver for a nonhuman or alien dimension whose entities could enter the user’s consciousness through repeated contact. The theory drew on the late nineteenth-century Spiritualist background of the board, the use of planchettes in automatic writing, and a period fascination with radio, invisible waves, telepathy, and unseen communication. It became a classic example of a new communications technology being reimagined as a gateway to invasion from beyond the visible world.