What better time to talk to dead people for fun than the festival to
celebrate the birth of Jesus? Ouija boards are flying themselves off
shelves and under trees this Christmas, according to trends data
released by Google. The company has recorded a 300 per cent increase in
searches for the spirit-bothering devices, fueled by a terrible movie
that was effectively a feature-length ad for a board game, an appearance
on The Archers, and the Victorian belief that if the dead could speak,
they would use a plank of a wood and the alphabet.
Ouija, released in October in time for Halloween, was, by all
accounts, a cliché-ridden turkey about a group of teenage girls who
experiment with a board and get scared. It has a disastrous 7 per cent
rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the review aggregating site, but became an
occult hit, to the delight of its backers. Hasbro, the toy company
behind Monopoly, pushed for the revival of the film, which had stalled
in development, and partnered with Universal to make it happen. Its
Ouija Game, including a glow-in-the-dark version, is – sure enough – the
biggest seller online.
All of which is appropriate, because the
Ouija-board trend, circa 1890, was always about selling games. Spirit
writing dates back much further. In 12th-century China, it was believed
that spirits had the power to guide a "planchette" to write Chinese
characters. In the late 19th century, when doubts about God inspired by
Darwin's little birds led to a boom in spiritualism, planchettes became a
novelty hit in the west. Elijah Bond, an American lawyer and inventor
from Baltimore, devised and patented in 1891 "a toy or game by which two
or more persons can amuse themselves by asking questions of any kind
and having them answered by the device used and operated by the touch of
the hand, so that the answers are designated by letters on a board".
Read Full Story: Independent UK
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