Ouija boards are the must-have gift this Christmas. "You know, for kids"

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

"A Nightmare on Elm Street" was loosely based on a true story,....sort of.

((From Los Angeles Times January 11, 1987)

Since April, 1983, at least 130 Southeast Asian refugees have left this world in essentially the same way.

They cried out in their sleep. And then they died.

Medical authorities call this Asian Death Syndrome. The refugees have various names for it, one of them being Night Terror.

"In the Philippines, it's called bangungut, in Japan pokkuri, in Thailand something else," says Dr. Robert Kirschner. "But it all roughly translates as the same thing: nightmare death."

As a deputy Cook County medical examiner, Kirschner has investigated five nightmare deaths himself, including a Laotian father and son who died in a Northside Chicago apartment--in bed, asleep, and only 15 months apart.

"The people in their neighborhood are terrified," Kirschner says.

Pathologist Studies Problem

Spurred by curiosity and concern, Kirschner, an associate professor of pathology at the University of Chicago, undertook a systematic study of the problem. His results, based on data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and autopsies of 18 night terror victims, were recently reported in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

The victims had much in common, Kirschner found, first and foremost that nothing seemed to be wrong with them before they suddenly died.


Read Full Story: Los Angeles Times

Dybbuk Box for sale on Ebay from the Ebay buyer

I like to check out ebay and see what people are selling, the interesting ones are the items that are haunted. It seems that people used the word "haunted" very loosely and will throw the word on anything they can to make a sale. And unfortunately there's a sucker born every minute.

But this one actually has a good background story and pictures. So maybe it really is a "Dybbuk Box", or the seller went out of his way to tell a story. Either way it's selling.


Here is the description and story regarding this item, and pictures added below.