We all know that one trope every horror movie seems to follow. A group of teens at a sleepover/abandoned building/church or all three come across an old Ouija board. The group decides to play the game, one person is wary of the board's powers, and an evil entity curses all who play. But the commonality of this trope throughout the years begs the question: why are these so-called devil boards so easy to come across?
Methods of spiritual communication have been around for thousands of years, but the spirit boards that would eventually become the Ouija made their first appearances at seances in the 1840s and gained popularity throughout the latter half of the century. Amidst the aftermath of the Civil War, William Fuld decided to capitalize off of America's obsession with death. There are several conflicting theories on how the board got its name. The most popular theory is that it is a combination of the French "oui" and the German "ja", but others say it comes from an actual Ouija game where a spirit spelled out those very letters. Regardless of its origin, the infamous Ouija board was born.
Where the Ouija board's modern connotation is cursed and evil, the casual spiritualism of the late 19th century used the board as a means of enjoyment among friends and even lovers. At the turn of the century, romantic interactions between unmarried individuals were extremely limited and chaste. The Ouija board provided a convenient excuse for flirty late-Victorian couples to sit face-to-face, fingertip-to-fingertip, and attempt to contact the dead.
During WWI and in the throes of the 1918 pandemic, national grief and spiritualism rose once again, but unlike the offset of the Civil War, this era had the advantage of mass production. By the early 1920s, almost every home in the US had a Ouija board, and sales skyrocketed. But this casual contacting of the dead didn't last for long. WWII and the prosperity of the 1950s diminished the nation's interest in depressing topics like death and the afterlife. The 1960s brought with it a wave of secularization that made people more skeptical than entranced by the Ouija board. The final nail in the coffin was the iconic 1973 horror film, The Exorcist. In it, a young girl becomes possessed by a demon after innocently playing with a Ouija board. The board is finally solidified as a curse rather than a game.
After the narrative surrounding the boards changed, they stopped being fun parlor games. They lost their romantic touch and veil-piercing chill. They become something perverse and forbidden. They became tucked away in attics and dusty chests, only to be found in the latter half of the 20th century by the group of teens at their slumber party in the abandoned church.
