VIDEO: Ouija Board Gone Wrong

We’ve all heard stories about mysterious shadows and inexplicable happenings – like objects floating around the house or doors opening/closing by themselves.

There are a lot of people out there who believe in ghosts, but there are even crazier ones that actually try to contact them!

In the video below, you’ll see why it’s better not to mess around with Ouija Boards.

According to Wikipedia, the Ouija is a flat board marked with the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words “yes”, “no”, “hello” (occasionally), and “goodbye”, along with various symbols and graphics.

It uses a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic called a planchette. Participants place their fingers on the planchette, and it is moved about the board to spell out words. “Ouija” is a trademark of Hasbro, Inc., but is often used generically to refer to any talking board.

Following its commercial introduction by businessman Elijah Bond on July 1, 1890, the Ouija board was regarded as a parlor game unrelated to the occult until American Spiritualist Pearl Curran popularized its use as a divining tool during World War I.

Spiritualists believed that the dead were able to contact the living and reportedly used a talking board very similar to a modern Ouija board at their camps in Ohio in 1886 to ostensibly enable faster communication with spirits.

Some Christian denominations have “warned against using Ouija boards”, holding that they can lead to demonic possession. Occultists, on the other hand, are divided on the issue, with some saying that it can be a positive transformation; others reiterate the warnings of many Christians and caution “inexperienced users” against it.

Paranormal and supernatural beliefs associated with Ouija have been harshly criticized by the scientific community, since they are characterized as pseudoscience. The action of the board can be parsimoniously explained by unconscious movements of those controlling the pointer, a psychophysiological phenomenon known as the ideomotor effect.

The Ouija phenomenon is considered by the scientific community to be the result of the ideomotor response. Michael Faraday first described this effect in 1853, while investigating table-turning.

Various studies have been produced, recreating the effects of the Ouija board in the lab and showing that, under laboratory conditions, the subjects were moving the planchette involuntarily. A 2012 study found that when answering yes or no questions, ouija use was significantly more accurate than guesswork, suggesting that it might draw on the unconscious mind.

Skeptics have described Ouija board users as ‘operators’. Some critics noted that the messages ostensibly spelled out by spirits were similar to whatever was going through the minds of the subjects.

In the 1970s Ouija board users were also described as “cult members” by sociologists, though this was severely scrutinised in the field.

Ouija boards have been criticized in the press since their inception, having been variously described as “‘vestigial remains’ of primitive belief-systems” and a con to part fools from their money. Some journalists have described reports of Ouija board findings as ‘half truths’ and have suggested that their inclusion in national newspapers lowers the national discourse overall.