JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Today is Halloween. Time to bring out the costumes and candy and maybe the Ouija board. Over the past 150 years or so, this witchy game has been everything from a connection to the dearly departed to a teen rite of passage and the subject of a moral panic. Deena Prichep has this social history.
DEENA PRICHEP, BYLINE: When Ali Maaxa was growing up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in the 1980s, she and her friends had a lot of slumber parties, and Ouija boards were a big part of them.
ALI MAAXA: We were Catholic school kids, and we literally thought we were talking to Satan. (Laughter) Like, we were really worried about it.
PRICHEP: And the questions they asked were pretty much always the same.
MAAXA: Who am I going to marry? What's my future going to be like? We sort of knew we were pushing the thing ourselves, but we sort of didn't. And it was just scary enough.
PRICHEP: Maaxa's 13-year-old kid, Serene, recently gathered around a Ouija board with his friends here in Portland, Oregon.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: So...
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: (Laughter) I can feel you pushing it.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #3: I am not the one pushing it. That's...
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: Yes, you are. I can tell.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: Yeah.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #3: No, it's not me.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: Sure.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #3: It is not.
PRICHEP: These kids asked similar questions, along with some new ones.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #1: Will I ever eat a whole lemon?
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #3: That is a question.
PRICHEP: OK, this is a group of teens and tweens. But honestly, I think it's hard for anyone to use a Ouija board without laughing and maybe freaking themselves out a little. But it started as a pretty serious pursuit. Emily Clark teaches religion at Gonzaga University and is working on a book about the spiritualist movement of the 1800s.
EMILY CLARK: In order to figure out how to communicate with spirits, which was the main focus of spiritualism, well, people got really creative.
PRICHEP: We're talking seances, spirits answering questions by knocking from the beyond or writing through a medium. And in the 1870s, they started experimenting with what were called talking boards.
CLARK: And these are the precursor to what we know as the modern-day Ouija board.
PRICHEP: Clark says it makes sense that people would be interested in connecting with the spirit world when the Civil War had brought death in such huge numbers. And she says, until the turn of the century, you didn't really see much pushback from major Christian denominations, to spiritualism in general or the Ouija board in particular.
CLARK: From its outset, you've got people who believe that this is truly a means of communicating with the dead. You have people who believe this is just fun. Some who believe this is a way to figure out what does my own inner subconscious think about things?
PRICHEP: According to Clark, after World War I, interest in the Ouija board exploded in the U.S. Throughout the Roaring '20s and beyond, it was marketed as a wholesome parlor game. The Saturday Evening Post had a Norman Rockwell cover with the Ouija board. It was a goofy plot point in "I Love Lucy." But that image of innocent fun started to shift in the '70s and '80s.
CLARK: This is around the rise of the first satanic panics, when there's this concern of satanism just rampant across the U.S. And then also, in the early 1970s, a little film called "The Exorcist" comes out.
PRICHEP: ...Where a little girl gets possessed by a demon invited in because of the Ouija board. But even so, or perhaps because of it, sales of the game continue, and the Ouija board has been cemented as the stuff of slumber parties and goofing around. And occasionally scaring ourselves along the way.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #2: Yo, stop push it.
UNIDENTIFIED CHILD #3: (Laughter) It wasn't me. I was the spirits.
PRICHEP: For NPR News, I'm Deena Prichep. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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