The plot of The Quid Pro Quo features a Ouija Board session that causes stuff to happen. I thought I knew all about them, but when I came to do a bit of research into what my 1920s characters would have known and thought about them, it turns out I didn’t know as much as I thought.
Ouija boards are an ancient way of contacting spirits, appropriated and twisted by the western world from another culture that uses them responsibly as part of their spiritual practice, right?
(Imagine a gong ringing here, if you would)
Wrong! Wrong in all the ways!
The roots of the Ouija Board lie in the mid-Western state of Ohio in the 1880s. Their use wasn’t at all incompatible with Christianity and grew out of the interest in Spiritualism that swept across the US after the Fox Sisters in New York State became a national sensation in the 1840s. After the Civil War, the US was in collective mourning for a long time. Having an easier way to talk to the spirits of loved ones rather than being dependent on a medium was presumably how the concept of a board and planchette arrangement originally came about.
In the 1890s the idea was picked up by a couple of smart businessmen, who set up the Kennard Novelty Company in Maryland to manufacture a ‘talking board’ as a parlour game. The name Ouija came from the sister-in-law of one of them, Helen Peters. She was a medium and the name came to her during a session with the ‘talking board’ itself. The spirit she was speaking with told her it meant ‘good luck’. However…at the time of the communication, Peters said she was wearing a locket with the picture and name of the novelist Ouida*. Make of that what you will!
Interest in both Spiritualism and the Ouija waxed and waned over the next two or three decades. Then in short order the world was hit by 1914-1918 world war and the 1918 influenza pandemic. Millions of people died and there was an explosion of interest in the ostensible comforts offered by talking to the dead.
So, at the time my story is set, talking to dead people and to a lesser extent communicating with spirits and angels and entities was a perfectly respectable occupation. Arthur Conan Doyle was a great believer in Spiritualism and Queen Victoria is said to have held several seances to attempt to contact Prince Albert. The Ouija Board even featured in this 1920 Norman Rockwell picture on the front of The Saturday Evening Post. The ladies in The Quid Pro Quo are divided between being fully invested in the process as a method of contacting their beloved dead; and finding it all rather inappropriate and ridiculous. But no-one is really worried about it in the sense that we are now, when we tend to associate Ouija Boards with demonic forces.
So…what changed? Well, in 1973, The Exorcist was released. It completely shifted the way the Ouija was perceived and they are now viewed in pop culture as something that can really harm people, either psychologically or by summoning evil spirits, depending on ones viewpoint.
You can read more about the history of the Ouija Board here at The Smithsonian Magazine . The Quid Pro Quo is coming out on 20th November.
*I hadn’t come across Ouida before. She’s amazing!