Spirit Boards and the Rise of the Ouija, Part 1

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Conny Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson, and we've recently covered the photographer Wuigi on the show and as you may recall, he allegedly got his nom de lens because he was nicknamed after the Wigia board. And of course that got me thinking about how I have been planning for a long time, a really long time, to do a spirit board episode, but I could never figure out exactly how to tackle it. And that's because it's hard because there is a lot of different information and ways you can go, uh so to level set. This is not going to be like a survey of ways people have used spirit boards around the world through history. Instead of what we're really talking about today is the rise of the Weigia board in North America, and that is different from just calling it a spirit board because Weigia is a trademarked name and the story behind it and how it became a corporate thing is kind of a morass. Listen, this is a Halloween episode, but you're going to get a lot of stuff you might not expect. We're going to talk a little bit about spiritualism, yes, but there is a lot more corporate intrigue and betrayal and family feuds and litigation and even some psychology, And there is so much that it is a two parter, even having gone with a really limited scope of the u s and the Weigia boards specifically. So for this first part, we're going to cover how talking boards started to show up in the press in North America and then how that interested businessmen and ultimately how what seems like a surprise player kind of comes out of nowhere to essentially run the entire industry of spirit board production. And then in part two we're going to continue with the commercial manufacturer weig boards. Were also going to touch on some exam poles of how it comes up in pop culture over the years, as well as in legal cases. That's where we get into probably more Halloween, certainly some gruesome stuff. And then we will wrap by talking about what is really happening psychologically when you play with a Wigia board and become convinced that something or someone other than you is controlling that plan set. So there's been various devices intended to help the living speak with the spirit realm really just about as long as there's been recorded history. As Polly just alluded to, if this were a global history of spirit writing and communication like that would be a whole different episode. During the rise of spiritualism in the United States specifically, there was an explosive growth and the number and the variety of these kinds of devices. They all had their pros and cons, but towards the end of the nineteenth century, one approach to solving transdimensional communication was embraced by believers and nonbelievers alike. It is still popular today, and that is, of course spirit boards or wegi boards as they came to be known, and their commercial offerings. So just as a level set in case you don't know what we're talking about, a weed to board or a talking board or spirit board, you'll hear all of those phrases used. Is a printed board. Sometimes it's painted, sometimes it's printed and then varnished. There are lots of different ways they can be made. It's usually rectangular or round with letters, numbers and a few words printed on it. We're gonna talk a little bit more about specifics in a bit, But then there is a planchett that sits on top of the board and players gently rest their fingertips on the plan schett. To play. The players ask questions and then wait for answers to be spelled out by the plantchett moving across the board to land on the various options. Where do these answers come from? Well, that is part of the fun, and it's been actually a matter of debate since the beginning. In spring of six, an Associated Press news article that was first published in the New York Tribune and then got picked up and appeared in papers all across the US mentioned spiritualists using what was referred to as a talking board. This article ran under the title the New plan Set. If you've ever played with a Wegia board, you know that the plant set is a little tool for the board. It's normally shaped like an inverted heart. There's a small pointer window that it moves across the game board to select letters or words as a means of communication. But before the development of the Regia plant set, the object that was usually called a plan set was shaped the same basic way, but it had a pencil attached to it vertically at one of the points where it was touching the surface, so that surface would be a piece of paper, not a board with printing on it. That older version of the plant sett was invented in France in the eighteen fifties as a divination tool, thus the name it means little plank in French. As the plant Sjett moved across the surface, that pencil on it produced writing on the piece of paper, writing typically more like a scribble that you had to discern and interpret. It was really subject to different interpretations. Yes, and we're giving you all of this background on the plant set because it helps to understand the opening of that eight eight six article Tracy just mentioned, which starts out Planchett is simply nowhere, said a Western man at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, compared with the new scheme of communication being used in Ohio. I know of whole communities that are wild over the talking board, as some of them call it. I have never heard a name for it, but I have seen and heard some of the most remarkable things about its operations, things that seemed to pass all human comprehension or explanation. The write up goes on to share an interview with this unnamed Western man about the board and the plant set. The description is gonna sound really familiar. He sketched out a board for the reporter just about exactly what you would see if you bought a commercially available version today. According to this interviewee, it was about eighteen by twenty inches. The board included the alphabet numerals zero to nine, the yes and no options, and then, according to this account, the words good eve and good night, which sounds like the same thing to me, So like, what uh to use this? There needed to be quote, a little table three or four inches high with four legs. According to the interviewee quote, anyone can make the whole apparatus in fifteen minutes with a jack knife and a marking brush. You can see this would be a lot faster and maybe easier than trying to decipher scribbles that had been created with the original style of plant set. Yeah, and to be clear, that little table four inches high he's talking about is what would become the Wegia plan chet. The four inches high seems very tall to me and like it might careen around into kind of a tippy way. But listen, I wasn't there. Uh. This whole right up though, is pretty thorough in terms of just describing how the board was used. It kind of reads almost like a game manual. The Western man describes taking the board in your lap across from another person, and each person then grasping what he called the little table today as we said, we'd call that the plan chet, and then asking the question are there any communications? According to this account quote, pretty soon you think the other person is pushing the table. He thinks you are doing the same. He told the reporter that the communication starts with the use of yes or no and then progresses to spelling out more detailed replies to questions. The only real difference in this description to the way a Weegi board functions today is that the users would look for where the legs of the table or the plan chet landed on the board instead of having that clear window to see what letters centered in it. This created some confusion and people would have to re ask questions because of course two legs could be touching letters at the same time. But the account reads quote, some remarkable conversations have been carried on until men have become a measure superstitious about it. This ap article really sets out the whole life that the spirit board would have because It also offers some cautionary tales about its dangers. The interviewee mentions a man named Jack who became so distressed at his family's obsession with this talking board that he burned it. Allegedly, when the wife had it replaced and asked what happened to the first one, the new talking board spelled out, Jack burned it. This account mentions valuable business information being communicated, and even the possibility that a person not touching the plan set could silently ask a question if two other people were touching it, and that the answer to that silent question would still be spelled out. This had become hugely popular in a lot of Ohio towns, and according to the rite up, it was replacing card games at parties as an amusement. All all of the superstitious stuff, all of all of the functioning. But this article also mentions the bias with which people approach the board, although it doesn't call it that, Western man merely says quote. There are, of course any number of nonsensical and irrelevant answers spelled out, but the workers pay little heed to them. If the answers are relevant, they talk get over with a superstitious awe. This entire thing that we've been discussing has so many ingredients about what the board was, what it could do, and how informative and or spooky it could be that if it hadn't come out several years before the commercial release of Luigia, it would be easy to think it was sort of a nineteenth century viral ad campaign in the style of the Blair Witch Project. So in just a minute, we'll be talking about a talking board that made its way to the White House. But first we will pause for a sponsor break. In the second half of six that was the year that article we mentioned in the first section appeared. The New York Times ran a very brief but really interesting note under the headline the President's witch Board. It turns out that when Grover Cleveland got married, the Lemonster Massachusetts company W S. Read to Wait in Manufacturing sent him what the company called a witch board as a wedding gift. The President's response was all that was included in the Times blurb with the header of Executive Mansion, Washington, June twelfth, six It reads, quote, Dear Sir, I acknowledge with thanks the witch board you sent me as a wedding present. I accept it as an evidence of kind feeling and friendship, and can admire it for its ingenuity, but I hardly think that I shall immediately test its power to quote disclose the past and foretell the future. Yours very truly, Grover Cleveland. So that date is important. It is an account of a company making a witch board for a president in eighteen eighties six. As we look at the rise of the Luigia board, it's notable that this one predated it, but it's not clear if this was a product that was intended for a short run of production, or whether it was some kind of prototype or one off. We do know that WS Reid did not start offering the talking boards widely to consumers until a few years after that. So this leads us to the point that there are varying stories of the invention of the Wigia board. Many even among a very small group of men who were part of the first big manufacturer and marketing push. The story varies, and it has changed over the years. Now. Some of that is probably just a matter of memory failure, but some of it was due to legal disputes and various stakeholders trying to ensure the story that circulated supported their claims. That ap article that we were talking about earlier was seen by Charles Kennard, or it probably was. He was certainly aware of the growing interest and talking boards. Canard was a businessman who was born in Delaware in eighteen fifty seven, and he had made an early fortune by developing a fertilizer made from bone meal that was rich in phosp fit. But then Kennard and his partner, Henry clay Chase kind of faltered in their fertilizer business that was a very competitive industry. Other problems like drought had impacted their production and they lost the plant. Kennard moved to Baltimore, Maryland, to start over once more in fertilizer. The change in market really didn't help his efforts, though, so soon he turned from fertilizer to real estate, which was more successful. The address of his Baltimore fertilizer factory would become important to the Wegis story. It was the address he used to form the company that he would use to manufacture them. That company, which was exclusively intended to make and sell what would become WIGI boards, was the Kennard Novelty company that was started in eight ninety by Charles Kinnard and four other businessmen. So it was Kennard, Colonel Washington Booey, Harry Wells Rusk, John F. Green, and William H. A. Moppin. To be clear, no one involved with the Canard Novelty Company was a spiritualist. They were businessmen who saw interest in a product that they thought they could capitalize on them. There was another person in the mix early on who did not become a part of Canard Novelty. That was ec Wright, who made his living building cabinets and coffins. During a period before Kennard opened his business in Baltimore, he was in Chestertown, Maryland, and had an office right next to Rice, and Cannard is said to have described these talking boards that he had heard about. He asked Rice to make some. This would lead to Rice later claiming that he was the inventor of the Weigia board and that Kennard had taken it from him and started his business. Cannard did sell the boards in Chestertown for a few years immediately following that eight article, but he clearly had a larger vision for the scope of his sales efforts. Another important figure in the mix was a man named Elijah Bond. Kennard met Bond, who was a lawyer after he moved to Baltimore, and it was Bond who applied for the first patent on Theligia board. Bond's sister in law was instrumental in securing that patent and for naming the board. You've probably read, or maybe worked out for yourself, that the word luigia is a combination of the French and German words for yes, we and yeah. That may be true, but the lore for the name's origin, as given by Cannard Novelty, was very much different. According to their story, the board named itself with the help of a medium, and that medium just so happened to be Elijah Bond's sister in law, a woman named Helen Peters. According to the publicized story, the group held a sort of seance with Helen leading it, and they asked the board what to call it. It's spelled out O U I J A. When asked for a meaning to the word, the boards told the assembled group that it meant good luck. But there is a second version of that story that is not so mystical. And it may just involve bad eyesight. According to notes that were exchanged among those businessmen, Helen Peters was wearing a locket with a woman's picture in it, which had the word Wuijia over her image. A Smithsonian article from by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie suggests that this actually could have been a portrait of the woman known as Weeta, which was the pen name of English novelist Maria Louise remay Remy would have been alive when the Wigia board was named, and she would have been in her early sixties, so it's possible because she was also, you know, a pretty outspoken feminist, and a lot of women really followed her story, so it's certainly possible Helen Peters had her picture in a locket. Whether or not Helen Peters really tried to channel spirits to name the board, that will probably remain a mystery. But she was present at a demonstration of the Weigia board at the U S. Patent Office. This would have been a really unusual patent filing, because how do you prove that a printed board with the plan chet is capable of channeling messages from the spirit realm? According to family lore. When Elijah Bond and Helen Peters went to the patent office, the clerk they spoke with was worried that he'd become a laughing stock if he issued a patent on their application. So to prove that the board worked, the investigating patent officer asked that Bond and Peters use it to spell out his first name. They did successfully. The clerk was allegedly a little shaken, and Bond received the patent on February tenth. But it's worth noting here that Bond was a patent attorney, he probably knew everyone in the patent office, or he would have been able to acquire such a formation pretty easily. Something that's interesting, though, is if you read the text of the patent, it does not really give any mention of channeling spirits. It mentions questions being answered by the board, but it gives no explanation of how that takes place. The patent summary reads quote, My invention relates to improvements in toys or games, which I designate as an Uigia or Egyptian luck board, and the objects of the invention are to produce 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 hand, so that the answers are designated by letters on the board. The invention consists of a board of suitable thickness, having the letters of the alphabet printed, painted, engraved, or affixed upon it in any suitable manner, but flush with the sir fists, and also the numerals from one to zero inclusive, as well as other configurations, and in conjunction, therewith of a peculiarly shaped table having legs and a pointer, and said table operated by the hand when placed upon said board, all of which will be more fully described here and after, and specifically pointed out in the claims reference being had to the accompanying drawings and the letters marked there on. It's an interesting patent because there's no here's how this works. It's just like I invented two things. They go together. But there's nowhere in the patent even when you read, like into the deeper discussion in details, is there here's how it works. Um, you can see why this would have been a tricky one. But once that patent was secured, Bond assigned it to Charles Kinnard and William H. Mobbin. They then sold the patent to the Canard Novelty Company, which applied for a trademark on the name we Jim. Although the company bore his name, Kennard was the general manager, he wasn't the president. Harry Wells Rusk was president. Was because he had more experience in that type of thing. Colonel Washington Booie was the treasurer, and he also held a controlling interest in the company, having provided more of the capital than anyone else. Are going to talk about Colonel Booey a bit more in just a moment after we hear from the sponsors. That keeps stuffy missed in history class going. Colonel Washington Booie the third was born into a wealthy family. He was well educated. He had become a prominent customs figure with an appointment to the role of Acting Surveyor of the Port of Baltimore. Role he was appointed to you by President William McKinley. When Buoye and his four colleagues founded the Canard Novelty Company, there was a point in their incorporation papers that would become really significant. Point five of those papers stated quote. We do further certify that the said corporation will be managed by five directors, and that Harry Wells Rusk, Charles W. Knard, William H. A. Moppin Washington Booey, and John F. Green are the names of the directors who will manage the concerns of the said corporation for the first year. We're mentioning that here because it is going to come back up in just a moment. We Ji boards started appearing in newspaper advertisements in that timing is not surprising. It's right when spiritualism was having a major surge in the US, and the advertising really played on that. For example, one ad read Wigia, the Egyptian luck Board, a talking board. The Wigia is without doubt the most interesting, remarkable, and mysterious production of the nineteenth century. It's operation are always interesting and frequently invaluable, answering as it does questions concerning the past, present and future with marvelous accuracy. It furnishes never failing amusement and recreation for all classes, while for the scientific or thoughtful, it's mysterious movements invite the most careful research and investigation. Apparently forming the link which unites the known with the unknown, the material with the immaterial. It forces upon us the conviction that great truth was contained in the statement of the Danish prince there are more things in heaven and earth Horatio than where ever dreamed of in thy philosophy. Although the Wigia board may have caused some to fear it, it was really kind of seen as a harmless pastime right from its introduction in a society column in the Denton Journal of Denton, Maryland on January thirty. One of the entries casually mentions the board right alongside other innocuous games. Quote Wigia cards, tiddly winks, and a delightful repast were the features of the entertainment given the Thursday Evening Sociable by Mr and Mrs G. A. Dekine this week. A week before that, there was another mentioned, this time in the Catoctin Clarion of Mechanics Town, Maryland that ran an opinion piece titled the Wuijia Craze. The brief write up called it the latest fad and made it clear that, in the opinion of the writer, only people who were prone to superstitious behavior would take it seriously. That article goes on to say, quote, it is, in its way a most convincing proof of the existence of a vein of superstition, more or less potent to control belief in every human. It mentions that there are two Wigia boards in the town, and that while reports are flooding in about the quote marvelous answers that people are getting through them. The writer's doubtful concludes with quote, at our first opportunity, these questions will be asked, and should the answers astound us, we will honestly confess it. For the present, we doubt Both of this and the previous Society column piece ran before Cannard Novelty had their patents. Yeah, it seems like they probably had made these boards and given them to people in society that they knew because these are all businessmen to play with, and that like kind of drove their early word of mouth advertising. There is an element in the multifaceted marketing identity of the Weichi board that offers an interesting case study in the crossover of business and spiritualism, because the board was marketed both as an amusement or a toy, as well as an object that just might connect people with the afterlife of the spirit realm. The net was cast really, really wide to catch all kinds of different levels of interest in such a thing, ing people who believed in spiritualism wanted them, people who thought it would just be a fun parlor game wanted them, and kids wanted them. Some mediums started using them, but there were plenty who did not appreciate the fact that a d I Y seance tool had been made available to the masses, thus cutting into their business. We mentioned in our recent episode on Rose Makenburg that she had warned people that the number of people fraudulently claiming to be psychics jumped up in times when there was panic and war and economic uncertainty. The same holds true for sales of Luigi Board, so in times following some kind of social crisis, sales would rise. The Luigia Board had a great success right out of the gate. Demand was already outpacing production, so a second factory had to be opened, and then more. The company opened up factories in New York, Chicago, and London, in addition to the two in Baltimore. But there was another big change for Canard Novelty Company in eight nine two a huge change in leadership, instructure, and in name. Booie and Rusk reorganized the entire company, and in the process they pushed out the other three founders. That meant that Charles Kennard, for whom it was named, was no longer part of the organization. But it also didn't stay Canard Novelty for very long because Booie and Rusk also changed the name of the company two Uigion Novelty Company, and they moved it out of the offices that Kennard had established at two twenty South Charles Street to a new location. It almost seems that Buoye, who had the controlling interest because of his larger financial contribution to the startup, had had a plan in mind all along to take over the company completely, thus our mention of that we're going to run it together for one year clause. But perhaps the most significant change was that they put a man named William Fold into a position of head of operations. William Fold had been part of the early Kennard Novelty Company team. He was hired as an employee and also became a stockholder. He was also good friends with Booie and Rusk. He and Booie were particularly close, and this friendship would lead to a lot of opportunities for Fold. William Fold, who was born in eighteen seventy, was said to have been imaginative and inventive from the very beginning of his life. As a kid, he made up games to entertain his nine siblings, So it seems sort of right that he landed a job at a company that made what many people considered to be a game. He got his first job at the company as a shop foreman, according to one report. Others list him as a varnish er. Some other accounts kind of combine those two and say, like, yes, he was doing things like varnishing, but he was also overseeing other people in the shop. But in any case, it definitely was a massive jump up the ladder to suddenly be named general manager. Once he moved into a leadership position at Wegia novelty company, Fold started filing more patent applications, making improvements to the wegi board. Ultimately, he'd file several patent and trademark applications, all of them as a means to protect the company's legal interests. Five years into folds tenure running the company, things once again shifted significantly, so up to that point, Colonel Washington Buey and Harry Wells Rusk were still involved in the day to day operations of the company, but they were both ready to retire, although they didn't really want to give up that really nice revenue stream that they got from Wigi Board. So the Wegia Novelty Company assigned its assets to Buoy and Rusk proportionate to their holdings of the company. That meant that went to Buoy and the remainder to Rusk and Fold opened up the Wigia Board to licensees approved by the Regia Novelty Company. One of those licensees was William Fold. Really it was William Fold and his brother Isaac Fold, under a company named Isaac Fold and Brother. Their license was agreed to in July and had a term of three years. William and Isaac manufactured wigi boards as well as other novelties during that time, but when the three year term ended, Williams next move just destroyed his relationship with his brother. Isaac. Fold and Brother were not given the option to continue to manufacture Wigi boards, but the Wegia Novelty Company did enter into a new licensing agreement. This time with William fold only excluding Isaac. There's a little bit of a Chicken or the Egg situation here, because we don't know if William and Isaac had a falling out that led to this business decision, or if the business decision was a betrayal that rendered their relationship as brothers irreparable. We're gonna get into what happened after all of this uh in our next episode, and in part two of this two part episode, there is a lot more coming. Like I said at the top, we will also talk about UH, some court cases involving which boards, some pop culture references to each boards, and some psychology of it, as well as more corporate intrigue on the next one. But in the meantime, I have a little brief listener mail. This is from our listener e J, and it is about our WEIG episode, which I mentioned at the top of this episode. I have been saving it for when we finally got to Wigi boards UH, just to have a little nice bookender. So this is a brief emale. It says, Hi, my name is e J, and I love your podcast. I listened to it every week. I wanted to write and tell you about Wednesday's episode about we G. I had one of the craziest days of my life this Wednesday, and I got into the car after work crying. I'm sorry, I have been there. It's a really terrible feeling. But e J says, my mood turned around when I turned on your podcast and it was about my favorite photographer of all time. No one knows about him, and I love to hear people talking about his unique work. It was a glimmer of good in what seemed like an awful day. Thank you for giving me that little bit of joy. Another thing about Weg that many people don't know is that they suspected that he had mob connections. He would show up minutes after mob hits and would say it was because of the police scanner, but a lot believed he was tied into the mob. I thought that was a cool fact that not many people know about. Thank you for giving me this podcast to listen to each week, e J. E J one, I'm so sorry you had a bad day too. I'm so thankful we could help in our small way, uh and turn it around a little bit. Three. I had heard that that mob connection thing, but I could never find any thing beyond sort of rumory stuff about it, so I didn't include in the episode, but it's sure makes sense given that he did, as you said, show up right as things seemed to be happening. Uh, and I well before the police. We did mention he got to a lot of crime scenes before the police did, which seemed a little I don't know if suspicious is the right word, but a little confusing. That is, after all, how he got his name. We do because they joked that he was psychic. Um, So thank you for sharing that with us, and I'm glad, like I said, that we can help make a bad day a little bit better. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at i heeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History And if you would like to subscribe to the podcast and you haven't gotten around to it yet, it is the easiest thing in the world. I promise you can do that on the I heart Radio app or anywhere else you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,