Spirit Boards and the Rise of the Ouija, Part 2

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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 Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, we're still talking about wag aboards. We are. We've promised listeners some corporate intrigue at the top of episode one, and we've already given some in that episode, but you're about to get a little more. We are also going to cover in today's part two some legal and pop culture appearances of the wig board in the twentieth century. And we're going to handle the little discussion of psychology. Heads up, if you skipped part one, none of the people were about to talk about are going to make any sense? Yeah, we do. Just jump right into the middle of something right here. Uh, and that is that. We ended part one with William Fold and Wegia Novelty Company choosing not to continue their licensing deal with Isaac Fold and brother. This cut Isaac totally out of the business and gave his brother William licensing rights as a solo entity. There was also a second part of William Fold's license that would cause even more problems for people who were not William Fold. In two, Harry Wells Rusk sold out his interest in the company to Booie, and Booie had granted William Fold the only manufacturer license for Wegia boards. He was the only person who had a right to make Spirit boards using the Region name. But he didn't only manufacture Wegia boards. He was tired of dealing with competitors on the market. We'll talk about those momentarily. So Folk thought that he could undercut his competitors by introducing his own Nonwigia talking boards to the market at a lower price than competitors. This other non Wegia board was the Oracle board. So not only was full the only man license to make and distribute Weigia boards, he also got the largest slice of the competitor market. Suddenly, the company, and Fold in particular was making money just hand over fist and some of his former colleagues were kind of feeling like they had been shafted. I think that's a fair feeling. Yeah, Just in case anybody doesn't recall, Fold had been essentially an employee that was working in the shop manufacturing when he suddenly got put in charge of the company by Colonel Washington Booi, who had paid the most into the startup fund for the company because of their friendship. Definitely, some who you know helps your entire career situation going on. Uh And at this point he's gotten rid of everyone else involved, so he's the only one making profits from it, as well as paying royalties to Boo and Rusk. So after Charles Kennard had been pushed out of the company, you were called. The first Wigia board making company was named after him. He had moved to Chicago, Illinois and started another company, Northwestern Toy and Manufacturing Company. This had actually been a company that was a branch unit of Kennard before the reord, so it had been making Wigia boards. This company was then also in transition because it had been cut and Kennard thought that they already had the set up they could manufacture their own talking boards, and so they developed and sold what they called the Volo talking board. It was similar to the Wigia, of course, but it had a few key differences. The layout was pretty different as these things go. The letters appeared in a funnel shape at the center of the board, and the numerals were split into two columns, one on either side of that funnel. It also featured an option that I thought was quite clever for a weather report from the beyond, because the words clear year and rain were included as options situated at opposite sides of the board. And despite having made changes to the design and lay out, the Volo was still too similar to the Wigia board. Wigia Novelty Company made a legal complaint of infringement and Volo production stopped after only three months. Cannard tried again. He had started making a talking board under the name of America Toy Company back in Baltimore and with partners J. M. Raffle and Albert Strobel. This board was called in a Jilly. Colonel Bowie William Fold and Wigia Novelty were once again ready with legal action, and the Agilly was gone almost as quickly as the Volo board had been. So he not only had been pushed out of the company that had once borne his name, he had been legally blocked from making similar products. While Fold amassed just a huge fortune after taking the Helm Elijah Bond. He was the lawyer who had secured the first patent on the Wigia board. Tried his hand at making his own talking boards with little success. In seven he introduced what was called the Nirvana Board under the Swastika Novelty Company. This was obviously well before the rise of the Nazi Party and the Swastikas association with it. Bond was likely trying to use the word Sanskrit origins as a way to bring an air of ancient mysticism to his board, which did feature a swastika in the design. Regardless, there were not very many of these made, and the Nirvana board was never a real contender for market share. Meanwhile, the battle between the Fold brothers continued and it kept going. William had formed the William Fold Manufacturing Company as the follow up to Isaac Fold and brother to continue production of Wigia boards. He filed for an injunction to keep Isaac from making Wigia boards and any other games that had been patented by William. There were several of the is that they had been making when they were still in business together. I really wish we could find out what happened between those two brothers. Um However, this injunction did not seem to dissuade Isaac Fold, who started making a talking board under the name Oriole in nineteen o four. It took him a long time to get the Oriole to production, though, all the way until nineteen nineteen when he founded the Southern Toy Company. But like everyone else who tried to compete with Wigia, his efforts were for not A judge ruled in nineteen twenty that William was the only brother who had a right to make Wigia boards. During testimony in Fold versus Fold, Colonel Washington Booey gave a statement that credited Rice, not Kennard, and not Fold for creating the Wigia board, though the company was the owner of the patent through bonds filing. William had gone to great lengths to assure his victory in this case. Again, that's nineteen twenty, and that argument started in nineteen o one, so it legally played out for nineteen years between these two brothers, and as things were reaching their fever pitch in, William had started writing letters to stores telling them that if they carried Isaac's Oriole board, they were in violation of his trademark. William Fold bought out Colonel Bowie in nineteen nineteen, the year before the legal battle between the brothers concluded. He'd also built a new, high dollar three story factory to modernize production and the press. Following his legal victory over his brother, it was often touted that William had made a million dollars as the maker of Wigia boards. He was always insistent that he did not believe in the Wigia board as a spiritual connection. He told reporters who visited him at home, quote, believe in the Weigia board, I should say not. I'm no spiritualist. I'm a Presbyterian. Yeah. It's interesting because some of those articles um actually pump up the number in terms of how much money he made to three million. In any case, it had to have just been like salt in the wound already to his brother and anybody else he had been in business with. In ninety, despite having made all of that money, William Fold sued the Collector of Internal Revenue in Baltimore, claiming that his excise taxes had been overstated by two hundred dollars. That number was based on the table of taxes for goods that were categorized as games or amusements. Because the corporate image of the Luigia had always straddled the fence between amusement and mysticism, Fold's lawyers took the tack that this wasn't a game because there was no opponent. If the tax collector wanted to classify it as a game, that would only work if they were willing to recognize that spirits were the opponents. Yes, this absolutely does conveniently ignore the fact that there are plenty of games like Solitaire that a person can play without an opponent. But the real wavering point of the court was the fact that the Wigia board was already being used by psychologists to study the unconscious mind, so it didn't really seem right to consider it just a game. However, because the company sold it as an amusement, the tax assessment was ruled correct. Fold appealed the decision right up through the court system until it was thrown out by the Supreme Court. Plenty of games are used in scientific studies, so this is a kind of weird argument. To me, Well, it is a weird argument, and I think the real foundation of how weird it is is that fold in the Wigia The various companies that made Wigia did try to straddle that line between mysticism and game to get the greatest market share. But then, like if you categorize your thing a certain way. That's what it is, and that's how you get taxed. And then they're like no, no, no, But it's also this um you can't play both sides. That is definitely a case of corporate trying to have its cake and eat it too. In William Fold was on the roof of his factory supervising the replacement of a flagpole when the support that he was leaning on gave way. He managed to grab onto the ledge of one of the windows for a moment, but he couldn't maintain his grip and he fell to the ground. He broke an arm, a leg, five ribs, and also sustained a concussion. He was rushed to Johns Hopkins, where he died from his injuries, but on his deathbed, Fold reportedly asked his three children to promise to keep the company going, which they did. Coming up, we'll talk about a nineties newspaper article that had a lot of questionable details. First, we will take a quick sponsor break before we get to that. Four. So, in the late stages of World War two, journalist James P. Connelly wrote an article for the Baltimore Sun about the jump in Wigia board sales during the war. He interviewed William Arthur Folds, son of William Fold, for the piece, and there are a lot of inaccurate details in it. According to the article, which ran on May eighteenth, nine, folds father invented the Wigia board and held the first patent. We know all of that's incorrect. When asked why the Wigia board was once again experiencing a surge in sales, William Arthur Fold stated quote, we have done a lot of missionary work on it through the years, and of course it is the times. Also in times like these, people take up things like the Wigia to find out what their sons and husbands are doing on the other side of the world. We don't put it out to be used in a serious way. It's just an amusement, that's all. There are even more details and the article that are out of step with the facts of the Weigia boards origins in early years, as is supported by documentation. William Arthur tells the wee Ya version of the board's name, but also embellishes the timeline of the game success. He says that the board only had moderate success initially, but as World War One approached, the board itself told his father, William Fold, quote to prepare for big business, said it was this message that catalyzed the expansion of the factories. This reminds me of all of the soft drink manufacturers that say they got the recipe and a dream. Yes, it's very much like that um and like the Folds were really good at marketing. But this is just documented. It's not so, he said. It's like wait, they expanded starting a year after they started selling these boards in eight So an interesting but brief sect and of the article includes some commentary from doctors on the rumors that Wegi boards could cause insanity. One unnamed doctor told the paper that he did not think that Wegi boards caused it, but he did think that they revealed it. Although William Arthur Fold was apparently quite dedicated to the company and his siblings Catherine and Hubert were as well, eventually they sold it they all experienced their own failing health. Parker Brothers purchased it from them in nineteen sixty six. Parker Brothers move production of the Wigia from Baltimore to Salem, Massachusetts. The year after Parker Brothers acquired the company, two million Wigi boards were sold. Hasbro acquired Parker Brothers in and still manufacturers Wegi boards. Are they still made in Salem? Do you know? That's a good question. I'm not sure. Um. Well, I mean they're made in a lot of different places. I'm curious their main in factories all around the world. There might still be one in Salem, or I would think it would be outside of Salem because it's not that big a place. But maybe they have a warehouse district I'm not aware of. Um. But yeah, you can still literally go online and buy one. You can walk into a toy store if you can find a toy store and buy one. Uh. Any of your big box retailers that have toy sections usually have something like it. If not a Weigia trademark, then something very similar. Uh. Wija boards became part of popular culture more or less as soon as they were introduced. This isn't something new that like grew along with our ability to consume retail items at a shocking rate. It has always kind of been in the public consciousness. Norman Rockwell featured one in a Saturday Evening Post illustration for the cover. It features a man and a woman seated knee to knee with a wija board spread across their laps. One of the big appeals for wigia boards early on is that they were popular because the board set up had the requirement that the people involved would touch the plantchett uh and touch each other's knees, and all of this was creating a situation where there was a socially acceptable way for young couples to have kind of casual physical contacts. So which was a little flirty as well. Yeah, I didn't go like dive into the story of this painting, which is what's going to be on our social media for this episode, but it definitely looks like a couple on a date. Like, yes, there's not really a different way to interpret it. There were even some advertisements that were like geared towards young men of like buy a Wigi board for your lady. It was definitely like you could have a date where you could touch her and it would not be considered untoward. So not all the press appearances of the wegi board have been so charming, though. For more than a century, news accounts have included stories of people who used Wigi boards and ways that were considered questionable or silly, or sometimes even very dangerous. One of the earliest of these that popped up in my research was a notice in the Baltimore Sun about a divorce. This ran on March nineteen o five, so pretty early in all of this, and it read, quote, A decree of divorce separating Frank B. Aleck of Chicago from Mabel L. Aleck, now a resident of Columbus, Ohio, was amended today by Judge Aurora so as to give custody of the child of the couple to the husband. Mrs Aleck made no defense to charges that she consulted a WIGI board to determine on her actions in one theuigia was central to a defamation case in Chicago, when Mrs Frank Walter sued one of her friends for spreading rumors about her based on what the luigia had told her. Walter's friend, Mrs Albert Yost, claimed that her spirit board had identified Mrs Walter as the person who had burgled her home, and a quote to the Chicago Tribune, Mrs Walter stated, quote, you see, she accused me of burglarizing her house in November fifteenth, nineteen nineteen, stealing raisins, salt and a couple of pounds of apricots. She says she knows I did it because the Wegia told her Mrs Walter wanted ten thousand dollars for the injury to her reputation, but she did not win that suit. It sounds like somebody was low on supplies to make chewy cookies and like, was it mice? Maybe I know right? Um. There is a very convoluted murder case in New York in nineteen thirty that also brought the wigia board into the courtroom as part of the killer's defense. This one has some really tricky aspects to it, in a lot of racism because the murderer, Mrs Nancy Bowen, was reportedly a member of the Seneca Nations. And I'm saying reportedly because we don't know much more in terms of specifics, because news coverage of the day generally used descriptors of her that would absolutely be considered slurs today and often have very little meaning. But Bowen did murder the wife of sculptor Ri Merchant. The story gets more complicated because another woman, Lillian Jemmerson, was said to have goaded Bowen on through the use of awigia board. Using this novelty to convince Bowen that Clotil Marchian was a witch. Lillian, who went by Lila, had also provided the murder weapon, which was a hammer. Lila j Emmerson, who was also identified in reports as Seneca, posed from Martian in his sculptures representing people of Seneca Nation. During this trial, it came out that Lila and Ari had been having an affair. Are Shan testified on the stand that many of the affairs he had had with what are simply referred to and pretty much all the articles as Native women was a quote professional necessity, and that his wife had known about his extramarital relationships. This whole story is such a ball of things to get irate about validly, so um, his professional necessity is like, well, that was the only way I could get them to pose nude for me, to which I say, I don't like you. Um. There were two trials involved before all of this was said and done, because the first was declared a mistrial. That was because Lilah became sick and they couldn't finish. Bowen eventually played guilty to manslaughter. She, of course, uh was found guilty because she had pled and she served one year in prison. Lillian Jimmerson was acquitted, but all of the press coverage involved had the effect of enforcing to social beliefs of the day. One was that the wigia board was just a silly toy and more nefarious too, that Indigenous people were stupid enough to fall for the mythos that it was not. Marshawn incidentally married his deceased wife, Clote, Tilda's eighteen year old niece, not long after the second trial ended. Another murder in November of nineteen thirty three involved instructions from a weegia board, and this was especially tragic. Earnest J. Turley was shot by his fifteen year old daughter. Maddie. A teenager, testified that during a seance with her mother over a wegia board, the board had instructed her to shoot her father because their mother, Irene Turley, was destined to marry quote a young cowboy. Mattie also stated that her mother had commented at the time that quote the board should not be denied. Maddie led guilty to an attempted murder and juvenile court and was sent to a reform school. Yeah, it's extra sad because when it happened. He did not die immediately, and he presumed that it had been an accident that her gun had accidentally discharged. Dorothy Irene Turley that was her full name, who had been a beauty queen in her youth that comes up in all of the articles, was charged with intent to murder. She tried to have this case dismissed several times but was unsuccessful, and in June of nineteen thirty four, after sixteen hours of jury deliberation, Mrs Turley was found guilty. She was sentenced to ten to twenty five years in the state penitentiary. On a lighter note, the Luigia board appeared on I Love Lucy in nineteen fifty one in an episode from the first season that's titled simply the Seance. The episode starts with Lucy talking about numerology to Ricky, but through a series of mad cap events, the Ricardo's end up hosting a seance in their home to help seal a business deal with the theatrical producer who was into the spiritual and is trying to contact somebody named Tilly on the other side. This is obviously an old show, but it's just perpetually on in syndication and reruns and stuff everywhere. We don't want to spoil the ending in case anybody listening wants to go watch it. The point though, really, besides the plots, just to show that the Wegia Board was not taken seriously at all. Lucy was just working this magic, pretending to be the voice of the spirit a very obvious way. Yeah, that's not that's not the reveal. The reveal of that episode is very funny to me, and I still laugh every time I see it, which is why I don't want to give it away in case nobody has had it. I want you to have that moment where you realize what's going on. Uh. And in Night, Theligia Board was invoked in yet another legal case. This one is very odd and it involves a will. When Helen dow Peck died in five at the age of eighty three, her relatives anticipated that she would have left them each a portion of her pretty considerable fortune. But when Helen's will was read, there was a surprise in the form of a very unusual bequest. Peck left the two members of her household staff one thousand dollars each, and then the remainder of her money, a hundred and seventy eight thousand dollars, was to go to a man named John Gail Forbes, but no one knew who John Gail Forbes was, not even Mrs Peck. She included information in her will that the name had been spelled out by a Wigia board when she and her late husband, Frank Peck, had been playing with one almost forty years earlier. In nine Helen believed that Peck was a real person who was alive, and that he was in a mental institution because he was telepathic, and that he had used that telepathy to contact her through the Wigia board. Initially, although Pecks nieces and nephews contested the will, authorities insisted that there be a thorough search for this John Gail Forbes. They needed to go find him. Newspaper articles ran all across the country encouraging anyone named John Gail Forbes to reach out. And although this strange bequest may have come as a total surprise to Helen's relatives, she had mentioned this man some of her closest friends over the years, and among her effects were notes about each time she believed she had had contact with him. And that dated back at least to the nineteen thirties. Helen had also made a provision in her will that if Mr. Forbes could not be found, the money should be used to start a John Gail Forbes Memorial Fund. That fund would help identify people who were classified as insane but were actually telepathic. After several years of searching for any indication of Forbes being a real person, Peck's will was rejected by the probate court. That happened in nineteen fifty eight, and at that point her estate was split up among her heirs. Now, I do love the idea of setting up a memorial fund for a person that never existed as a joke, and I'm just telling you I'm thinking hard and seriously about that. We are going to talk next about the film that usually comes up as a turning point in the wigi boards image after we first hear from the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history class. Going throughout the early twentieth century, even though there were, as we've noted, some serious legal cases that invoked the Wigia board, it still had kind of a silly reputation as a game, and when people claimed they had used it to talk to spirits. They were usually not taken seriously or they were simply written off as crazy. But starting in nine three with the movie The Exorcist, Wuiji boards started to be featured in horror films, and suddenly there were plenty of people who seemed genuinely concerned about the possibility that this game could open up access to demonic spirits. In case you have not seen it, we're giving away nothing. It's at the very beginning in The Exorcist to the character of Reagan tells her mother that she uses the Wigia board to talk to an entity named Captain Howdy. In our episode on the case of Roland Doe, that was the real world case that inspired the book and then the film The Exorcist, we also talked about how the boy involved was said to have been introduced to the Wigia Board by his aunt, who he tried to contact through the board after her death, and that the church believed that that was how he became possessed. Since then, the Wigia board has been characterized as a more sinister tool of darkness and a variety of media, including horror films. Some of them are simply titled Wega There's also a very campy looking one titled Weija Shark, which I had not heard of until Holly mentioned it. Holly has never watched there. I can't I can't wait. I literally cannot wait. I was like yelling at Brian in the middle of the night. I was like, there's no Regia Shark movie. As I mentioned, though, the Wegia board is still sold as a novelty. I haven't been in a toy store or toy aisle in a while, but I super remember seeing them next to things like Candyland. This gets to the next question, though. If it's a novelty, right, what is really happening when you play with a Wigia board or a similar game. There have been many, many different explanations given over the decades for how a Weigia board works, and if you accept that it's nothing mystical, then what explains the experiences that some people have when using one. So it turns out there's been a pretty clear sense of what is going on just about since the Wegi board first appeared on the market, or at least there have been a number of pretty plausible ideas. The Wegia board and its relatives were definitely not believe to be supernatural conduits by everybody. There were probably more skeptics than believers even at the height of the spiritualist movement in the United States. Even before the Uigia board rose to popularity, scientists were examining the paranormal and supernatural through a critical and scientific lens. Dr A. Campbell Clark wrote an article on automatic writing for the British Journal of Medicine in eighteen ninety four, which opened with quote, A good deal of brain energy has been and is being expended in studying the phenomena of so called spiritualism. The hypnotic furor is replaced for the present by the revival of the spiritualistic. But outside the throng so possessed are thoughtful observers not carried away by the new cult, observing and reflecting carefully and searching critically for the truth through the maze of error and superstition. Automatic writing was a popular element of spiritualist practices in the nineteenth and early to one of centuries. The idea was that people could write without consciously doing so, often in an almost trance like state. Sometimes a person would sit down with the necessary implements for writing and then would focus on something else, usually something mystical in nature, with the hopes that an automatic writing session would happen. While behaviors like automatic writing have been around for centuries and in other parts of the world, in the time that the US was in its spiritualism rise, it became very, very popular. A lot of people believed it was a way that the dead might speak through the living to physically convey a message. Just as the plan chet's evolution from a pencil version to the pointer version used with the talking board sped up the process of communication, it alleviated the need to decipher scribbly writing. The talking board also offered a faster tool than automatic writing, sort of side stepped trying to make out anybody's penmanship. But the idea of unconscious communication persisted here as well. There were definitely people who believed that if you got to a place where you were unconscious of the plant set and the board before you, it would move unconsciously as a spirit communicated. The Baltimore Sun ran a number of articles and op ed pieces in the early twentieth century about the Wigi board, which indicate pretty deep skepticism. Because the Wigi board is considered to have been born in Baltimore. It makes sense that the Sun would have an ongoing interest in it as the subject of articles. In February of nine nine, the Wigia board is mentioned in a Baltimore Sun article titled true Stories of the Supernatural Told by Readers of the Sun. This one has sort of a scientific vent, stating in the early paragraphs quote the strange force does not lie in the Wigi board, the plant set, or the table, but in some unexplained faculty of the human mind, which is called into play by the quietude, the expectancy and receptive nous of its attitude, the plant jet, or other instruments merely serving as a convenient means of expression. This account, written by a reader going only by the initials s M, is about using the wegia as a tool to unlock psychic channels and describes the Wegia board giving answers to questions posed to suggest that it is quote hampered by your wills. The Baltimore Evening Sun included a query about the function of the Wigia board in its editor Answers section on August twenty three, nineteen eleven. To the query can you explain to me how words are spelled out on the Wigia board. The editor replied, quote, there is nothing at all occult or mysterious about the Wigi board. Its motion is due to the fact that few persons are able to keep their hands in so constrained a position for any considerable time. Soon or late, someone in the up is sure to move the board, and once it starts, it keeps going. It spells out definite words in two ways. Sometimes the strong, if not fully conscious, desire of a believer helps it along. At other times the stimulation is furnished by a humorous scoffer. Both automatic writing and the spelling out of messages through a wegia plant set have been analyzed from a scientific point of view. This included as part of Freud's psychodynamic theory because of Freud's theories were just kind of out there. Has a note uh. It's come under criticism for a variety of reasons. He may have been onto something with psychodynamic theory, although the specific drivers of what he thought was happening seem a little bit off. Freud believed that people's unconscious behaviors are expressing childhood experiences like trauma, and it does seem like the unconscio mind is an important part of the puzzle, although it maybe more about things you haven't realized you learned at some point in your life other than just a childhood experience. In more recent years, some very interesting psychological experiments have been conducted as examinations of the behavior in psychology of Wijia play. A team of researchers from the University of British Columbia conducted a series of tests using the Wigia board and had some interesting findings. Study participants were asked questions about general knowledge topics, things like capitals of countries or details or dates of recent history events. These are pretty easy questions that most people would know. Participants answered in two ways. In one round they gave verbal answers and they were asked to make guesses when they weren't sure. Then, in another round, they were asked very similar questions, similar level of knowledge they would need, but they gave the answers using a Wigia board. The test participants believed they were playing with another person. The other participant was a plant who was not moving the plan chet. There's also a whole other thing with a robot that I'll talk about behind the scenes, but it's so hard to communicate and convey concisely that I left it out of this. But on the round where they verbally answered, participants got about half of the questions right. But on the round where they had a Wigi board involved, their success rate went up to sixty five. That may not sound like much, but it's really a significant difference. Ron Rensink, psychology and computer science professor, who was one of the researchers who wrote the paper on it, noted quote, if you don't think so, consider the difference of playing Roulette when the odds are fifty fifty versus six. I have various curiosities about, like how many people were in this research and where they all psych majors getting extra credit? Uh. This research team's work suggested that participants were accessing non conscious knowledge things they knew but weren't really aware that they knew. Sort of information that's been stored in the mind but which a person can't consciously pull up. The ideo motor effect is at play when somebody uses the board meeting their unconscious mind is moving the muscles needed to scoot the planchet around, so the user might feel like they are not the one doing it, even though it is their own body that's creating this motion. And the findings of this study were published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition. As researcher and co author Alleno Shoe put it, quote, these surprising findings suggests we have a powerful second intelligence resting beyond our conscious minds that can be accessed under the right conditions. We may believe we don't know an answer consciously, but actually have the right answer there in our subconscious Maybe we heard it on the radio but we weren't really paying attention in Scott g. Everley, pH d, who specializes in American intellectual history and has written ex sensibly about games and toys and play, wrote an article about ideomotor action and the Wigia Board for Psychology Today. At the end of the article, he notes that not everyone wants science to explain away their beliefs, and he offered a fun challenge, writing quote, I've written about the Wegia board before, and afterward I heard plenty from an adamant few who didn't like the news that there are no such things as ghosts. In response, I offered them this simple test of paranormal claims. Try inviting the Wigia believer to wear a blindfold, then quietly rotate the game half a turn, then ask some mischievous questions of your own devising. Be nice now if your subject has memorized the position of the letters or the yes and no answers on purpose or not, I promise you amusing and instructive results. There is a nice coda to all of this that I wanted to include. There has been a really positive outcome of the ongoing interest Inligia boards because of the research work that historian Ron Merch has done to tease out the actual facts about William Fold in the board's origin. He has a whole, huge website about William Fold which I read a lot of um. The feuding sides of the family, though once separated by William and Isaac's disagreements, have been reunited. Merch told Baltimore Magazine in descendants of both William and Isaac had reached out to him independently when he started sharing his work online and eventually asked Merch to connect them. They actually, it turned out, lived really close to each other, and they are reported to have been quote getting together regularly ever since. Just sort of a nice nice finale to that part of the story, which is a bit heartbreaking to know that two brothers and their business stuff tore them apart. Um. I have listener mail one is interesting because to me, uh, it involves the food that is very autumnal, although it's not only autumnal, but it puzzled me. They made me want to discuss it. Uh. This is from our listener, Nick, who writes, Hello, ladies, great podcast. Have listened to y'all since the start, including the previous hosts you had mentioned recently, the cheese is a good topping for apple pie. Have you ever heard of dousing your pie in milk? My granddad on my mom's side used to do both cheese and milk on the outcast of my generation of the family because I drowned my apple pie and milk. Generally, I prefer a birthday pie instead of cake. Always Apple. Keep up the good work. I enjoy it. Nick. I'm fascinated by this, and I will confess that initially I was like, why would you do that to pie? And then I was like, you're kind of making pie cereal and that actually sounds pretty good. I've never done this with milk, but there have been some pies that I have put cream on. Always it's somebody else's suggestion. Like we had this pie and we had this cream, and it was like, let's put some cream on the pie. Not whipped cream, like liquid cream, like the poor pouring cream that you would put in coffee. Yeah. Interesting, interesting, I mean that's naturally sweet. So that actually makes sense to me, right, Like if you get an Irish coffee in a bar, they're using that cream because it naturally adds sweetness and you don't have to add sugar. Um, this is it's fascinating to me. I'm like, soggy pie not so much. But again then I was like Cereal, I don't know, it's okay, it's okay. I mean right, Like I used to love to mash pie into ice cream and then kind of stir it until I made ice cream soup, which isn't that far afield from this, So I understand. And now I want to make a pumpkin pie and then mash it into various creamy substances and see what I like. Really, I just want excuse to see pumpkin pie. Um. That was a very brief email, so I will I also read another brief one. This one is from our listener Bryce, who writes, I just finished listening to the second part of the Charles Chapin episode, and I was not expecting to make a personal connection with the episode, but then you brought up the USS Main's explosion in Havannah Harbor. My third grade uncle, Charles Dwight Sixby, was the captain of the USS main when it sank. That story was one of my favorites to hear my great grandmother tell me whenever I visited or growing up, although her telling never included that Charles was wrong and the main was not exploded by a Spanish mine. I'm a huge fan of the podcast. They keep me entertained on my long commute to work. I look forward to every new episode that comes out. I will pay the kittie tax and include pictures of my two cats. Meogatron, which is the best cat name, is a four or five year old tortoise tabby mix who loves me from a distance. And then I recently adopted a year old gray American bob Tale named Sebastian. These cats are really painfully cute. I love a bob Tale. They're so sweet. Um, and you know torties have their own feelings about the world, and you, you, uh, you kind of have to play by their rules. Uh. Thank you so much to both of our listeners. She sent us mail this week. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as Missed in History, and you can subscribe to the podcast on the iHeart radio app wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from i Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.