Behind the Scenes Minis: Ouija, Ouija!

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Wegia boards a whole lot this week. We did. Uh, there are so many side streets that I had to pare down even in this narrowed focus. Um, some of which I wanted to talk about. One thing that I think is interesting is that some historians will note some of the licensing deals that we JA made early on that we're not to make boards, but to make other things like jewelry. And there was even a Wegia oil which was kind of a snake oil situation. Like this is a liniment you can put on anything. But I have to laugh because there's more we just stuff on the market now than there ever has been my own it all. You're wearing a Wei shirt right now. Yeah, I don't think this was licensed, but um yeah, I mean I literally have like three, three or four different cardigans that have Weiji boards on them, have a million shirts, I have dresses, I have purses, I have like compact. I love them like I love the iconography of it, and I think it's very fun um and I love that it's a game that has become associated with the supernatural. That just tickles me. But it just strikes me as funny. And I wonder what any of these men involved would think if it was like, yes, now we're making a Wiga version of I don't know, some sereal like there are so many weird things floating around in the world that have Weijia branding on them now, which is fine by me. I love weird novelty stuff, so that's right up my alley. But it does tickle me. I would love to get an antique bottle of Ego oil, but I think they're probably hard to come by. Probably. There are so many things about the Folds that I want to talk about. Yeah, one is that William Fold was not only working for Kennard and then Luigia Novelty and then his own company. He was also because of his association with Colonel Bowie, he also got a job in customs, so he was also making money that way. He ended up running for political office a couple of times, like he had a whole thing. He was working in customs until just a few years before he died. He finally retired from that job in so like, even though he was a millionaire at that point, theoretically, if the reports are correct, he didn't really need to keep that job and did, which I'm like, how lucrative was that job? Because they to me that doesn't sound like a a big job, but apparently it might have been. Um, I did not get into the fact that the five men who started canard novelty, Like if you tried to make a chart of how they were all connected to one another, you would have to draw so many weird lines that you would end up with like a white circle. I think because like in some cases like their children married the other one, and like this one's sister was actually working with this one, and like but one of the weird things, it's not really weird, but it's interesting. I mean, clearly, the key relationship there was this one between Colonel Washington Bowie and William Fold and that carried on generationally where even Um Washington Bowie Jr. Was William's attorney in every single case involving the Luigia Board. That hell yeah, and his um his son, so Colonel Bowie's grandson had mentioned in an account out that they would sit the children down him and his siblings and give them toy catalogs and asked them to circle any talking boards that might be infringing on patents and then they would go after them. So they were outsourcing their searches for for unlicensed Wuigia boards to their kids because kids love to look through toy catalogs, which is sure. And I'm of two minds. On the one hand, I'm like, this is an ingenious way to get a lot of information tackled with minds that are very obsessive anyway with your kids looking at toys. And on the other hand, I'm like, that's child labor. Um. But apparently, uh Washington, Booie Jr. And the lawyer never took any payment for any of his his cases that he did with Fold. I don't know why Booie took such a shine to Fold. I don't understand how that relationship started and how I mean he clearly basically like at some point had decided I'm going to make this man succes ausful because he did. Um. It's just fascinating. There is a whole side story about the Folds that I didn't get into because it doesn't make any sense in the Theligia story, and it's quite tragic, which is that UM, but it struck me. It showed up in a newspaper article I was looking at about a whole different aspect of it, and it is about Williams sister, Henrietta. We said he was one of ten kids, he was the third in the birth order UM, but his sister Henrietta showed up in a random search I was doing as a missing person and it's a really sad story because it becomes pretty apparent that this was something that was really a scenario. Her body was eventually found. She had been drowned. It was ruled a death by suicide, and it clearly to me, again, I'm not a doctor obviously, and I'm I'm making judgments based on the information in old newspaper articles, but it seemed very clearly if you look at the flow chart of information, that she had a really bad case of postpartum depression, like they talked about. One of the doctors when she first disappeared was like, well, I'm very worried because she seems to have had a mental break from too much nursing, which is a weird way that they would put it. When they don't really understand that, you know, mental things going on. Um, But it makes me so sad. And it's one of those things that doesn't come up in this story a lot. But like she was part of a prominent family at that point and it was you know, barely discussed that, like this was a real thing. So I just she becomes emblematic to me of like a problem socially where we didn't understand postpartum depression at all. I think a lot of people still don't understand it um as a very real thing that needs to be addressed and treated. And so I'm just Henrietta. If you're out there, if there is, if there are spirits and ghosts, I hope you understand that, like I see you. I'm so sorry that happened to you. You know, she's emblematic of a bigger problem in funnier things. One nobody you can't even less if you want, But if you are thinking, you know, you didn't mention Mrs Pearl Curran and the literary figure of patients worth that she channeled to write books. Listen, I'm saving that for next year. It's coming probably next year. Um. The other thing is that there was an attempt to invent an electric version of the mystifying oracle that would like send out electric shocks when you made connections to things. You can see why this never took off. Yeah, that doesn't sound pleasant to me at all. Sounds really dangerous. So um, the robot that I said I would talk about because it's hard to explain, and I should say before this, I have not asked you in any of this if you have ever played with a wedge board and as a kid, you ever like, oh, something's moving the board. No. Because I was raised by a very methodist mother during Satanic Panic era, I'm always I always have this moment where like my brain is like, so because we are we were clearly such different children where my parents would tell me a thing and I would just kind of flip them the bird and run and do my own thing. Whereas you're a very good kid, I think. Yeah, in a lot of ways, I was, like I was a rule follower in a lot of ways. Um, but not when it came to things like doing my homework. I thought that was a waste of my time. So I just didn't. Uh. But we were also living like in a community where a lot of people have the same perceptions. So like, I don't know if any child whose house I played with had a wedge board there. Yes, yes, you know, my family loved a little mystice loved it, I should say my mom's side. But in any case, the robot and I only ask you that because I'm curious if you had ever had that experience of feeling like the board had moved or the plan chet had moved, and that clearly no one involved was doing it. Um. The thing with the robot is interesting. So these researchers in Vancouver, initially one of the things that they were doing was they were using a robot and telling the participants, Okay, this robot is actually um, you know, like sort of being informed by the behaviors of another person that's outside of this as a way to say, like, this is how we're controlling it and making sure no one is messing with it except for you. They had some problems with that, and they even mentioned in their paper like we could not scale that because it was just too too problematic. The robot was problematic, which is why they started introducing having a second participant that would not do anything um. And in some cases they even had the people that were answering the questions blindfolded, and then the other participant would actually not be touching the plan sheet at all, so they could be a percent sure that that like nobody was actually interfering with it, which is pretty interesting. Um and then people were still getting that higher six hit rate on their answers to trivia questions essentially, which is just descinaything. One of the things I didn't dig into because it would have taken me uh down on a fairly arduous and time consuming journey, is that because of that study they have there have been other scientists that have have started to examine this idea of idiopathic motor response and accessing knowledge you don't realize you have in some pretty interesting real world cases like could we use this to help people with Alzheimer's kind of reconnect to parts of their their mind that they don't they don't consciously access anymore. Um, Like, there's some very interesting research going on in that space, and I just didn't want to like halfheartedly touch on that much when like I really would have, I feel like I would have needed to do several weeks study of just how that was all working. So if you have heard of that and you're like, well, why didn't that come up? That's why. And I don't want to do a sloppy version of it. But it's pretty interesting stuff and you can find it online, especially if you have access to like medical journals. There's a lot of information. Like I said, I own a lot of Weeda stuff. Yeah, I love it. I don't even think I've ever had my hands on a Wegia planchet. I'm making such a shocked face, are I mean you could come to my house and I could just hand you to a bunch of different ones. Um, the thing is right, like some of it too, is just um. I love them from an art perspective because there have been some really beautiful boards designed over the years. Um, Like I love the roundboards. I just think they're beautiful and it's interesting to me. Here's where I really become fixated on them, not as anything spiritual, but like the fact that a thing that looks like it could be as completely innocuously used. Right. It looks like you can teach a kid letters in numbers with it, and yet people are like, but ghosts are talking through it. That juxtaposition is part of the appeal to me that it is such a fascinating psychology touch point. That's what part of why I love them. Also, the designs are beautiful. Something that is also a funny irony tangentially related to all this is that when I was in high school, my mom went to a very New Age workshop that involved a lot of these same ideas about like accessing parts of your brain that you maybe aren't consciously and getting communication from non corporeal right, whether it's people somewhere else or the spirits of people or whatever, which my mom found very helpful to her as she was becoming progressively more disabled and like trying to figure out how to deal with that. Uh. And she took me to the same workshop. And it's just funny to me that like a lot of these same concepts that are surrounding weed to boards were also part of these workshops. Uh. But like there was no movies along the lines of The Exorcist had this New AG workshop as part of it, right. Well, And that's also an interesting thing, right, this idea of idiomatic motor response has been used in that way of like, oh, if you can you know, access those parts of your brain, what you're actually accessing is another entity and others whore Like, no, dude, it's a thing you don't even know, you know, but you know it and that's cool. Like it's like that divide of how people are perceiving the possibilities of that. That's really interesting. I wanna go play with my weach board, make the cats use it and see what it's spills. Oh my gosh, I want to make a cat we two board that's got like things like fish and chicken on it, and they can tell me the spirits. They would tell me what they want to eat because they're not going to learn to spell. It could be like those buttons we got for our cats that they still have not figured out how to press in a meaningful way. Yeah, those are tricky. I feel like those are tricky with cats. I see more success with people using them to teach their dogs to communicate. Cats are kind of like, why don't you learn my language? Fools? Yeah, yeah, they just have not. And I know a couple of people that have had really good success with their cats and the buttons, and that just has not been our cats so far. Different creatures, different creatures are different ways. In any case, Um that is my I have now had my obsessive Weigia week and I'm done. Theoretically, I hope that it was fun for our listeners. I also hope that you have some fun coming up in the next couple of days. If it's your your actual weekend and you have time off, I hope that you take care of yourself and that you get to have some some rest and relaxation and maybe access parts of your brain that know things you don't think you know. If you don't that time off, UM, I hope that the things you have to do go smoothly and that everything is as easy as possible and you still maybe find a little bit of relaxation in there. I hope if you are into Halloween, that you're enjoying Halloween season. I know I am at a ridiculous level. Um. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic, and then on Monday you'll get some more some more fun new stuff. 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.