Hi All,

I am sure that everyone here will have heard of the danger of using Ouija boards. They are generally considered to be an invitation to malevelent entities, and are sometimes credited with causing lives to be ruined.

I feel that there is no real reason for there to be a difference between Ouija boards & other forms of spirit communication, other than our own perceptions of the methods.

Some one recently expressed to me the opinion that it was Hollywood which created their bad image, but the perceived problem with Ouija boards predates all the well known Hollywood movies.

I am pretty well completely skeptical these days, but as a kid growing up in the seventies, I was a huge believer in and reader of paranormal topics. We owned a Ouija board, although we pronounced it either "oo-ee-jay" or "wee-gee", depending on how old we were. lol! But we used it fairly regualarly to try to contact spirits. We had a lot of seances at our house!

I still remember the day we got a frantic call from our grandmother warning our mother to burn the board imediately. She had recieved a letter from her local evangelist (she was on the mailing list) that detailed how various people's lives had been ruined by dabbling in the occult and using Ouija boards. Fortunately for us, my mother did not destroy our cherished board, and the spooky fun continued!

I can remember reading some books that warned about misuse of the board as well back then. People told of opening the door to malevelent entities that then persecuted them horribly.

So I believe that Hollywood has simply picked up what was already being said, tarted it up a little, and handed it back to us. They did not create the Ouija's reputation out of whole cloth.

My personal idea about the true roots of the Ouija board's bad reputation is this: It's been easily accessed by the popular culture the longest.

The average person in the seventies did not have knowledge of or access to a Tarot deck. Dowsing rods were generally thought of only as a way to locate water. Automatic writing and hypnotism were being practiced, but really only by the well read and initiated. Pendulums, runes, crystals & the like were not on the map yet. The plethora of electronic ghost hunting devices had either not been invented, or were being used for their intended purpose rather than shoehorned into paranormal ones.

That pretty much leaves the venerable Ouija board, that had been around for years, and could be gotten off the shelf in almost any toy or department store. People had simply had more of a chance to use it, get terrified by their experiences, and declare it to be dangerous.

Without being judgemental, the stories of horrible Ouija experiences were often publisized by religious organizations seeking to discourage people from dabbling in the occult. It is similar to the campaign that was waged against Dungeons and Dragons in that respect. There were & are many "paper & pencil" RPG's available, But D&D was the most popular and widest known and so got singled out for criticism; even though there was no meaningful difference that set it apart from the others.

I believe that the later forms of communication tended to benifit from the Ouija's bad rep. They were usually seen more as "safe alternatives" to the "dangerous" Ouija. People were focused on the incidentals of form, rather than the function of comunicating with spirits. This trend has been taken to the extreme in the case of the "angel board." An angel board is a ouija board with pictures of angels on it. There is no difference other than the user's perception, and yet user's of angel boards believe they are contacting angels, rather than ghosts or demons. It's all in the user's viewpoint.

If you think about it, the same kind of stories of horrible life destroying hauntings that are connected to the Ouija board are often also related by people that never have touched a ouija board. One of the classic forms is the "new house" story, the most famous example probably being Amityville. So, whether or not you believe the stories to be true, we can also see that the presence of an Ouija board is not neccesary to account for reports of terrible paranormal experiences.

I believe that all this points towards negative paranormal experiences being independent of Ouija Boards. It's all in people's perception.

Regards, Mike