• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 337 0

A common story line involves communication that is at first reassuring and even useful—a lost object may be recovered through the board’s counsel—but eventually gives way to threatening or terrorizing messages. One group of Ouija enthusiasts reported ghostly knocks on their apartment doors after contacting the spirit of a serial killer. Others claimed physical and sexual assaults from unseen hands after a night of Ouija experimentation. One famous murder trial in 1933 involved claims that Ouija had “commanded” an Arizona girl and her mother to kill the girl’s father. Hugh Lynn Cayce, the soft-spoken son of the famous American psychic Edgar Cayce, once cautioned that his researches found Ouija boards among the most “dangerous doorways to the unconscious.”

For their part, Ouija enthusiasts respond that influential spiritual teachings such as the “Seth material,” channeled by writer Jane Roberts in the 1970s, first emerged through the board. In the World War I era, a St. Louis housewife used Ouija to record a remarkable range of novels, plays, and poems from a seventeenth-century English spinster named Patience Worth. Some were hugely ambitious in scale and written in a Middle English dialect that the St. Louis homemaker (who didn’t finish high school) would have had no obvious means of knowing. Ouija writing also produced a posthumous full-scale “novel” by Mark Twain in 1917, pulled from store shelves after a legal outcry from the writer’s estate. While such works won brief popularity, they failed to retain enduring readership. Further up the literary scale, poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes wrote haunting and dark passages about their experiences with Ouija. (“Fame will come,” the board tells Sylvia in Ted’s 1957 poem, “Ouija,” “… And when it comes you will have paid for it with your happiness, your husband, and your life.”) Though darkly prophetic, such works are not generally counted among either poet’s finest efforts.

Given that this mysterious object has, in one form or another, been on the American scene for over 120 years, it’s natural to wonder: Can anything of lasting value be attributed to Ouija? The answer is yes, and it has stared us in the face for so long that we have nearly forgotten it is there.

In 1976, the American poet James Merrill published—and won the Pulitzer Prize for—an epic poem that recounted his experience, with his partner, David Jackson, of using a Ouija board from 1955 to 1974. His work, The Book of Ephraim, was later combined with two other Ouija-inspired epic poems and published in 1982 as The Changing Light at Sandover. “Many readers,” critic Judith Moffett wrote in her penetrating study James Merrill, “may well feel they have been waiting for this trilogy all their lives.”

First employing a manufactured board and then a homemade one—with a teacup in place of a planchette—Merrill and Jackson encountered a world of spirit “patrons” who described for them a sprawling and profoundly involving creation myth. In Merrill’s hands, it became poetry steeped in the epic tradition, in which myriad characters—from W. H. Auden, to lost friends and family members, to a ghostly Greek muse/interlocutor called Ephraim—walk on and off stage. The voices of Merrill, Jackson, and those who emerge from the teacup and board alternately offer theories of reincarnation, worldly advice, and painfully poignant reflections on the passing of life and ever-hovering presence of death.

The Changing Light at Sandover is nothing less than a new mythology of world creation, destruction, resurrection, and the vast, unknowable mechanizations of God Biology (GOD B, in the words of the Ouija board) and those mysterious hosts who enact his will: bat-winged creatures who, in their cosmological laboratory, reconstruct departed souls for new life on earth. And yet we are never far from the grounding human voice of Merrill, joking about the selection of new wallpaper in his Stonington, Connecticut, home, or from the moving counsel of voices from the board, urging: In life, stand for something.

“It is common knowledge—and glaringly