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obvious in the poems, though not taken seriously by his critics—that these three works, and their final compilation, were based on conversations … through a Ouija board,” wrote John Chambers in his 1997 analysis of Merrill in The Anomalist. Critic Harold Bloom, in a departure from others who avoided the question of the work’s source, called the first of the Sandover poems “an occult splendor.” Indeed, it is not difficult to argue that, in literary terms, The Changing Light at Sandover is a masterpiece—perhaps the masterpiece—of occult experimentation. In some respects, the book challenges the cautionary moral of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as its two protagonists, Merrill and Jackson, successfully pierce the veil of life’s inner and cosmic mysteries. But, as with Victor Frankenstein, did the revelation they found also destroy them?

Creepyville

Merrill and Jackson acknowledged that their social contacts with friends withered as they became more engrossed in their nightly readings. Their sometime friend and neighbor Truman Capote drifted away, branding Stonington as “Creepyville.” One of their closest friends, novelist Alison Lurie, even suggested that the Ouija-channeled spirit Ephraim sanctioned the couple’s pursuit of multiple sex partners outside their domicile, contributing to the sixty-eight-year-old Merrill’s death in 1995 from heart failure linked to HIV. All of this leaves hanging the question: Can Ouija be a tool, psychological or otherwise, for hidden knowledge and ideas—or is it merely a disastrously distracting toy?

An academic survey of Ouija buffs in the 2001 International Journal of Parapsychology found that one half “felt a compulsion to use it.” An eighteen-year-old male offered researchers this chilling account:

There have been many interesting [ones] but the best would be with a spirit named Kyle. He was a sixty something year old child molester. I don’t remember how he died but he seems to have some kind of connection to me. Every time I use the Ouija board Kyle’s name comes up. Most of the time the people playing know nothing about him. Even sometimes I’m not even playing when he comes up. I think I’ve seen him twice in spirit form and he once threatened to kill my half sister. He’s a complete psycho. He scares me. Strange things happen the nights we speak to him. He likes to switch lights on/off.

More than two centuries earlier, the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who inspired so many American spiritual visions, would not have been surprised by such accounts. While Swedenborg recorded his own flights to heavenly realms, he often warned that spirit communications should never be attempted casually. In what may have been the first application of the don’t-try-this-at-home disclaimer, the seer cautioned in his 1758 opus, Heaven and Hell: “At the present day to talk with spirits is rarely granted because it is dangerous … evil spirits are such that they hold man in deadly hatred, and desire nothing so much as to destroy him both soul and body, and this they do in the case of those who have so indulged themselves in fantasies as to have separated from themselves the enjoyments proper to the natural man.”

Sounding a different but not unrelated note, twentieth-century authorities in psychic research made the contention that Ouija is a gateway for the gremlins of the unconscious. For years J. B. Rhine, the veritable dean of psychical research in America, worked with his wife, Louisa, a trained biologist and well-regarded researcher in her own right, to bring scientific rigor to the study of psychical phenomena. Reacting to Ouija’s popularity, Louisa wrote in the winter 1970 newsletter of the American Society for Psychical Research: “The very nature of automatic writing and the Ouija board makes them particularly open to misunderstanding. For one thing, because [such communications] are unconscious, the person does not get the feeling of his own involvement. Instead, it seems to him that some personality outside of himself is responsible. In addition, and possibly because of this, the material is usually