Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
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
(00:23):
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
(00:45):
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
(01:08):
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.
(01:30):
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
(01:50):
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
(02:11):
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
(02:33):
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
(02:57):
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
(03:19):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:05):
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
(04:26):
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
(04:47):
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
(05:08):
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
(05:28):
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,
(05:52):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:37):
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
(06:59):
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.
(07:22):
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.
(07:50):
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
(08:12):
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.
(08:36):
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,
(08:56):
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
(09:19):
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
(09:40):
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
(10:00):
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
(10:20):
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
(10:44):
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
(11:07):
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
(11:27):
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,
(11:50):
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
(12:14):
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.
(12:35):
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
(13:00):
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.
(13:24):
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,
(13:45):
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,
(14:05):
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.
(14:27):
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,
(14:49):
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
(15:12):
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.
(15:35):
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
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(15:56):
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