Spirit Boards and the Rise of the Ouija, Part 2

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 welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy, we're
still talking about wag aboards. We are. We've promised listeners

(00:22):
some corporate intrigue at the top of episode one, and
we've already given some in that episode, but you're about
to get a little more. We are also going to
cover in today's part two some legal and pop culture
appearances of the wig board in the twentieth century. And
we're going to handle the little discussion of psychology. Heads up,
if you skipped part one, none of the people were

(00:43):
about to talk about are going to make any sense? Yeah,
we do. Just jump right into the middle of something
right here. Uh, and that is that. We ended part
one with William Fold and Wegia Novelty Company choosing not
to continue their licensing deal with Isaac Fold and brother.
This cut Isaac totally out of the business and gave

(01:06):
his brother William licensing rights as a solo entity. There
was also a second part of William Fold's license that
would cause even more problems for people who were not
William Fold. In two, Harry Wells Rusk sold out his
interest in the company to Booie, and Booie had granted

(01:28):
William Fold the only manufacturer license for Wegia boards. He
was the only person who had a right to make
Spirit boards using the Region name. But he didn't only
manufacture Wegia boards. He was tired of dealing with competitors
on the market. We'll talk about those momentarily. So Folk
thought that he could undercut his competitors by introducing his

(01:52):
own Nonwigia talking boards to the market at a lower
price than competitors. This other non Wegia board was the
Oracle board. So not only was full the only man
license to make and distribute Weigia boards, he also got
the largest slice of the competitor market. Suddenly, the company,

(02:14):
and Fold in particular was making money just hand over
fist and some of his former colleagues were kind of
feeling like they had been shafted. I think that's a
fair feeling. Yeah, Just in case anybody doesn't recall, Fold
had been essentially an employee that was working in the
shop manufacturing when he suddenly got put in charge of

(02:37):
the company by Colonel Washington Booi, who had paid the
most into the startup fund for the company because of
their friendship. Definitely, some who you know helps your entire
career situation going on. Uh And at this point he's
gotten rid of everyone else involved, so he's the only
one making profits from it, as well as paying royalties

(02:59):
to Boo and Rusk. So after Charles Kennard had been
pushed out of the company, you were called. The first
Wigia board making company was named after him. He had
moved to Chicago, Illinois and started another company, Northwestern Toy
and Manufacturing Company. This had actually been a company that
was a branch unit of Kennard before the reord, so

(03:21):
it had been making Wigia boards. This company was then
also in transition because it had been cut and Kennard
thought that they already had the set up they could
manufacture their own talking boards, and so they developed and
sold what they called the Volo talking board. It was
similar to the Wigia, of course, but it had a
few key differences. The layout was pretty different as these

(03:44):
things go. The letters appeared in a funnel shape at
the center of the board, and the numerals were split
into two columns, one on either side of that funnel.
It also featured an option that I thought was quite
clever for a weather report from the beyond, because the
words clear year and rain were included as options situated
at opposite sides of the board. And despite having made

(04:06):
changes to the design and lay out, the Volo was
still too similar to the Wigia board. Wigia Novelty Company
made a legal complaint of infringement and Volo production stopped
after only three months. Cannard tried again. He had started
making a talking board under the name of America Toy
Company back in Baltimore and with partners J. M. Raffle

(04:29):
and Albert Strobel. This board was called in a Jilly.
Colonel Bowie William Fold and Wigia Novelty were once again
ready with legal action, and the Agilly was gone almost
as quickly as the Volo board had been. So he
not only had been pushed out of the company that
had once borne his name, he had been legally blocked

(04:50):
from making similar products. While Fold amassed just a huge
fortune after taking the Helm Elijah Bond. He was the
lawyer who had secured the first patent on the Wigia board.
Tried his hand at making his own talking boards with
little success. In seven he introduced what was called the
Nirvana Board under the Swastika Novelty Company. This was obviously

(05:14):
well before the rise of the Nazi Party and the
Swastikas association with it. Bond was likely trying to use
the word Sanskrit origins as a way to bring an
air of ancient mysticism to his board, which did feature
a swastika in the design. Regardless, there were not very
many of these made, and the Nirvana board was never
a real contender for market share. Meanwhile, the battle between

(05:37):
the Fold brothers continued and it kept going. William had
formed the William Fold Manufacturing Company as the follow up
to Isaac Fold and brother to continue production of Wigia boards.
He filed for an injunction to keep Isaac from making
Wigia boards and any other games that had been patented
by William. There were several of the is that they

(06:00):
had been making when they were still in business together.
I really wish we could find out what happened between
those two brothers. Um However, this injunction did not seem
to dissuade Isaac Fold, who started making a talking board
under the name Oriole in nineteen o four. It took
him a long time to get the Oriole to production, though,
all the way until nineteen nineteen when he founded the

(06:22):
Southern Toy Company. But like everyone else who tried to
compete with Wigia, his efforts were for not A judge
ruled in nineteen twenty that William was the only brother
who had a right to make Wigia boards. During testimony
in Fold versus Fold, Colonel Washington Booey gave a statement
that credited Rice, not Kennard, and not Fold for creating

(06:45):
the Wigia board, though the company was the owner of
the patent through bonds filing. William had gone to great
lengths to assure his victory in this case. Again, that's
nineteen twenty, and that argument started in nineteen o one,
so it legally played out for nineteen years between these
two brothers, and as things were reaching their fever pitch in,

(07:07):
William had started writing letters to stores telling them that
if they carried Isaac's Oriole board, they were in violation
of his trademark. William Fold bought out Colonel Bowie in
nineteen nineteen, the year before the legal battle between the
brothers concluded. He'd also built a new, high dollar three
story factory to modernize production and the press. Following his

(07:30):
legal victory over his brother, it was often touted that
William had made a million dollars as the maker of
Wigia boards. He was always insistent that he did not
believe in the Wigia board as a spiritual connection. He
told reporters who visited him at home, quote, believe in
the Weigia board, I should say not. I'm no spiritualist.

(07:52):
I'm a Presbyterian. Yeah. It's interesting because some of those
articles um actually pump up the number in terms of
how much money he made to three million. In any case,
it had to have just been like salt in the
wound already to his brother and anybody else he had
been in business with. In ninety, despite having made all

(08:14):
of that money, William Fold sued the Collector of Internal
Revenue in Baltimore, claiming that his excise taxes had been
overstated by two hundred dollars. That number was based on
the table of taxes for goods that were categorized as
games or amusements. Because the corporate image of the Luigia
had always straddled the fence between amusement and mysticism, Fold's

(08:37):
lawyers took the tack that this wasn't a game because
there was no opponent. If the tax collector wanted to
classify it as a game, that would only work if
they were willing to recognize that spirits were the opponents. Yes,
this absolutely does conveniently ignore the fact that there are
plenty of games like Solitaire that a person can play
without an opponent. But the real wavering point of the

(09:01):
court was the fact that the Wigia board was already
being used by psychologists to study the unconscious mind, so
it didn't really seem right to consider it just a game. However,
because the company sold it as an amusement, the tax
assessment was ruled correct. Fold appealed the decision right up
through the court system until it was thrown out by

(09:23):
the Supreme Court. Plenty of games are used in scientific studies,
so this is a kind of weird argument. To me, Well,
it is a weird argument, and I think the real
foundation of how weird it is is that fold in
the Wigia The various companies that made Wigia did try

(09:44):
to straddle that line between mysticism and game to get
the greatest market share. But then, like if you categorize
your thing a certain way. That's what it is, and
that's how you get taxed. And then they're like no, no, no,
But it's also this um you can't play both sides.
That is definitely a case of corporate trying to have
its cake and eat it too. In William Fold was

(10:07):
on the roof of his factory supervising the replacement of
a flagpole when the support that he was leaning on
gave way. He managed to grab onto the ledge of
one of the windows for a moment, but he couldn't
maintain his grip and he fell to the ground. He
broke an arm, a leg, five ribs, and also sustained
a concussion. He was rushed to Johns Hopkins, where he

(10:30):
died from his injuries, but on his deathbed, Fold reportedly
asked his three children to promise to keep the company going,
which they did. Coming up, we'll talk about a nineties
newspaper article that had a lot of questionable details. First,
we will take a quick sponsor break before we get
to that. Four. So, in the late stages of World

(11:01):
War two, journalist James P. Connelly wrote an article for
the Baltimore Sun about the jump in Wigia board sales
during the war. He interviewed William Arthur Folds, son of
William Fold, for the piece, and there are a lot
of inaccurate details in it. According to the article, which
ran on May eighteenth, nine, folds father invented the Wigia

(11:24):
board and held the first patent. We know all of
that's incorrect. When asked why the Wigia board was once
again experiencing a surge in sales, William Arthur Fold stated quote,
we have done a lot of missionary work on it
through the years, and of course it is the times.
Also in times like these, people take up things like

(11:45):
the Wigia to find out what their sons and husbands
are doing on the other side of the world. We
don't put it out to be used in a serious way.
It's just an amusement, that's all. There are even more
details and the article that are out of step with
the facts of the Weigia boards origins in early years,
as is supported by documentation. William Arthur tells the wee

(12:07):
Ya version of the board's name, but also embellishes the
timeline of the game success. He says that the board
only had moderate success initially, but as World War One approached,
the board itself told his father, William Fold, quote to
prepare for big business, said it was this message that
catalyzed the expansion of the factories. This reminds me of

(12:31):
all of the soft drink manufacturers that say they got
the recipe and a dream. Yes, it's very much like
that um and like the Folds were really good at marketing.
But this is just documented. It's not so, he said.
It's like wait, they expanded starting a year after they

(12:54):
started selling these boards in eight So an interesting but
brief sect and of the article includes some commentary from
doctors on the rumors that Wegi boards could cause insanity.
One unnamed doctor told the paper that he did not
think that Wegi boards caused it, but he did think
that they revealed it. Although William Arthur Fold was apparently

(13:17):
quite dedicated to the company and his siblings Catherine and
Hubert were as well, eventually they sold it they all
experienced their own failing health. Parker Brothers purchased it from
them in nineteen sixty six. Parker Brothers move production of
the Wigia from Baltimore to Salem, Massachusetts. The year after

(13:37):
Parker Brothers acquired the company, two million Wigi boards were sold.
Hasbro acquired Parker Brothers in and still manufacturers Wegi boards.
Are they still made in Salem? Do you know? That's
a good question. I'm not sure. Um. Well, I mean
they're made in a lot of different places. I'm curious

(13:58):
their main in factories all around the world. There might
still be one in Salem, or I would think it
would be outside of Salem because it's not that big
a place. But maybe they have a warehouse district I'm
not aware of. Um. But yeah, you can still literally
go online and buy one. You can walk into a
toy store if you can find a toy store and
buy one. Uh. Any of your big box retailers that

(14:18):
have toy sections usually have something like it. If not
a Weigia trademark, then something very similar. Uh. Wija boards
became part of popular culture more or less as soon
as they were introduced. This isn't something new that like
grew along with our ability to consume retail items at

(14:39):
a shocking rate. It has always kind of been in
the public consciousness. Norman Rockwell featured one in a Saturday
Evening Post illustration for the cover. It features a man
and a woman seated knee to knee with a wija
board spread across their laps. One of the big appeals
for wigia boards early on is that they were popular

(15:00):
because the board set up had the requirement that the
people involved would touch the plantchett uh and touch each
other's knees, and all of this was creating a situation
where there was a socially acceptable way for young couples
to have kind of casual physical contacts. So which was
a little flirty as well. Yeah, I didn't go like

(15:22):
dive into the story of this painting, which is what's
going to be on our social media for this episode,
but it definitely looks like a couple on a date. Like, yes,
there's not really a different way to interpret it. There
were even some advertisements that were like geared towards young
men of like buy a Wigi board for your lady.

(15:45):
It was definitely like you could have a date where
you could touch her and it would not be considered untoward.
So not all the press appearances of the wegi board
have been so charming, though. For more than a century,
news accounts have included stories of people who used Wigi
boards and ways that were considered questionable or silly, or

(16:08):
sometimes even very dangerous. One of the earliest of these
that popped up in my research was a notice in
the Baltimore Sun about a divorce. This ran on March
nineteen o five, so pretty early in all of this,
and it read, quote, A decree of divorce separating Frank B.
Aleck of Chicago from Mabel L. Aleck, now a resident

(16:31):
of Columbus, Ohio, was amended today by Judge Aurora so
as to give custody of the child of the couple
to the husband. Mrs Aleck made no defense to charges
that she consulted a WIGI board to determine on her
actions in one theuigia was central to a defamation case
in Chicago, when Mrs Frank Walter sued one of her

(16:54):
friends for spreading rumors about her based on what the
luigia had told her. Walter's friend, Mrs Albert Yost, claimed
that her spirit board had identified Mrs Walter as the
person who had burgled her home, and a quote to
the Chicago Tribune, Mrs Walter stated, quote, you see, she
accused me of burglarizing her house in November fifteenth, nineteen nineteen,

(17:18):
stealing raisins, salt and a couple of pounds of apricots.
She says she knows I did it because the Wegia
told her Mrs Walter wanted ten thousand dollars for the
injury to her reputation, but she did not win that suit.
It sounds like somebody was low on supplies to make
chewy cookies and like, was it mice? Maybe I know right? Um.

(17:44):
There is a very convoluted murder case in New York
in nineteen thirty that also brought the wigia board into
the courtroom as part of the killer's defense. This one
has some really tricky aspects to it, in a lot
of racism because the murderer, Mrs Nancy Bowen, was reportedly
a member of the Seneca Nations. And I'm saying reportedly

(18:04):
because we don't know much more in terms of specifics,
because news coverage of the day generally used descriptors of
her that would absolutely be considered slurs today and often
have very little meaning. But Bowen did murder the wife
of sculptor Ri Merchant. The story gets more complicated because
another woman, Lillian Jemmerson, was said to have goaded Bowen

(18:28):
on through the use of awigia board. Using this novelty
to convince Bowen that Clotil Marchian was a witch. Lillian,
who went by Lila, had also provided the murder weapon,
which was a hammer. Lila j Emmerson, who was also
identified in reports as Seneca, posed from Martian in his

(18:50):
sculptures representing people of Seneca Nation. During this trial, it
came out that Lila and Ari had been having an affair.
Are Shan testified on the stand that many of the
affairs he had had with what are simply referred to
and pretty much all the articles as Native women was
a quote professional necessity, and that his wife had known

(19:14):
about his extramarital relationships. This whole story is such a
ball of things to get irate about validly, so um,
his professional necessity is like, well, that was the only
way I could get them to pose nude for me,
to which I say, I don't like you. Um. There

(19:36):
were two trials involved before all of this was said
and done, because the first was declared a mistrial. That
was because Lilah became sick and they couldn't finish. Bowen
eventually played guilty to manslaughter. She, of course, uh was
found guilty because she had pled and she served one
year in prison. Lillian Jimmerson was acquitted, but all of

(19:57):
the press coverage involved had the effect of enforcing to
social beliefs of the day. One was that the wigia
board was just a silly toy and more nefarious too,
that Indigenous people were stupid enough to fall for the
mythos that it was not. Marshawn incidentally married his deceased wife, Clote,
Tilda's eighteen year old niece, not long after the second

(20:20):
trial ended. Another murder in November of nineteen thirty three
involved instructions from a weegia board, and this was especially tragic.
Earnest J. Turley was shot by his fifteen year old daughter. Maddie.
A teenager, testified that during a seance with her mother
over a wegia board, the board had instructed her to

(20:41):
shoot her father because their mother, Irene Turley, was destined
to marry quote a young cowboy. Mattie also stated that
her mother had commented at the time that quote the
board should not be denied. Maddie led guilty to an
attempted murder and juvenile court and was sent to a
reform school. Yeah, it's extra sad because when it happened.

(21:03):
He did not die immediately, and he presumed that it
had been an accident that her gun had accidentally discharged.
Dorothy Irene Turley that was her full name, who had
been a beauty queen in her youth that comes up
in all of the articles, was charged with intent to murder.
She tried to have this case dismissed several times but
was unsuccessful, and in June of nineteen thirty four, after

(21:26):
sixteen hours of jury deliberation, Mrs Turley was found guilty.
She was sentenced to ten to twenty five years in
the state penitentiary. On a lighter note, the Luigia board
appeared on I Love Lucy in nineteen fifty one in
an episode from the first season that's titled simply the Seance.
The episode starts with Lucy talking about numerology to Ricky,

(21:48):
but through a series of mad cap events, the Ricardo's
end up hosting a seance in their home to help
seal a business deal with the theatrical producer who was
into the spiritual and is trying to contact somebody named
Tilly on the other side. This is obviously an old show,
but it's just perpetually on in syndication and reruns and

(22:08):
stuff everywhere. We don't want to spoil the ending in
case anybody listening wants to go watch it. The point though, really,
besides the plots, just to show that the Wegia Board
was not taken seriously at all. Lucy was just working
this magic, pretending to be the voice of the spirit
a very obvious way. Yeah, that's not that's not the reveal.

(22:30):
The reveal of that episode is very funny to me,
and I still laugh every time I see it, which
is why I don't want to give it away in
case nobody has had it. I want you to have
that moment where you realize what's going on. Uh. And
in Night, Theligia Board was invoked in yet another legal case.
This one is very odd and it involves a will.
When Helen dow Peck died in five at the age

(22:53):
of eighty three, her relatives anticipated that she would have
left them each a portion of her pretty considerable fortune.
But when Helen's will was read, there was a surprise
in the form of a very unusual bequest. Peck left
the two members of her household staff one thousand dollars each,
and then the remainder of her money, a hundred and

(23:14):
seventy eight thousand dollars, was to go to a man
named John Gail Forbes, but no one knew who John
Gail Forbes was, not even Mrs Peck. She included information
in her will that the name had been spelled out
by a Wigia board when she and her late husband,
Frank Peck, had been playing with one almost forty years earlier.
In nine Helen believed that Peck was a real person

(23:38):
who was alive, and that he was in a mental
institution because he was telepathic, and that he had used
that telepathy to contact her through the Wigia board. Initially,
although Pecks nieces and nephews contested the will, authorities insisted
that there be a thorough search for this John Gail Forbes.
They needed to go find him. Newspaper articles ran all

(24:00):
across the country encouraging anyone named John Gail Forbes to
reach out. And although this strange bequest may have come
as a total surprise to Helen's relatives, she had mentioned
this man some of her closest friends over the years,
and among her effects were notes about each time she
believed she had had contact with him. And that dated

(24:21):
back at least to the nineteen thirties. Helen had also
made a provision in her will that if Mr. Forbes
could not be found, the money should be used to
start a John Gail Forbes Memorial Fund. That fund would
help identify people who were classified as insane but were
actually telepathic. After several years of searching for any indication

(24:44):
of Forbes being a real person, Peck's will was rejected
by the probate court. That happened in nineteen fifty eight,
and at that point her estate was split up among
her heirs. Now, I do love the idea of setting
up a memorial fund for a person that never existed
as a joke, and I'm just telling you I'm thinking

(25:06):
hard and seriously about that. We are going to talk
next about the film that usually comes up as a
turning point in the wigi boards image after we first
hear from the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in
history class. Going throughout the early twentieth century, even though

(25:33):
there were, as we've noted, some serious legal cases that
invoked the Wigia board, it still had kind of a
silly reputation as a game, and when people claimed they
had used it to talk to spirits. They were usually
not taken seriously or they were simply written off as crazy.
But starting in nine three with the movie The Exorcist,

(25:55):
Wuiji boards started to be featured in horror films, and
suddenly there were plenty of people who seemed genuinely concerned
about the possibility that this game could open up access
to demonic spirits. In case you have not seen it,
we're giving away nothing. It's at the very beginning in
The Exorcist to the character of Reagan tells her mother

(26:15):
that she uses the Wigia board to talk to an
entity named Captain Howdy. In our episode on the case
of Roland Doe, that was the real world case that
inspired the book and then the film The Exorcist, we
also talked about how the boy involved was said to
have been introduced to the Wigia Board by his aunt,
who he tried to contact through the board after her death,

(26:35):
and that the church believed that that was how he
became possessed. Since then, the Wigia board has been characterized
as a more sinister tool of darkness and a variety
of media, including horror films. Some of them are simply
titled Wega There's also a very campy looking one titled
Weija Shark, which I had not heard of until Holly

(26:58):
mentioned it. Holly has never watched there. I can't I
can't wait. I literally cannot wait. I was like yelling
at Brian in the middle of the night. I was like,
there's no Regia Shark movie. As I mentioned, though, the
Wegia board is still sold as a novelty. I haven't
been in a toy store or toy aisle in a while,
but I super remember seeing them next to things like Candyland.

(27:22):
This gets to the next question, though. If it's a novelty, right,
what is really happening when you play with a Wigia
board or a similar game. There have been many, many
different explanations given over the decades for how a Weigia
board works, and if you accept that it's nothing mystical,
then what explains the experiences that some people have when

(27:42):
using one. So it turns out there's been a pretty
clear sense of what is going on just about since
the Wegi board first appeared on the market, or at
least there have been a number of pretty plausible ideas.
The Wegia board and its relatives were definitely not believe
to be supernatural conduits by everybody. There were probably more

(28:04):
skeptics than believers even at the height of the spiritualist
movement in the United States. Even before the Uigia board
rose to popularity, scientists were examining the paranormal and supernatural
through a critical and scientific lens. Dr A. Campbell Clark
wrote an article on automatic writing for the British Journal

(28:24):
of Medicine in eighteen ninety four, which opened with quote,
A good deal of brain energy has been and is
being expended in studying the phenomena of so called spiritualism.
The hypnotic furor is replaced for the present by the
revival of the spiritualistic. But outside the throng so possessed
are thoughtful observers not carried away by the new cult,

(28:47):
observing and reflecting carefully and searching critically for the truth
through the maze of error and superstition. Automatic writing was
a popular element of spiritualist practices in the nineteenth and
early to one of centuries. The idea was that people
could write without consciously doing so, often in an almost
trance like state. Sometimes a person would sit down with

(29:10):
the necessary implements for writing and then would focus on
something else, usually something mystical in nature, with the hopes
that an automatic writing session would happen. While behaviors like
automatic writing have been around for centuries and in other
parts of the world, in the time that the US
was in its spiritualism rise, it became very, very popular.

(29:31):
A lot of people believed it was a way that
the dead might speak through the living to physically convey
a message. Just as the plan chet's evolution from a
pencil version to the pointer version used with the talking
board sped up the process of communication, it alleviated the
need to decipher scribbly writing. The talking board also offered

(29:55):
a faster tool than automatic writing, sort of side stepped
trying to make out anybody's penmanship. But the idea of
unconscious communication persisted here as well. There were definitely people
who believed that if you got to a place where
you were unconscious of the plant set and the board
before you, it would move unconsciously as a spirit communicated.

(30:19):
The Baltimore Sun ran a number of articles and op
ed pieces in the early twentieth century about the Wigi board,
which indicate pretty deep skepticism. Because the Wigi board is
considered to have been born in Baltimore. It makes sense
that the Sun would have an ongoing interest in it
as the subject of articles. In February of nine nine,

(30:39):
the Wigia board is mentioned in a Baltimore Sun article
titled true Stories of the Supernatural Told by Readers of
the Sun. This one has sort of a scientific vent,
stating in the early paragraphs quote the strange force does
not lie in the Wigi board, the plant set, or
the table, but in some unexplained faculty of the human mind,

(31:01):
which is called into play by the quietude, the expectancy
and receptive nous of its attitude, the plant jet, or
other instruments merely serving as a convenient means of expression.
This account, written by a reader going only by the
initials s M, is about using the wegia as a
tool to unlock psychic channels and describes the Wegia board

(31:23):
giving answers to questions posed to suggest that it is
quote hampered by your wills. The Baltimore Evening Sun included
a query about the function of the Wigia board in
its editor Answers section on August twenty three, nineteen eleven.
To the query can you explain to me how words
are spelled out on the Wigia board. The editor replied, quote,

(31:46):
there is nothing at all occult or mysterious about the
Wigi board. Its motion is due to the fact that
few persons are able to keep their hands in so
constrained a position for any considerable time. Soon or late,
someone in the up is sure to move the board,
and once it starts, it keeps going. It spells out
definite words in two ways. Sometimes the strong, if not

(32:08):
fully conscious, desire of a believer helps it along. At
other times the stimulation is furnished by a humorous scoffer.
Both automatic writing and the spelling out of messages through
a wegia plant set have been analyzed from a scientific
point of view. This included as part of Freud's psychodynamic

(32:29):
theory because of Freud's theories were just kind of out there.
Has a note uh. It's come under criticism for a
variety of reasons. He may have been onto something with
psychodynamic theory, although the specific drivers of what he thought
was happening seem a little bit off. Freud believed that

(32:52):
people's unconscious behaviors are expressing childhood experiences like trauma, and
it does seem like the unconscio mind is an important
part of the puzzle, although it maybe more about things
you haven't realized you learned at some point in your
life other than just a childhood experience. In more recent years,
some very interesting psychological experiments have been conducted as examinations

(33:16):
of the behavior in psychology of Wijia play. A team
of researchers from the University of British Columbia conducted a
series of tests using the Wigia board and had some
interesting findings. Study participants were asked questions about general knowledge topics,
things like capitals of countries or details or dates of
recent history events. These are pretty easy questions that most

(33:38):
people would know. Participants answered in two ways. In one
round they gave verbal answers and they were asked to
make guesses when they weren't sure. Then, in another round,
they were asked very similar questions, similar level of knowledge
they would need, but they gave the answers using a
Wigia board. The test participants believed they were playing with
another person. The other participant was a plant who was

(34:02):
not moving the plan chet. There's also a whole other
thing with a robot that I'll talk about behind the scenes,
but it's so hard to communicate and convey concisely that
I left it out of this. But on the round
where they verbally answered, participants got about half of the
questions right. But on the round where they had a
Wigi board involved, their success rate went up to sixty five.

(34:23):
That may not sound like much, but it's really a
significant difference. Ron Rensink, psychology and computer science professor, who
was one of the researchers who wrote the paper on it,
noted quote, if you don't think so, consider the difference
of playing Roulette when the odds are fifty fifty versus six.
I have various curiosities about, like how many people were

(34:47):
in this research and where they all psych majors getting
extra credit? Uh. This research team's work suggested that participants
were accessing non conscious knowledge things they knew but weren't
really aware that they knew. Sort of information that's been
stored in the mind but which a person can't consciously

(35:07):
pull up. The ideo motor effect is at play when
somebody uses the board meeting their unconscious mind is moving
the muscles needed to scoot the planchet around, so the
user might feel like they are not the one doing it,
even though it is their own body that's creating this motion.
And the findings of this study were published in the
journal Consciousness and Cognition. As researcher and co author Alleno

(35:32):
Shoe put it, quote, these surprising findings suggests we have
a powerful second intelligence resting beyond our conscious minds that
can be accessed under the right conditions. We may believe
we don't know an answer consciously, but actually have the
right answer there in our subconscious Maybe we heard it
on the radio but we weren't really paying attention in

(35:54):
Scott g. Everley, pH d, who specializes in American intellectual
history and has written ex sensibly about games and toys
and play, wrote an article about ideomotor action and the
Wigia Board for Psychology Today. At the end of the article,
he notes that not everyone wants science to explain away
their beliefs, and he offered a fun challenge, writing quote,

(36:16):
I've written about the Wegia board before, and afterward I
heard plenty from an adamant few who didn't like the
news that there are no such things as ghosts. In response,
I offered them this simple test of paranormal claims. Try
inviting the Wigia believer to wear a blindfold, then quietly
rotate the game half a turn, then ask some mischievous

(36:38):
questions of your own devising. Be nice now if your
subject has memorized the position of the letters or the
yes and no answers on purpose or not, I promise
you amusing and instructive results. There is a nice coda
to all of this that I wanted to include. There
has been a really positive outcome of the ongoing interest

(37:01):
Inligia boards because of the research work that historian Ron
Merch has done to tease out the actual facts about
William Fold in the board's origin. He has a whole,
huge website about William Fold which I read a lot
of um. The feuding sides of the family, though once
separated by William and Isaac's disagreements, have been reunited. Merch
told Baltimore Magazine in descendants of both William and Isaac

(37:24):
had reached out to him independently when he started sharing
his work online and eventually asked Merch to connect them.
They actually, it turned out, lived really close to each other,
and they are reported to have been quote getting together
regularly ever since. Just sort of a nice nice finale
to that part of the story, which is a bit
heartbreaking to know that two brothers and their business stuff

(37:47):
tore them apart. Um. I have listener mail one is
interesting because to me, uh, it involves the food that
is very autumnal, although it's not only autumnal, but it
puzzled me. They made me want to discuss it. Uh.
This is from our listener, Nick, who writes, Hello, ladies,

(38:10):
great podcast. Have listened to y'all since the start, including
the previous hosts you had mentioned recently, the cheese is
a good topping for apple pie. Have you ever heard
of dousing your pie in milk? My granddad on my
mom's side used to do both cheese and milk on
the outcast of my generation of the family because I
drowned my apple pie and milk. Generally, I prefer a

(38:32):
birthday pie instead of cake. Always Apple. Keep up the
good work. I enjoy it. Nick. I'm fascinated by this,
and I will confess that initially I was like, why
would you do that to pie? And then I was like,
you're kind of making pie cereal and that actually sounds
pretty good. I've never done this with milk, but there

(38:53):
have been some pies that I have put cream on.
Always it's somebody else's suggestion. Like we had this pie
and we had this cream, and it was like, let's
put some cream on the pie. Not whipped cream, like
liquid cream, like the poor pouring cream that you would
put in coffee. Yeah. Interesting, interesting, I mean that's naturally sweet.

(39:17):
So that actually makes sense to me, right, Like if
you get an Irish coffee in a bar, they're using
that cream because it naturally adds sweetness and you don't
have to add sugar. Um, this is it's fascinating to me.
I'm like, soggy pie not so much. But again then
I was like Cereal, I don't know, it's okay, it's okay.
I mean right, Like I used to love to mash

(39:39):
pie into ice cream and then kind of stir it
until I made ice cream soup, which isn't that far
afield from this, So I understand. And now I want
to make a pumpkin pie and then mash it into
various creamy substances and see what I like. Really, I
just want excuse to see pumpkin pie. Um. That was
a very brief email, so I will I also read

(40:00):
another brief one. This one is from our listener Bryce,
who writes, I just finished listening to the second part
of the Charles Chapin episode, and I was not expecting
to make a personal connection with the episode, but then
you brought up the USS Main's explosion in Havannah Harbor.
My third grade uncle, Charles Dwight Sixby, was the captain
of the USS main when it sank. That story was

(40:21):
one of my favorites to hear my great grandmother tell
me whenever I visited or growing up, although her telling
never included that Charles was wrong and the main was
not exploded by a Spanish mine. I'm a huge fan
of the podcast. They keep me entertained on my long
commute to work. I look forward to every new episode
that comes out. I will pay the kittie tax and
include pictures of my two cats. Meogatron, which is the

(40:43):
best cat name, is a four or five year old
tortoise tabby mix who loves me from a distance. And
then I recently adopted a year old gray American bob
Tale named Sebastian. These cats are really painfully cute. I
love a bob Tale. They're so sweet. Um, and you
know torties have their own feelings about the world, and you, you, uh,

(41:07):
you kind of have to play by their rules. Uh.
Thank you so much to both of our listeners. She
sent us mail this week. If you would like to
write to us, you can do so at History Podcast
at iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us
on social media as Missed in History, and you can
subscribe to the podcast on the iHeart radio app wherever
you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in

(41:32):
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
more podcasts from i Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Spirit Boards and the Rise of the Ouija, Part 2