Jingszo !

Beloved by horror films and teen sleepovers, the Ouija board has roots in the spiritualist movement and opportunistic toy manufacturers

We’re all familiar with the question posed by so-called spiritualists and psychics as they attempt to contact those who have passed into the other world. But the big problem is: how do you convince your marks… sorry, clients… that you really do have some amazing power? After all, not everyone falls for cold-reading, and not every psychic can do it well enough, so your target audience will naturally be limited.

What if there were some technique that seemed so remarkable, so unbelievable, that it must be supernatural? If you had that, even hardened skeptics might be convinced. In trying to find this concrete proof, the early spiritualists created an arms-race in different practices, until the eventual rise of the Ouija board in the late 19th Century.