Literature Ouija boards have been the source of inspiration for literary works, used as guidance in writing or as a form of
channeling literary works. As a result of Ouija boards' becoming popular in the early 20th century, by the 1920s many "psychic" books were written of varying quality often initiated by Ouija board use. • Emily Grant Hutchings claimed that her novel
Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board (1917) was dictated by
Mark Twain's spirit through the use of a Ouija board after his death • Pearl Lenore Curran (1883–1937), alleged that for over 20 years she was in contact with a spirit named
Patience Worth. This
symbiotic relationship produced several novels, and works of poetry and prose, which Pearl Curran claimed were delivered to her through channelling Worth's spirit during sessions with a Ouija board, and which works Curran then transcribed • Much of
William Butler Yeats's later poetry was inspired, among other facets of occultism, by the Ouija board • In late 1963,
Jane Roberts and her husband Robert Butts started experimenting with a Ouija board as part of Roberts' research for a book on
extra-sensory perception. According to Roberts and Butts, on 2 December 1963, they began to receive coherent messages from a male personality (an "energy personality essence no longer focused in the physical world") who eventually identified himself as "Seth", culminating in
a series of books dictated by "Seth" • In 1982, poet
James Merrill released an
apocalyptic 560-page
epic poem titled
The Changing Light at Sandover, which documented two decades of messages dictated from the Ouija board during séances hosted by Merrill and his partner
David Noyes Jackson.
Sandover, which received the
National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983, was published in three volumes beginning in 1976. The first contained a poem for each of the letters A through Z, and was called
The Book of Ephraim. It appeared in the collection
Divine Comedies, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1977. According to Merrill, the spirits ordered him to write and publish the next two installments,
Mirabell: Books of Number in 1978 (which won the
National Book Award for Poetry) and
Scripts for the Pageant in 1980.
Aleister Crowley Aleister Crowley had great admiration for the use of the ouija board and it played a passing role in his magical workings.
Jane Wolfe, who lived with Crowley at
Abbey of Thelema, also used the Ouija board. She credits some of her greatest spiritual communications to use of this implement. Crowley also discussed the Ouija board with another of his students, and the most ardent of them,
Frater Achad (
Charles Stansfeld Jones): it is frequently mentioned in their unpublished letters. In 1917 Achad experimented with the board as a means of summoning Angels, as opposed to
Elementals. In one letter Crowley told Jones: Your Ouija board experiment is rather fun. You see how very satisfactory it is, but I believe things improve greatly with practice. I think you should keep to one angel, and make the magical preparations more elaborate. Over the years, both became so fascinated by the board that they discussed marketing their own design. Their discourse culminated in a letter, dated 21 February 1919, in which Crowley tells Jones, Re: Ouija Board. I offer you the basis of ten percent of my net profit. You are, if you accept this, responsible for the legal protection of the ideas, and the marketing of the copyright designs. I trust that this may be satisfactory to you. I hope to let you have the material in the course of a week. In March, Crowley wrote to Achad to inform him, "I'll think up another name for Ouija". But their business venture never came to fruition and Crowley's new design, along with his name for the board, has not survived. Crowley has stated, of the Ouija Board, that There is, however, a good way of using this instrument to get what you want, and that is to perform the whole operation in a consecrated circle, so that undesirable aliens cannot interfere with it. You should then employ the proper magical invocation in order to get into your circle just the one spirit you want. It is comparatively easy to do this. A few simple instructions are all that is necessary, and I shall be pleased to give these, free of charge, to any one who cares to apply.
Others •
Roland Doe used a Ouija board, which the
Catholic Church stated led to his
possession by a demon •
Dick Brooks, of the
Houdini Museum in
Scranton, Pennsylvania, uses a Ouija board as part of a paranormal and seance presentation •
G. K. Chesterton used a Ouija board in his teenage years • Around 1893, he had gone through a crisis of scepticism and depression, and during this period Chesterton experimented with the Ouija board and grew fascinated with the occult •
Bill Wilson, the co-founder of
Alcoholics Anonymous, used a Ouija board and conducted seances in attempts to contact the dead • Early press releases stated that Vincent Furnier's stage and band name "
Alice Cooper" was agreed upon after a session with a Ouija board, during which it was revealed that Furnier was the reincarnation of a 17th-century witch with that name. Alice Cooper later revealed that he just thought of the first name that came to his head while discussing a new band name with his band • Former Italian Prime Minister
Romano Prodi claimed under oath that, in a
séance held in 1978 with other professors at the
University of Bologna, the "ghost" of
Giorgio La Pira used a Ouija to spell the name of the street where
Aldo Moro was being held by the
Red Brigades • According to Peter Popham of
The Independent: "Everybody here has long believed that Prodi's Ouija board tale was no more than an ill-advised and bizarre way to conceal the identity of his true source, probably a person from Bologna's seething
far-left underground whom he was pledged to protect." •
The Mars Volta wrote their album
Bedlam in Goliath (2008) based on their alleged experiences with a Ouija board • According to their story (written for them by a fiction author, Jeremy Robert Johnson),
Omar Rodriguez Lopez purchased one while traveling in Jerusalem. At first the board provided a story which became the theme for the album. Strange events allegedly related to this activity occurred during the recording of the album: the studio flooded, one of the album's main engineers had a nervous breakdown, equipment began to malfunction, and
Cedric Bixler-Zavala's foot was injured. Following these bad experiences the band buried the Ouija board • In the murder trial of Joshua Tucker, his mother insisted that he had carried out the murders while possessed by
the Devil, who found him when he was using a Ouija board • In London in 1994, convicted murderer Stephen Young was granted a retrial after it was learned that four of the jurors had conducted a Ouija board séance and had "contacted" the murdered man, who had named Young as his killer. Young was convicted for a second time at his retrial and jailed for life •
E. H. Jones and
C. W. Hill, whilst prisoners of the Turks during the
First World War, used a Ouija board to convince their captors that they were mediums as part of an escape plan ==In popular culture==