by Editor
on September 25, 2014
Though William Fuld Did Not Invent The Ouija Board He Was The Marketing Mastermind Behind The Game’s Popularity. Photo: Courtesy, WilliamFuld.com
Did The Ouija Board Cause William Fuld’s Death?
William Fuld did not invent the Ouija board; that credit belongs to Charles Kennard, another Baltimore businessman who came up with the idea of commercializing the “spirit board,” a previously homemade divination tool or toy used by spiritualists in the late 1800s. Nor did Fuld name the Ouija board. In fact, the Ouija board apparently named itself.
However, Fuld was the great entrepreneur who took control of Kennard’s company in 1892, the year after the Ouija business started, and ran it for three and a half decades. In the interim, Fuld successfully promoted his talking board, popularizing it until it became a bonafide international craze. [continue reading…]
by Editor
on September 24, 2014
Clytemnestra’s Ghost Is On The Left. This Period Illustration May Look Tame—But Legend Says A Female Audience Member Died Of Fright At The Play’s Premiere.
Before 458 BC, Literary Ghosts Played Minor Parts
Elsewhere on this site, we’ve discussed ghosts who played “walk-on” roles in Homer’s epic Greek poems, the Illiad and The Odyssey. We also mentioned the one significant—though very brief—ghost story in the Old Testament.
It wasn’t until about four centuries after Homer that Aeschylus, the ancient Greek playwright known as “the father of tragedy,” gave us one of the first fictional works in which a ghost took a central dramatic role. The work is called The Eumenides, and it is the final play in a trilogy collectively known as the Oresteia, all of which deal with the murder and its aftermath of King Agamemnon by his wife, Clytemnestra, in the wake of the Trojan War. [continue reading…]
by Editor
on September 20, 2014
A Modern Commercial Pre-1966 William Fuld Ouija Board Intended As Entertainment. Photo: Visitor7
The Story Of The ‘Mystifying Oracle’ That Named Itself
The story of how the Ouija board was given the name Ouija (wee-ja) board actually is more amusing than it is mysterious. Many people assume that Ouija is a combination of the French (oui) and German (ja) words for “yes.” But it is not.
According to Ouija historian Robert Murch, the board suggested its own name one day in the early 1890s while it was being used by Elijah Bond, one of the original investors in the company that manufactured it, and members of Bond’s family. When the group asked the board what they should call it, it spelled out, “Ouija.” When they asked what Ouija meant, the board reportedly told them, “Good Luck.” [continue reading…]
by Editor
on September 20, 2014
Dwellings At An Isolated Indigenous Village In The Amazon Forest, Similar To The One That Burned. Photo: Gleilson Miranda/Governo do Acre
I Didn’t See Her. I Saw Proof Of The Fear She Caused.
In the Peruvian rain forest, while working as a travel journalist the late 1980s, I saw vivid, concrete evidence of the power with which the ghostly had gripped the hearts and imaginations of a community whose members still lived by the rhythms of their most distant ancestors. I was ascending the Amazon River by paddlewheel boat from Leticia, Colombia to Iquitos, Peru in the company of a small group of other American writers, all of us traveling at the invitation of a Peruvian adventure-tour operator. From time to time the boat would pull to the riverbank and we would disembark either to search for wildlife or to visit villages on or near the edges of the river. Some of these villages belonged to native groups that only a few decades previously had experienced their first contact with Europeanized Peruvians.
One afternoon, as our boat churned toward the landing for an Indian village set farther back in the jungle, our Peruvian guides pointed out an unusual and disturbing sight: Wispy columns of gray smoke were rising from the forest canopy directly above the place where they knew the village to be—much more smoke than a few cooking fires ever would produce. Also strange was that, even after the crew had dropped the aluminum ramp down which we all trooped to shore, not a soul came to greet us. The forest before us was dead quiet. [continue reading…]
