Making Connections — With the Spirits?

The slumber party. If only our parents knew…after some preliminary talk about boys, this seemingly innocent giggle fest, turned, well, dark and sinister. There was a part of every overnight when someone suggested communing with the spirits. We turned out the lights, lit candles and prepared to explore the ghostly past and our romantic futures through séances, Ouija boards, tarot cards. We looked in crystal balls and asked magic 8 balls what lay in store. We tried our powers out with love spells and levitation tricks. Yes, frightful perhaps but also fun!

And, the Answer Appears to be Y-E-S: The Ouija Board

Talking boards, also known as witchboards have been sold since at least the early 1800s when interest in the paranormal was high. Near the end of the 19th Century, two brothers, Isaac and William Fuld, started a company to sell talking boards they called Ouija Boards (some say the name is a combination of the French “oui” and the German “ja” for yes, yes). The Ouija Boards at times had great surges of popularity (especially in times of war and uncertainty) and the Fuld Company had trouble over the years keeping up with the demand. In 1966, the Parker Brothers Company, recognizing a hot new game when they saw one, offered to buy out the Fulds and the company became the producer of the Ouija Board that became a Boomer favorite.

To play, two people placed their fingers lightly on a small traiangular board known as a planchette. Someone asks a question and within a few minutes the planchette moves across the Ouija board stopping at letters to spell out an answer. (Hey, Ouija, I’m still waiting for my future husband, Richard Green.

Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later: The Magic 8-Ball®

The Magic Eight Ball was invented by Abe Bookman for the Alabe Toy Company in 1946. The Ideal toy company bought the rights to the little plastic fortune-telling ball in 1970 and sold it to Tyco in the late 1980s and Tyco itself was bought by Mattel in the 1990s. At least, that’s my understanding of the ball’s history. Fortunately for we the indecisive, each company in turn saw its value and kept it as a part of their product line. Even today the Magic-8 ball is a popular toy —my coworker has one on his desk for those important decisions.

The Magic 8-ball looks like a plastic version of the billiards 8 ball but it’s filled with some sort of liquid and floating inside is a icsahedron, a 20-sided sided piece they floats to a window in the bottom of the ball to reveal an answer to a question.

Let Your Fingers Do the Talkin’:
The Origami Fortune-telling Device

We didn’t have a name for this folded paper device but almost every girl in school had one. It seemed to be the exclusive domain of girls when I was growing up but I can’t think why—but this tradition continues to this day. South Park aired an episode last year where the boys at school so coveted the girls’ magic fortune-telling device they dressed Butters up as a girl to infiltrate a slumber party and capture it for the boys.

It’s hard to describe this item but the idea was to write answers to questions on the inside of the paper and fold it so that you had four on which you wrote or colored four colors. Under these flaps were eight numbers. The person would pick a color and you’d spell out the color, then they’d pick a number and you’d count it out. Under the final flap was the answer to the question.

Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board

In additon to séances, Tarot cards and fortune-telling games, trying to levitate someone was a favorite slumber party activity. (Okay, maybe our friends were a bit on the weird side, but it was big in our circle…in fact anything that scared us so much we couldn’t sleep was great fun in our book!)

The idea was for a person to sit or lie very still. A group of people would surround the subject and chant, “Ligth as a feather, stiff as a board.” They’d put two fingers underneath the subject and begin to lift them—and it seemed effortless as though the person was indeed levitating with just a little direction from our fingers. To make the mood even spookier one of us would lead and tell the person a scary story about their demise.

—Betty