The story of the Hasbro, Inc.-trademarked Ouija board starts out innocently enough — as a post-Civil War parlour game profiting off people who believed they could contact the dearly departed — and ends with you, age 13, and five of your friends, screaming bloody murder in the dark of your parents’ shed.
Somewhere along the way, the idea came to be that using a Ouija board opens you up to the possibility of becoming legitimately possessed by a legitimate demon; that it is a tool of Satan; that it is not a harmless way to scare your friends but rather a dangerous form of divination. Scientists can easily explain away the movement of the board as part of a psychophysiological phenomenon known as the ideomotor effect, wherein the subject makes motions unconsciously.
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Work of Satan, rational scientific explanation — whichever you choose is entirely up to you. But if you’ve ever seen a Ouija board in use, that shit is scary! So perhaps it is, after all, just best not to mess with it, and respect the dead and yourself by not attempting to engage with them across party lines. Live and let live, and die, and all that.
But if you just can’t resist the occult appeal of a wooden planchette that taunts you from deep within the drawer where you have all those sweaters that you hoped would provide enough of a physical boundary that the Ouija board wouldn’t somehow call to you like it does every year, maybe take a deep breath, finish putting on your Halloween makeup, and pick up the Mystifying Mattifying High Definition Microfinish Pressed Powder from Lunatick Cosmetic Labs instead.
Thanks to its planchette-shaped packaging, the powder will give you that familiar feeling of holding in your hand a tool with which to commune with the dead, except it’ll just set your foundation, blur fine lines and wrinkles, and leave your skin silky smooth. It’s a totally spook-free way of paying your respects to the Ouija. Except, of course, when you wake up in the middle of the night only to see it slowly inching its way across your nightstand, while the rest of the world is entirely still...
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