Ouija Board Online

How the Online Ouija Board Works

Type a question and the planchette sets off across the board. A yes or no question sends it to the printed YES or NO, or to a short phrase like NOT YET or ASK AGAIN. A question that starts with when, who, how many, what or why gets a spelled answer instead: a time, a person, a number or a single word, picked out one letter at a time with the window lighting each letter as it arrives.

The board holds its answer for a question for the whole day. Ask the same thing twice and the planchette spells the same reply, which is how a real sitting feels when someone insists on asking again. A different question, or the same question tomorrow, gets a fresh answer. There is no artificial intelligence behind it: the answers come from a fixed set and a fixed rule, and nothing you type leaves your browser.

When you are done, say goodbye. The planchette moves to GOOD BYE and the board closes, with your questions and answers kept in the sitting record until you begin again.

How to Use a Ouija Board

The traditional rules are simple and almost every version of them agrees on the same points. Sit with at least one other person, in a quiet room, with the board flat between you. Each sitter rests two fingertips lightly on the planchette. One person asks a single clear question out loud, and everyone waits. Do not push, and do not try to hold the planchette still. When it moves, read the letters aloud as it reaches them and write the answer down, because spelled answers are easy to lose track of.

Keep the questions simple. Yes or no questions get the clearest replies. Ask one thing at a time and let the answer finish before asking the next. If the planchette drifts to the corners or starts counting down through the numbers, most traditions say to end the sitting. And always finish by moving the planchette to GOOD BYE. Whatever you believe about the board, closing it on purpose is the one rule nobody skips.

Online, the ritual is the same without the second pair of hands: ask one question, watch the whole answer, and close the board when you are finished.

A Short History of the Talking Board

Talking boards grew out of the spiritualist craze of the late 1800s, when seances and table-turning were a parlour pastime on both sides of the Atlantic. The board as we know it was first sold in Baltimore in 1890 by the Kennard Novelty Company, and Elijah Bond received the United States patent for it in 1891. The patent application famously had to prove the board worked by spelling out the patent clerk's name.

William Fuld, an early employee, took over production in the years that followed and ran the business until his death in 1927; his family sold the rights to Parker Brothers in 1966, and Parker Brothers became part of Hasbro in 1991, which still sells the board as a game. The layout has barely changed in all that time: the alphabet in two arcs, the numbers in a row, YES and NO in the top corners with a sun and a moon, and GOOD BYE along the bottom.

The board's reputation as something sinister is much younger than the board itself. For its first seventy years it was sold as a family game and a romantic one, something for a couple to do with their knees touching. The horror films came later, and the Halloween association with them.

Why the Planchette Moves

With a real board, the planchette moves because the people touching it move it, without meaning to and usually without noticing. This is the ideomotor effect, named by the physiologist William Carpenter in 1852: the idea of a movement produces a small version of that movement. Michael Faraday demonstrated it the following year, rigging seance tables with sliding layers that showed the sitters' hands were doing the pushing. The same effect moves a dowser's rods and a yes or no pendulum.

The simplest test is a blindfold. Sitters who cannot see the board produce strings of letters that spell nothing, because the small guiding movements need to know where the letters are. None of this makes the board less interesting to use. It means the answers come from the people at the table, which for most questions is exactly where the answer was all along.

Other Ways to Get a Yes or No

• Magic 8-Ball shakes out one of the twenty classic answers.
• Random Yes or No keeps it to a clean coin-flip 50/50.
• Yes or No Oracle answers with a full written interpretation instead of a word.
• Yes or No Pendulum answers through the swing of a weighted crystal.

See them all on the Yes or No page, or draw a Halloween tarot reading while the veil is thin.

Frequently Asked Questions