10 Famous Uses of the Ouija Board

Tempted to break out the Ouija Board this spooky season? You wouldn’t be the first. Here are the stories of famous writers, jurors, politicians, and musicians who consulted the spirits using the board (sometimes with mixed results).

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, used an upside-down brandy glass for the planchette of their Ouija board, which they often broke out to talk to their spirit guide, Pan. In 1957, Plath wrote Dialogue over a Ouija Board, which is the result of her and Hughes’s use of the board; she described it as “a short verse dialogue which is supposed to sound just like conversation but is written in strict 7-line stanzas, rhyming ababcbc. It ... is at last a good subject—a dialogue over a Ouija board, which is both dramatic and philosophical.” Plath also wrote the poem Ouija about the practice.

John G. Fuller

After Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades in 1972, killing 101 of the 176 people on board, John G. Fuller wrote a book about it called The Ghost of Flight 401. Employees of Eastern Air Lines reported seeing the ghosts of the captain, Bob Loft, and second officer Don Repo. The theory was that parts from Flight 401 were salvaged and used in other aircraft the company owned. Fuller used a Ouija Board in the process of writing the book and reported that messages from Repo came through.

James Merrill

Even Pulitzer Prize winners have consulted the Ouija. Poet James Merrill extensively used the board to write his work, including 1982’s The Changing Light at Sandover,  a 560-page epic consisting of messages from spirits like fellow poet W.H. Auden.

Emily Grant Hutchings

Perhaps one of the most famous uses of the Ouija Board happened in 1917, when a Missouri author named Emily Grant Hutchings published a book titled Jap Herron, which she claimed was dictated to her via the Ouija Board by her acquaintance Mark Twain. The results were not impressive, leading The New York Times to declare, “If this is the best that ‘Mark Twain’ can do by reaching across the barrier, the army of admirers that his works have won for him will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary.”

Pearl Curran 

Hutchings was good friends with Pearl Curran, who became famous for her own Ouija-dictated books. Curran supposedly co-wrote with a Puritan woman named Patience Worth, a prolific lady who wrote multiple novels and many, many poems before Curran died in 1937. Patience, of course, was kind enough to let Pearl know that her demise was imminent.

Bill Wilson

Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, had a “spook room” set up in his house where he would contact spirits. One of them, he claimed, was a centuries-old monk named Boniface. When he was penning the 12 steps, he wrote to a friend that “I have good help—of that I am certain. Over here and over there,” i.e., the spirit world.

Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi 

You probably wouldn’t catch most politicians admitting that they used a Ouija Board, but that’s what former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi did when he was asked how he knew where previous Prime Minister Aldo Moro was being held by the Red Brigades. Prodi and some others held a séance in which a spirit supposedly gave him information. Who was said spirit? Giorgio La Pira, the former mayor of Florence who had died the previous year. Most people believe the explanation was simply Prodi trying to avoid revealing his real source for the information.

The Mars Volta

The Mars Volta says they wrote an entire album, The Bedlam in Goliath, with a Ouija Board. A session with the board gave them a story that they ended up using in the whole creative process, but when strange things started happening—a flooded studio, one of their engineers had a nervous breakdown, and their lead singer injured his foot—they broke the Ouija Board in two and buried it in a mystery location.

Jurors in the Stephen Young Case

In 1993, Stephen Young was accused of murdering Henry and Nicola Fuller at their home in Wadwurst, England. He went to trial the next year and was convicted—but the verdict was overturned after it came out that four of the jurors on the case had used a Ouija Board at their hotel the night before declaring their verdict. Using a glass as a planchette, they asked the spirits, “Who killed you?” One supposedly responded “Stephen Young done it” before instructing them to “vote guilty tomorrow.” Young was retired and once again found guilty.

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A version of this story ran in 2010; it has been updated for 2024.