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Ouija Boards & what they are.
Many people have different views on Ouija boards & what they do. Some people have claimed it's all in your mind, it's what your brain predicts others strongly believe you're capable of communicating with the dead through a board. Although I've never owned or attempted to speak to the dead, I don't plan on it since I believe it could be real based on other people's experiences with it.

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Here is my first website, here are 12 real life experiences people have encounters with the Ouija board. For some cases there may be some Confirmation Bias because maybe some people believe what they want after putting everything into consideration it's possible everything could be a coincidence but since they had experience with the Ouija board even having the lights go on and off may give them the creeps.

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View as slideshow

Culture

We spoke with real people about their encounters with Ouija boards. Their personal experiences will make you question reality.

Justin, 32, New Jersey

Justin played with an Ouija board one day with several of his friends. They asked questions, but instead of the planchette moving to certain letters, it began to move in a strange pattern. "It went to all four corners of the board and made an X," he tells Reader's Digest, "then it just went in circles." The next time he used the board, it was with a different friend at his house. Again, the planchette moved in the same strange pattern. "I felt like it was some kind of hex," he continues. Later that night when he was sleeping, he felt a forceful hand grab his arm and wake him up. Everyone else in the house was sound asleep.

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Real Ouija Board Stories That Will Give You Chills | Reader's Digest

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View as slideshow Culture We spoke with real people about their encounters with Ouija boards. Their personal experiences will make you question reality. Justin played with an Ouija board one day with several of his friends. They asked questions, but instead of the planchette moving to certain letters, it began to move in a strange pattern.

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As another website here is my second one. In this website it explains how it's not real & linked to Freud's Discovery of the Unconscious. After reading the article I was curious on reading the comments people posted on the web page. I found one very interesting. Someone explained how her mother tried the board as a teenager and asked the board when she would meet her soul mate & when she would get married. She claims the board got both dates right after her mother met & married her father.

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At the twilight of the Victorian Age, hypnotists entertained audiences with their mysterious arts, seemingly severing the connection between will and mind in hapless volunteers. Groups gathered for séances, too, where, more ominously, charlatans purported to communicate with the dead. Hélène Smith, a famous Hungarian medium, made a fortune on the strength of her claim that she could communicate with Martians. (In the light of day, alas, the Martian language turned out to look suspiciously like French.) Mme. Smith made her start in 1891, the same year the Ouija Board was first patented. Ouija successfully rode the wave of spiritualism that was sweeping through Europe. When Ouija debuted in the United States, advertisers promised that the game would deliver an " intelligent answer to any question," and, right in step with the spirit of the times, they guaranteed surpassing effects in " mind-reading," "second sight," and "clairvoyance."

Moving a heart-shaped "planchette"-a sort of pencil on rollers-across the Ouija Board printed with an alphabet, the numbers 0-9, and YES and NO options allowed players to spell out and compile apparently un-sourced answers. Mysterious at the time, the game still exerts an uncanny effect. But today, most people are unable to naively play the game because, after its debut, Sigmund Freud's "discovery of the unconscious" fundamentally changed our orientation to our deepest thoughts and emotions. His therapeutic method sometimes included free association (not so unlike playing with an Ouija Board). But Freud claimed our hidden thoughts for science in the interest of therapy; the irrational, he insisted, would yield to rational explanation. "Where id was, there ego shall be," he famously asserted. But the Ouija Board, by contrast, stands as a relic of that era when popular uneasiness grew proportionately just as modern empirical science gained in confidence and explanatory power.

Revolutions always leave some people behind-the scientific revolution especially so-and catching up to leading thoughts often takes a long time because some cling to belief, in this case an old belief. Today's marketing of a glow-in-the-dark Ouija Board claims that it has been "a mystery for over 30 years!" However, the first versions of the Ouija Board-in the form of "exploring pendulums" or "diviners"-appeared in Europe more than 1600 years ago and possibly 1500 years earlier in China. But oracles of old likely possessed little clue about how their magical equipment really worked.

The Ouija Board's continued success depends on two things, neither of them a secret or arising from malign spirits. The first factor is the participants' suspension of disbelief coupled with clever deception in manipulating the planchette: say it another way, "play." Sometimes, of course, the answers that players hope for are an open secret, and fellow game players cooperate to help fulfill a wish. Ouija players know this kind of insider conspiracy well. Secondly, the Ouija Board-which acts inside the compelling liminal space between physical and mental phenomenon-works by harnessing a much less well known psycho-physiological principle called ideomotor action. William Benjamin Carpenter, a British physiologist, introduced this theory as far back as 1852; later, Harvard physician William James popularized the explanation in his 1890 book, Principles of Psychology.

Here's how ideomotor action works. The planchette may seem to drag our hands along as it selects letters that spell out words, but it happens that muscular action does not always arise out of deliberate will or volition, or in fact, even upon our awareness. Our keen expectations for a certain outcome will sometimes direct the movements of our arms and hands as the planchette glides easily on felt-covered feet. This happens at a level that lies below our conscious attention. "Dousing" sticks or "divining" rods which also appear to move strangely on their own work in exactly this way by amplifying muscle movements. Whether we're looking for buried pipes or for answers, though, subtle unacknowledged suggestions, not spirits, guide our actions. Yes, we select the letters ourselves in this game; it's just that sometimes we don't quite know that we do it or how we do it.

It's fun and usually harmless to indulge a spooky Ouija Board fantasy about just who is moving that thing. Pretending is fun. But some take playing this game too far into the realm of belief, investing the world with unseen manipulators and leaving play far behind. I've written about the Ouija Board before, and afterward I heard plenty from an adamant few who didn't like the news that there are no such things as ghosts. In response, I offered them this simple test of paranormal claims. Try inviting the Ouija believer to wear a blindfold; then quietly rotate the game a half turn. Then ask some mischievous questions of your own devising. (Be nice, now.) If your subject has memorized the position of the letters or the YES and NO answers (on purpose or not) I promise you amusing and instructive results.

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At the twilight of the Victorian Age, hypnotists entertained audiences with their mysterious arts, seemingly severing the connection between will and mind in hapless volunteers. Groups gathered for séances, too, where, more ominously, charlatans purported to communicate with the dead.

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As for my final website I found this one. It explains how there's something that is called Ideomotor effect it's when your body moves when you don't mean to. I can relate to this, not in terms involving a Ouija Board but as a young kid in grade school my friends and I would play this game that includes something exactly like the Ideomotor effect. My friend would put my two hands together, lock all fingers except for my thumb and index while they would hit the inside of my fingers for 30 seconds then would make a turning movement with their hands on each side of my hand. At the beginning my two index fingers would be completely apart by the end they would be stuck together without even trying.

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It's that time of year again - the season when paranormal entities come out to play. But if you're thinking about grabbing a Ouija board for your next conversation with the other side, you might want to think again.

Despite their long history as hoax spiritualist devices turned hit toys turned tools of the devil, Ouija boards won't actually put you in contact with demons or spirits. Any scary firsthand reports you might hear or read of real-life Ouija board horror stories are exaggerations, false claims, or a misunderstanding of how Ouija boards actually work.

That might be disappointing news if you're hosting a Halloween sleepover, but it might also leave you asking, "How do Ouija boards work?" The answer is surprisingly simple.

Ouija boards rely on the power of your own body

If you've never used a Ouija board, the concept is pretty straightforward. With a group or by yourself, you place your hands lightly on a triangular pointer called a planchette. The planchette rests on the board itself, which has the words "yes" and "no" in its top corners, an alphabet in the center, and the word "goodbye" at the bottom.

The idea is to summon the spirits you want to communicate with, and they'll move the planchette around the board to spell out answers to the questions you ask - until they or you finally say goodbye and the spirits go back to wherever they came from.

It all sounds pretty harmless, but there's a long tradition of people believing that Ouija boards are dangerous occult gateways that can lead to demon possession or worse. After all, what happens if it's a non-friendly spirit that's moving the planchette without your control?

In fact, there's a simple scientific explanation: The mysterious mechanism that powers the Ouija board is called the ideomotor effect (pronounced "idio- mo-tor" or "id-ee- aah-meh-ter"), and it's basically a way for your body to talk to itself.

The ideomotor effect is an example of unconscious, involuntary physical movement - that is, we move when we're not trying to move.If you've ever experienced the sudden feeling of jerking awake from sleep (known as the hypnic jerk), you've experienced a more abrupt version of the ideomotor effect: your brain signaling your body to move without your conscious awareness. The obvious difference is that the ideomotor effect happens when you're awake, so the reflexive movements you make are much smaller.

In the case of a Ouija board, your brain may unconsciously create images and memories when you ask the board questions. Your body responds to your brain without you consciously "telling" it to do so, causing the muscles in your hands and arms to move the pointer to the answers that you - again, unconsciously - may want to receive.

There are multiple scientific studies that have shown various instances of the ideomotor effect in action. In one well-known and oft-repeated variant of the Ouija board test, blindfolded participants spell much more incoherent messages. (You can try this one at home.)

These experiments easily demonstrate that the Ouija board only works when the participants are able to manipulate the pointerthemselves. If a ghost or spirit were really in the room, it would be able to direct the planchette to spell out coherent messages without any assistance. But there is no ghost, and when the Ouija board users are deprived of their ability to spell out words they can see, the game rapidly devolves into gibberish.

The ideomotor effect is actually a powerful subconscious tool

Before Ouija boards were invented, spiritualists and other would-be ghost communicators used makeshift devices called "talking boards"that served a similar purpose. Talking boards first became popular in mid-19th-century America, when millions of people suddenly gained an interest in talking to the dead following the tremendous loss of life in the Civil War. The popularity of talking boards, and their use as a tool to exploit grieving war families, meant scientists actually started studying the ideomotor effect in the midcentury, well before Ouija boards and planchettes were patented in 1890.

Over the years, research has determined that the ideomotor effect is closely tied to subconscious awareness - and that its effect is maximized when the subject believes he has no control of his movements. Paradoxically, the less control you think you have, the more control your subconscious mind is actually exerting.

This is where the Ouija board's triangular pointer comes in. The planchette makes it easier to subconsciously control your muscle movements, because it focuses and directs them even while you believe you aren't in control of them. It's also why the planchette seems to move even more effectively when multiple people are using the planchette at once: It frees everyone's minds to subconsciously generate creepy Ouija board answers together.

The effect might also make the Ouija board an effective tool to help you tap into your own subconscious. In one study published in 2012, scientists found that using the Ouija board allowed subjects to recall factual information with more accuracy than if they weren't using the board. Participants were instructed to answer a series of yes/no questions and to rate whether they were confident in their answers or merely guessing. Later, they were subjected to another round of questions but used a Ouija board to indicate "yes" or "no," once again rating their confidence level in their answers. In cases where participants believed they didn't know an answer, they were able to give more correct answers, more often, when using the Ouija board than when they believed they were only guessing on their own.

The researchers behind that study have gone on to speculate that using the Ouija board as a technique to unlock subconscious knowledge could lead to insights about the early onset of Alzheimer's and other neurodegenerative diseases.

In other words, the Ouija board is potentially a very powerful communication tool - just not in the way most people think.

The ideomotor effect is behind much more than just Ouija boards - including several harmful real-life scams and "therapies"

The appeal of the ideomotor effect is that you actually may be communicating with something you can't typically access - your own subconscious - and that the experience can feel like communicating with something paranormal or unknown.

This real physical effect causes some people to believe that seemingly miraculous or paranormal phenomena are behind certain behaviors and occurrences. It's a common element of demon possession hoaxes, since witnesses come to believe the "possessed" person is moving without her own control. It can also convince people they have the gift of automatic writing, meaning they insist that spirits can communicate with the living through their "uncontrolled" handwriting. Often, the ideomotor effect is used to defraud people who visit exorcists, psychics, mediums, and other self-proclaimed spirit-channeling types - sometimes leading to severe financial, physical, and psychological harm.

Dowsing is another example of the ideomotor effect being exploited for financial gain. The practice, whose stated purpose is to divine water or other things located underground or concealed within something else,involves holding a special device (like a dowsing rod or a divining rod) and letting the ideomoter effect cause your hand to "mysteriously" point to the location of the desired object or substance. These devices have been scientifically tested and debunked again and again, but that hasn't stopped their purveyors from falsely claiming they can detect everything from gold to liver disease and hepatitis to "harmful earth radiations." In 2013, one charlatan was convicted of selling nearly $70 million in fake bomb detectors to Iraqi police.

Finally, the ideomotor effect lies behind a controversial, repeatedly debunked form of pseudoscience therapy called "facilitated communication," which emerged as a popular therapy technique in the 1990s. Facilitated communication claims to work by allowing disabled or autistic patients to "communicate" through slight finger movements. In reality, science has proven many times over that the patients' movements are caused by the ideomoter effect, and that their caregivers are reading meaning into nothing. One scientist even referred to facilitated communication as "Ouija board stuff."

The disastrous effects of this fake therapy include a sex abuse case in which the caregiver claimed she used facilitated communication to obtain consent from her patient, and a devastating parental custody case where manipulative caregivers used it to suggest that the children involved had "accused" their parents of abuse. Sadly, it still exists today as a fraudulent speech therapy technique used with autism patients, disguised under various names like "rapid prompting method," "supported typing," or "progressive kinesthetic feedback."

Ironically, the same factor lies at the heart of both the cause and the effects of the ideomotor phenomenon: We want to believe. Our desire to confirm the existence of ghosts, spirits, and other improbable possibilities is what convinces Ouija board users, facilitated communication proponents, and anyone else who encounters the ideomotor effect in action that they've experienced something real: a real visitation from another dimension, some sort of mystical sign, or an indication that a patient trapped in his own mind is suddenly able to break free and communicate.

But the marvelous thing about a Ouija board isn't what a planchette might read or a psychic might claim the spirits are saying through it from the other side. In reality, the true wonder of the Ouija board is what lies within our own subconscious.

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How Ouija boards work. (Hint: It's not ghosts.)

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It's that time of year again - the season when paranormal entities come out to play. But if you're thinking about grabbing a Ouija board for your next conversation with the other side, you might want to think again.

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I've watched many videos and tried to understand where different people were coming from with their views and opinions on the Ouija Board. It's a little bit of a long video with some irrelevant parts at the beginning but I noticed a good point he brought up since I'm a little on both sides of the fence. He explained if paranormal presence can shut doors and turn off lights why do ourselves and they people playing with us needs to have our hands on the portable in order for it to work. Which I think is a very good point for the side that doesn't believe in Ouija Boards. Also, big brands like Hasbro sell it with the minimum age limit as 8 years old. You can gamble at 18, buy alcohol at 19 but can summon the devil at 8 - A funny tweet I found online.

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I found another interesting video that explains more about the confirmation bias and the ideomotor effect that exists. Explained by a Neurological  Scientist.

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Brain Games - Ouija Board, Ideomotor Effect, and Confirmation Bias

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As my final video I found another video that explains more once again about Self - Hypnosis & the Ideomotor Effect. Not just with the Ouija Board but with another object such as a key to demonstrate the effect it has when you are unaware.

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Self-Hypnosis and the Ideomotor Effect - The Haunted Key

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Here's a picture that shows whatever you think with your mind you can do, as an example in one of the videos I've chosen (In post 6) when the skeptical participates played the "spirt" was able to answer & spelled words, but when they were blindfolded and unaware of where their hands where it wasn't making any sense.

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Here is a picture of the brain and where the functioning of the Ideomotor Effect comes from

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For my final picture, I found a picture which is almost the same concept of the Ouija Board and Ideomotor Effect. It 2015 a game called Charlie Charlie began. With one paper, two pencils and write yes, no, yes and no in a square and ask Charlie Charlie are you there. The pencil turns. Many people could have blown the pencil a few times to move in a direction on camera.