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The next couple of times he used the board, it seemed like “ZOZO” was always waiting.Īnother time using the board, Setzer claims he and his friends contacted a spirit named Charlie Gilbert who died in 1986. Setzer claims he began to experience phenomena outside of using the Ouija board, including a mischievous laugh in his head. Having grown up in a Christian home, Setzer says, “You live your whole life thinking that some things just aren’t real…But when one of them is personally proven to you, you realize you know much less than you thought you did.” He is convinced that the movement “could not be replicated by any amount of people if they tried”.

Setzer felt as if the planchette was moving strongly, like by magnets. At the time I had no idea what the ZOZO phenomena was…I looked it up on Google and found that ZOZO was a demon that was considered malevolent and often messed with people’s lives.” “When asked what ‘ZOZO’ did, it spelled ‘KILL’. “We contacted a spirit who answered ‘ZOZO’ to most questions,” he says. The next night, Setzer and his friend decided to use the Ouija board in an EWU dorm room where a student claimed to hear voices.

“The planchette moved and spelled out a name and way of death.” His friend wanted to use a Ouija board, and he agreed, not expecting anything. “It all started one winter night when I went with a friend to a cemetery,” he says. Matt Setzer, former EvCC student and anthropology graduate from EWU, was one of the skeptics. In American culture, it seems as if there are the skeptics, the fearful avoiders and the fringe, confident participants.

This negative idea of the Ouija board (and séances) has prevailed. Religious leaders and horror aficionados alike latched onto this sinister reputation of the board, and for many, it became associated with evil. Suddenly using the Ouija board was no longer considered a casual affair. This took a turn when 12-year-old Regan became possessed after using a Ouija board in the 1973 horror film The Exorcist. The Ouija board quickly became a success and using it to conduct séances was normalized in American pop culture. The wooden board, marked by letters and numbers, was navigated by a windowed planchette to receive messages from the spiritual realm. Mediums claimed to have the ability to communicate with spirits and demonstrate signs of proof: messages from the spiritual realm, levitation, rapping and banging from unknown sources and the exorcism of ectoplasm, a ghostly white substance which emanated from people’s orifices.Īt the end of the century, a novelty “talking” board was advertised to American families: the Ouija board. Medium Meurig Morris holding an onstage séance at the Fortune Theatre in London, 1931.Séances gained popularity in mid-19th century America during the Spiritualist Movement, when many people were open to contacting their loved ones in the afterlife. The committee sat in on 20 séances, and the debate about Crandon's abilities lasted for a year, but ultimately, Scientific American opted not to award her the money.ġ5. Crandon had entered herself in a contest of sorts, run by Scientific American, that offered a monetary prize to the medium able to produce a "visual psychic manifestation." Here, Houdini is shown in the "Margie Box," which was intended to limit the medium's physical movements within the séance room and contain her suspected manipulations Houdini built the box himself. In 1924, Houdini was part of a committee investigating Boston medium Mina "Margery" Crandon, the wife of a respected surgeon and Harvard faculty member. He even asked his wife to help him show how mediums pull off certain tricks. In fact, he had almost a secondary career debunking the methods of famous mediums during séances and performing their tricks as part of his stage show. Mediums had no greater opponent than magician Harry Houdini, who denounced them as frauds.