In the early 1900s, St. Louis housewife Pearl Curran used her Ouija board communications with the ubiquitous spirit Patience Worth to publish a number of poems and prose. Pearl claimed that all of the writings came to her through séances, which she allowed the public to attend. In 1917 writer Emily G. Hutchings believed she had communicated with and written a book dictated by Mark Twain from her Ouija board. Twain's living descendants went to court to halt publication of the book that was later determined to be so poorly written that it could not have been written by Twain dead or alive.
Since the 1970s, author Jane Roberts has transcribed text channeled from what she described as an "energy personality essence" named Seth. Topics attributed to Seth discuss the nature of physical reality, the origins of the universe, the theory of evolution, the many-worlds interpretation, the Christ story, and the purpose of life among other subjects and form a collection of more than 10 books and a number of videos and audio recordings.
Author John Fuller used a Ouija board in his research for his 1976 book The Ghost of Flight 401. As he was skeptical of its effectiveness, he worked with a medium and claimed they both contacted Don Repo, the flight engineer on the flight which crashed into the Everglades en route to Miami. According to Fuller, the information divined described facts that neither he nor the medium previously knew.
More recently, Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Merrill used a Ouija board and recorded what he claimed were messages from a number of deceased persons. He combined these messages with his own poetry in The Changing Light at Sandover (1982).
Author Jerry Hicks (Ask and It Given) whose wife Esther claims to speak for a nonphysical entity group called Abraham, experimented with the Ouija Board prior to contact with Abraham. The board told him to "read everything about Albert Schweitzer", hardly demonic.
Ouija Board
.gif)
