The ouija board, a talking board popular since the late nineteenth century, has spawned a range of reactions about the amusement, and potential allure, of communicating with the unknown, unconscious, or even dead.
According to Linda Rodriguez McRobbie in Smithsonian Magazine, its creators had tapped into the growing popularity of spiritualism in the U.S. during the 1890s to fashion a device that would facilitate direct and immediate communicate with the spirits of the dead.