BALTIMORE - No late-night séance or Halloween sleepover is complete without a Ouija Board, and if you’re in Baltimore, you can visit where it was named — or, according to legend, where the board named itself!
The mysterious talking board emerged from 19th-century America’s obsession with spiritualism, and in 1890, a group of Baltimore investors began manufacturing the novelty, according to SmithsonianMag.com.
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The layout of the original Ouija boards remains mostly unchanged today. The board features the alphabet in the middle, a row of numbers below, "yes" and "no" in the upper corners, and "goodbye" at the bottom. Each board includes a "planchette," a device used to move around the board. It works when two or more people gather, ask a question aloud, and watch as the board answers.
To find where the board got its name, head to a former boarding house, now a convenience store, in Mt. Vernon, downtown Baltimore.
On the wall of the 7-Eleven at 529 N Charles Street, next to the donuts and across from the soda and Slurpee machines, hangs a plaque documenting the historical event. It reads:
"One evening about April 1890, while trying the board with a Miss Peters... in a large boarding house at that time on the corner of Charles and Center streets... I remarked that we had not yet settled upon a name, and as the board had helped us in other ways, we would ask it to propose one. It spelled out O-U-I-J-A. When I asked the meaning of the word it said 'good luck.' Miss Peters there upon withdrew from her neck a chain which had at the end a locket, on it the figure of a woman and at the top the word 'Ouija.' We asked her if she had thought of this name, and she said she had not. We then adopted the word."
Charles W. Kennard, First to Manufacture the Ouija Board
Believe it—or not! If not, grab a Ouija Board and ask it yourself!