All Paranormal Games That You Should Not Play

Ouija Board

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

No, demons will not possess you if you use one.

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 doOuija 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 studiesthat 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 pointer themselves. 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.