Throughout the centuries, writers have looked to many sources for inspiration. They have attempted to stimulate the creative process through prayer, meditation, tantric techniques, and biochemical enhancement. While most may have credited their work to their own cleverness, many have also paid homage to their guiding spirits, be it the whiskey bottle or Erato, the muse of poetry. Techniques for achieving success vary, as well. While Jack Kerouac kept the juices flowing by typing On the Road on a continuous roll of paper – producing in two weeks a single-spaced paragraph 120 feet long – authors like William S Burroughs used cut-and-paste to overcome writer's block. This last method is probably closest to the unusual phenomenon that is the subject of today's discussion.

As we have said, writers have many sources of inspiration. But a Ouija board? What's up with that? Seriously, novels and poetry have been written using the demon toy. In fact, they've won literary prizes. You will pardon the expression, but whatever possessed these people to commit literature by planchette? And did Mark Twain publish a posthumous novel this way¹?

Let's take a brief look at the history of Ouija board literature.

Ouija: Literary Boon or Demonic Menace?

The Ouija board was patented in the US in 1891². The boards were popular for home use: William Fuld, the manufacturer, claimed in 1920 to have made $3 million in profits on these cardboard divination aids, which were ruled by the US legal system in the same year to be toys, and thus taxable. (The Supreme Court refused to hear the matter.)

Ouija boards were popular in many places, although some feared, as they do today, that the little cardboard letter-and-number boards were the Urim and Thummim³ of Beelzebub. Ouija boards were particularly popular in St Louis, Missouri, during the First World War. According to the Literary Digest in 1916, there was a run on Ouija boards in St Louis.

Nearly everybody in St Louis is monkeying with 'weejie-boards' and talking to dead novelists!
The call for the little heart-shaped things on wheels, known as ouija-boards by the elect⁴, has sent prices shooting skyward, and shipments of them are coming to St Louis from all over the country.
Literary Digest, 14 October, 1916.

The reason for Ouijamania in St Louis was the literary output of two women writers: Pearl Lenore Curran and Emily Grant Hutchings. Frankly, these two ladies – and their disembodied collaborators – were setting the publishing world on its heels. Not to mention annoying the Mark Twain Estate.

Patience Worth and The Sorry Tale

When it all began, Pearl Lenore Curran was a respectable, though not well-educated, St Louis housewife. According to those who should know, Pearl was a terrible student growing up, with a short attention span. According to her publisher, she had little or no understanding of historical fact. For example, she originally believed that it was Henry VIII who'd had his head cut off, rather than his wives. So how did this writer, hardly a scholar, produce a historical novel set in the 1st Century BC, which more knowledgeable readers found to accord with the facts as related by Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus? Well, Pearl said she wasn't doing the writing: Patience Worth was.

Patience Worth was... well, it depended on whom you believed. Pearl, her note-taking husband, and her friends insisted that Patience was a discarnate entity, the spirit of an Englishwoman from the 17th Century who had immigrated to New England and been killed by Indians. Patience spoke to Pearl through the Ouija board. Her first words were:

Many moons ago I lived. Again I come. Patience Worth my name. Wait, I would speak with thee. If thou shalt live, then so shall I. I make my bread at thy hearth. Good friends, let us be merrie. The time for work is past. Let the tabby drowse and blink her wisdom to the firelog.

Patience had a lot to say: with Pearl's help, she penned the novels Telka, The Sorry Tale, Hope Trueblood, The Pot upon the Wheel, Samuel Wheaton, and An Elizebethan Mask. Patience was also a poet: almost 100 of her poems appeared in print, and were anthologised alongside other leading poets of the day, such as Edgar Lee Masters and Edna St Vincent Millay.

The 1916 publication of The Sorry Tale: A Story of the Time of Christ, was a bit of a literary event. Although General Lew Wallace, author of the US bestseller Ben Hur, had required seven years' research to produce his epic novel of Biblical times, Mrs Curran had apparently composed hers entirely with the aid of the Ouija. Strange, in an almost surreal style, with characters named Panda and Indra, the novel nonetheless received favourable reviews: one noted critic even called it a new classic of world literature.

Although in vogue for a time, Mrs Curran failed to realise a fortune from her (and Patience's) literary labours. After her husband's death, she went on the lecture circuit to support her family, and ended by moving to Los Angeles to live with a family friend.

Mark Twain Revived?

The next year after publication of The Sorry Tale, Mrs Emily Grant Hutchings, a friend of Mrs Curran's, brought out her ghost-written book: Jap Herron, by none other than Mark Twain. Unlike Pearl Curran, Mrs Hutchings was a real writer: she wrote for the St Louis Republic, and contributed to the Atlantic Monthly and Cosmopolitan, prestigious magazines. But Mrs Hutchings, like Pearl, claimed that this work came by means of the Ouija board.

Emily Hutchings had two qualifications for dealing with Mr Twain. First, she was from Hannibal, Missouri, Twain's birthplace. Second, she had corresponded with him in life, receiving writing advice from her famous townsman. But how did Twain, an avowed skeptic when it came to the afterlife, come to use the Ouija board?

According to Emily, Twain said that all the 'scribes' on the Other Side were keen on finding a living amanuensis. Clemens was patient with Hutchings, even helping her with the rewrite process, but he complained about the rigours of the Ouija board, saying, '...that apostrophe is too far down. I am in danger of falling off the board every time I make a run for it.' However, as the first author to submit a typewritten manuscript to a publisher, Twain was no doubt fascinated by this new 'technology'.

The resultant novel, Jap Herron, was described as 'a Missouri pastoral'. It is a humorous tale about some semi-literate newspaper publishers in a small town. There is a cast of drunks and oddballs, and [Spoiler Alert] Jap becomes mayor in the end. Was the quality up to Twain's usual level? Not according to the New York Times.

If this is the best that 'Mark Twain' can do by reaching across the barrier, the army of admirers that his works have won for him will all hope that he will hereafter respect that boundary.
New York Times, 9 September, 1917⁵.

Clara Clemens, Twain's daughter, and the Twain publishers Harper and Company sought an injunction to stop the publication of this screed. For weeks, it was hoped that the case would go to the Supreme Court – which would have to rule on Ouija boards and dead authors. Alas, Mrs Hutchings and her publisher proved to be spoilsports. They accepted an out-of-court settlement, and agreed to destroy Jap Herron. Fortunately for posterity, they didn't quite succeed. We have got it, it's online, and we can read it if we want to.

Judge for Yourself

Is The Sorry Tale a great classic? Is it at least as good as Ben Hur? You be the judge. Just read it online. Draw your own conclusions about whether you'd recommend the Ouija board as a muse.

Want to enjoy the Missouri pastoral? Find it here. Decide if that New York Times critic was too harsh.

Hungry for Ouija-inspired poetry? This collection can get you started on an appreciation of the verse of Patience Worth. Beware: she useth 'thee' a lot.

It is to be hoped that readers will approach these works in a spirit of exploration, and worry less about claims that the writers are haunted than whether the prose or verse speaks to them. Although Midwestern outrage groups may still burn Ouija boards along with Harry Potter novels, attitudes have softened over time. Even the New York Times has mellowed somewhat, at least in respect to poet James Merrill, whose 560-page epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover, was published in 1982. This opus was composed with the aid of... you guessed it: a Ouija board.