Perhaps if Bob Murch had thought to ask his first Ouija board, it might have told him what was ahead: meandering trips through dank graveyards, hours of rooting through archives for patent files and court transcripts, landing in the middle - and helping resolve - a nearly 100-year feud between the families of the two Baltimore brothers who marketed the "all-knowing" slab of wood.
But he didn't, and 15 years later, he's still immersed in his quest to document the history of "The Mystifying Oracle" - that diviner of the future, that gateway to the spirit world, that simple lettered board, born in Baltimore, that went on to become an icon of both pop culture and occult subculture.
Murch was merely doing a favor for some friends - wannabe frat boys in need of Ouija Boards for rush-related scavenger hunts - when he bought his first one at an antique store. He bought more at flea markets, and some online. Most had these words at the bottom:
FOR THE RECORD - A photo caption in Sunday's Arts & Life section misidentified William Andrew Fuld as his father, William Fuld, creator of the Ouija Board. William Andrew Fuld was pictured with his sister, Katherine Fuld, in the 1939 file photo.
THE SUN REGRETS THE ERROR
WILLIAM FULD, BALTIMORE, MD., U.S.A.
Murch, yet to turn 20 and living in Salem, Mass., at the time, was intrigued by the obscure name, the slightly less obscure place and how they combined to spawn the Ouija Board. So he set out to find out more about the history of "talking boards," which were first mass marketed under the name Ouija.
Had it been the 1960s, the decade in which the Ouija Board reached its peak, Murch would have had few places to turn: the board itself, maybe, or the World Book Encyclopedia - the two shared bookcases in many a mainstream suburban home. This was the 1990s, though, and Murch had the Internet. One could rest a hand on a little plastic thing - come to think of it, a little like the Ouija Board's windowed planchette - and point and click for answers.
But, also like Ouija, the Internet could be pretty ambiguous, Murch found, leaving the same uncertainties that users of the Ouija Board had in earlier decades: Can I believe this? Is it telling me the truth, or simply what I already know? Is it leading me astray? Is it - gasp! - a tool of the devil?
"I found lots of conflicting information," said Murch, 34, who was raised an orthodox Jew and was turned onto the macabre and mystical by a sci-fi and horror-show-watching grandmother. "I decided to stop reading what everybody else said and start from scratch."
