The talking board sold as a game and feared as a gateway.
Documented
A patent, a trademark, a board game
Talking boards rode the Spiritualist wave of the 1880s. Elijah Bond patented the Ouija board in 1891; Helen Peters reportedly asked the board itself what to call it. Parker Brothers bought it in 1966, then Hasbro. The yes-yes etymology is folk invention; the trademark filing is the documented birth certificate.
Assessment: Fully documented corporate history. The most feared object in the average basement is, on paper, a toy with a serial number.
Stories
Do not play it alone
The story every generation inherits: the board opens a door, demons lie and pretend to be grandma, and the only safe move is never to touch it. The Exorcist sealed the reputation in 1973, and sales reportedly rose.
Assessment: Documented as folklore with a measurable feedback loop: the more terrifying the reputation, the better the board sells. The fear is the marketing.
Interesting claims
Your hands know what you will not say
The scientific claim with the best evidence: the ideomotor effect. Unconscious muscle movements steer the planchette, demonstrated in blindfolded experiments where boards produce gibberish and sitters swear they were guided.
Assessment: The ideomotor mechanism is laboratory-supported and explains the phenomenon without spirits. Believers answer that a mechanism is not a source: the planchette moves through the hands, but who moves the hands. The archive shelves both sentences and closes the drawer.
Sources and further reading
US Patent 446,054, Elijah Bond (1891)
Hunt, Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game (1985), skeptically read
Wegner et al., ideomotor studies, Consciousness and Cognition
Worth asking
If the answer comes from your own hands, does that make it less true or more?