By Kristen Anderson, @chillinkristen

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A good Ouija board session is a seminal childhood experience, at least for the creepy set. 

Think back to your fingers lightly touching the plastic planchette and asking questions into the air with the hopes they’ll be answered by something unseen (and hopefully, something nice). If anything happens at all, which often, it doesn’t, maybe there were whispered, slightly annoyed but giggly accusations of “moving it.” It’s all a little scary but also fun and exciting. And safe. 

You can discount any notion that some supernatural or paranormal presence is actually using the board to come through and make contact because someone in your circle had to have been using just the slightest pressure (whether consciously or subconsciously) to move the planchette. It was one of your friends. Not a ghost.

If you haven’t experienced this yourself, you’ve almost certainly seen it on TV. “You’re moving it!” is usually an assertion that a spirit isn’t actually there. But what if they’re not mutually exclusive?

Sometimes someone IS moving it, and their denial might be genuine—they might have no idea that their light touch on the felt-tipped planchette is creating ever-so-slight movements. 

There’s a phenomenon called the “ideomotor effect” where a person makes unconscious movements, and realists point to this effect as a valid explanation for Ouija boards “working.” They say those using it are unconsciously making micro-movements so subtle that even they may not realize they’re doing it, and then they misconstrue any subsequent messages as spirit intervention. The ideomotor effect is a real thing and a completely legit explanation.

But some people in the paranormal community wonder if, while the ideomotor effect is at play, it doesn’t mean a spirit isn’t still manipulating things to get its message across. Perhaps a ghost is communicating through a person’s subconscious, and thus their subtle movements, and rather than getting in the way of a spirit’s message, are actually spelling it out for them.

Michelle Belanger is a paranormal investigator who believes this could be what’s happening. In a Twitter thread, they say that divination tools like Ouija boards aren’t, at their base level, necessary for us to communicate with the beyond. We ourselves are divinatory tools, perfectly capable of picking up messages from the other side. But through socialization and structures that teach us to look for guidance and confirmation outside of ourselves, we don’t trust those messages if they don’t go through an outside source.

Enter tools like the Ouija board, pendulums, tarot, etc. Not only do these tools provide a useful framework and language for spirits to work through, but we’re also less likely to brush off these messages. Using these tools means there’s visual “proof” of them, as opposed to our own intuitive feelings that we think are just reaching.

It’s an exciting idea that opens up a whole world of possibility. The things that we think taint genuine supernatural contact—us imposing our thoughts or our will onto them—might just be enhancing the communication process, turning it into a collaboration of sorts.

It’s similar to the idea that you’re likely to get a more resonant reading with a psychic or medium if you give them a little up-front information so that they can better interpret the messages that are coming through, rather than withholding facts to “test” the psychics. Or why tarot readers who have a unique interpretation of the cards can give more personal—and therefore useful— readings. It may not be clean, impartial, ready to hold up to the scientific method, but this isn’t a science, anyway. 

While these are different kinds of experiences—the act of knowingly disclosing information to a psychic is different than unconsciously moving a Ouija planchette—there are interesting parallels. In the same way we might decide to give our trust to a psychic and see what happens, perhaps you can trust yourself with a Ouija board. Even if you feel yourself “moving it,” maybe you can relax, go with it and see what comes through with an open mind rather than assuming that you messed it up.

When we use these tools, it’s ideal that we bring some of ourselves and our perception into the experience. Perhaps we’re not contaminating the findings, but are instead contributing to them. So what if we ARE moving the planchette?

Maybe, as Belanger says, “The spirit world uses us as a tool to move the tool.”