Elijah Bond’s Ouija Board Grave

3 min read

1 year ago Nathan

Horror movie lovers and not only, the concept of a Ouija board is quite simple: ask questions, then wait to see which letters on a board your involuntary motions end up pointing to for your otherwordly answer.
The creepy notion of not being fully aware of where your own hands are going to point, nor why, has fascinated paranormal enthusiasts and psychologists alike for years, but probably you didn’t known that it’s all thanks to one man: Elijah Bond.

Elijah Jefferson Bond was born on January 23rd 1847 in Bel Air, Harford County, Maryland and was the fourth child of Judge William Bond and Charlotte Howard Richardson.
His brother General Frank A. Bond would father Harriet Virginia Bond, who would later marry Elijah’s friend, William H. A. Maupin, one of the original founders of the Kennard Novelty Company, the first company to produce a real Ouija board.
Records show that Elijah was a veteran of the Confederate Army as were two of his brothers Frank A. and Arthur W. Bond. He attended public schools in Anne Arundel County and then graduated the Law School of the University of Maryland in 1872.
While living in Charleston he worked as both an attorney and an insurance agent.
When, later, he returned to Baltimore he suffered a “stroke of paralysis” in 1919 and he died on April 14th 1921.

The man patented one of the world’s first commercially sold talking boards, which was trademarked as Ouija, and immediately captured people’s imaginations with his claims that it could help one speak to people from beyond the grave.
And you can only imagine how well the one on his own gravestone works, since it’s already very close to the deceased!
However, such was not always the case.
In one of the last century’s most intriguing but perhaps intentional ironies, the man responsible for bridging the communication gap between the living and the dead was buried in an unmarked grave, making him nearly impossible to find years later.
But it was 2007 when Robert Murch, a paranormal enthusiast and Ouija board collector, located the grave and Elijah Bond finally got the acclaim for his creation.
Robert claims it took him 15 years to locate the precise grave in Baltimore’s Green Mount Cemetery, several of those spent working closely with the cemetery owners.
A year later, together with generous donations from Ouija enthusiasts, the cooperation of the cemetery itself, and the blessing of Elijah’s descendants Walter Dent Jr. (his great grand nephew!) and his daughter Winifred Pierce, a new memorial monument was erected to mark the grave and commemorate Elijah’s creation.
Volunteers and donation funds were pulled together to create Elijah Bond’s memorable headstone, which bears his traditional name, birth and death dates on one side, and a replication of a Ouija board carved into the other.
The headstone, crafted by Tegeler Monuments, is now a popular destination for people interested in the supernatural and after years of resting in obscurity, Elijah is finally being communicated with, one way or another.