Fairmount Cemetery: here lies the woman who named the Ouija Board!

3 min read

5 months ago Leo S

Hidden in Denver’s historic Fairmount Cemetery, a gravestone marks the final resting place of Helen Peters Nosworthy, or the woman who, apparently, named the Ouija board.
Though largely forgotten for decades, her role in the board’s origins is now cemented in stone, thanks to a headstone erected by the Talking Board Historical Society in 2018.

Helen was born on September 19, 1851, in Baltimore, Maryland. Her affluent family was part of Southern society and had many ties to the Confederate Army during the American Civil War and, together her siblings, she would often take buttons from dead soldiers after battles.
The spiritualist movement began in the United States around the time of her birth, and gained further popularity following American Civil War, when mediums did significant business in allegedly allowing survivors to contact their lost relatives.
Living in Baltimore, Helen became a medium and spiritualist herself. Her sister, Mary, had married Elijah Bond who had invented a talking board with his business partner, Charles W. Kennard. Helen herself became a stockholder in the Kennard Novelty Company but they needed a marketable name to manufacture the board and so, one night in 1890, they decided to hold a seance and ask the mysterious device what it wished to be called.

The planchette slid across the board spelling out “O-U-I-J-A” and, when asked what the word meant, the board simply replied: “Good luck”.
However, a deeper mystery lies in the name’s possible origins, as Helen at the time was wearing a locket featuring a portrait of the English novelist Ouida, whose signature below seemed to spell out, not by chance, “ouija”, with some believe the board borrowed the name from the author, rather than the spirit realm.
Either way, despite her early involvement, she later distanced herself from the Ouija board, calling it a board that tells lies.
In 1891, Helen married Ernest Nosworthy (1864–1937), a Shakespearean actor and later traveling salesman and relocated to Denver, Colorado and, when she died on November 8, 1940, she was buried in an unmarked family plot in Denver’s Fairmont Cemetery, with her story fading into obscurity.

Historically, prior to this, talking boards had been used worldwide for centuries. In China, for example, there is evidence of usage as far back as 1100AD where they were used ritualistically and as a means of spirit communication.
At least…until they were banned by the Quing dynasty around 1644!
Also the American spiritualist movement similarly saw widespread usage of printed alphabet boards as a means of contacting the dead, but It was not until Elijah Bond saw to patent his particular planchette and board combination that actually launched the Ouija board.
In 1901, production was taken over by William Fuld, who began to produce the boards under his own name, suggesting that it was him personally who named the device and, when asked of the roots of “Ouija”, he initially remarked that he learned the name from the board itself, and that it was an old Egyptian term, meaning “good luck”.
Later, when popularity increased, he went on to say that it was simply a combination of the French and German words for “yes”, literally “Oui” and “Ja”.
Questionable claims aside, his boards flooded the market and reached peak popularity in the 20s and 30s.

Nearly 80 years later, occult historians and Ouija enthusiasts rediscovered Helen Peters Nosworthy contributions, ensuring that her name would not be lost to time, and today visitors can find her grave marked with an inscription that reads: “The Woman Who Named the Ouija Board”, standings as a quiet tribute to the interesting history of one of the world’s most infamous spirit-communication devices.

Article written by our former collaborator Leo for Random-Times.com – Summer2022🙏🏽