My mom always said the secret to success was getting a good night sleep and making sure you washed your face every morning. I guess Charles Kennard, the man who first manufactured the board that later became Ouija®, felt the same way! The pillowcase and hand towel you see here were gifts from Charles Kennard’s…
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Well, here he is, Charles W. Kennard, the man who spent his life claiming he invented the Ouija board. This is the only known photo of him that’s survived and I came face to face with it in July in a Mexican restaurant over chimichangas and margaritas. I’d been after good ole Charlie since 1992…
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Prologue – In my lifetime, I’ve listened to Ouija as its revealed many of its secrets. It’s been a group effort that’s taken countless collaborations, old school research, hours of interviews, and traveling the western hemisphere to get the world’s most well-known talking board to speak up. Arguably, one of the most profound finds regarding…
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Thanks to the collaboration and dedication of a wonderful librarian at the Meriden Public Library we know a little more about William W. Wheeler’s 1898 “Wireless-Messenger.” I first saw one of these almost a hundred years after it was manufactured when I visited another collector in 1997. She had a bunch and I traded her…
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Continued from Part 1… Message received… and with that William Wheeler and his Wireless Messenger spilled their secrets. Mind you, it only took five collectors, two librarians, two local historians, the Connecticut Secretary of State”s office and their archives, a researcher at the National Archives, and the Copyright Catalogue to get this little board to…
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