Faith is the peerless bridge, supporting what we see and to the scene that
we do, not to slender for the eye. It bears the soul as
bold as it were, rocked in steel, with arms of steel at either
side. It joins behind the veil to what could we presume the bridge would
cease to be, to our far vacillating feet A first necessity. Faith is
the Peerless Bridge by Emily Dickinson. If you've ever visited Colorado, or if
you're lucky enough to live here, then you know it's an outdoor enthusiast's playground,
hiking, biking, skiing. The list goes on and on another side
to the centennial state that most people will never see. It's a side that's
a little darker, a little more sinister, and a little bit strange.
Welcome to Strange Colorado. When this episode comes out, Halloween will be happening
in less than one week. That's right, my spooky friends. This is
our time of year, so I hope you're soaking it in and loving every
minute of it just like I am. And in honor of that whole fall
Halloween spooky season vibe, I found another fun, interesting tidbit of history that
has very strong eerie other round tie ins that fits perfectly with this, But
what is it about this season in particular that just sort of sends a shiver
down your spine, makes you want to wear a big thick sweater and just
sort of bundle up and stay safe inside watching a Harry Potter marathon. Well,
the origins of Halloween and that feeling of change and the oncoming darkness of
winter goes back thousands of years. If you know your Halloween history, then
you probably are already aware that initially the holiday was known as sam Hayne as
some pronounce it, but original pronunciation was actually Sowin, and this originates from
the Celtic Pagans pre Christian era, which encompasses the air of Ireland, Scotland,
Wales, that sort of region of the world, which is pretty funny
to me because that's most of my DNA markers and it explains a lot.
When you know, all those videos about basic fall girls come out, it's
not just us being basic, it's literally in our DNA. Okay, maybe
not, but it makes me feel better about it anyways. So Sourin,
as I was saying, or Halloween as we now call it, was originally
a time of year thousands of years ago in this area of the world where
people began to understand that nature was tucking itself away for the winter. The
trees were starting to drop their leaves, the crops were dying, it was
getting colder, it was time to put up food and prepare for the long,
dark, cold winter ahead, And as everything around them was sort of
in a state of death and decay. Even though we think the leaves are
beautiful when they're dying, people began to believe that this meant, because all
of nature was going through this transformation, that the veil, or the divider
between our world and the spirit realm, was very thin, which makes sense
if you are thinking along those lines of so much of the natural world dying
during this time and passing over. It's a huge rush from one side to
the other, so it does make sense that if there is a veil,
it would be a little bit easier to access during this time of year,
which meant to them that if they had any recently deceased loved ones, they
believed that these loved ones were still close enough to that veil, having recently
passed on, that they would still be able to cross back over and visit
their living relatives. So on the night of Salen, many of these ancient
people would leave food and trinkets out in their homes and on their properties just
in case their friends and relatives who had passed decided to return they could partake
in the fall festivities and enjoy a little bit of liveliness in their after life.
It was all about honoring and remembering their dead and celebrating death and life
and the link between the two and the cycle, which we're really terrified of
now today in our current society because it's hidden from us so much of the
time. But back then it was just another Tuesday. They saw this stuff
all the time, so celebrating death wasn't a scary prospect for them. As
these traditions grew and expanded over the years, people would gather together to celebrate
this holiday, and they would do things like light large bonfires and invite all
of their friends and family to come and celebrate the thinning of the veil and
the visiting of their dead loved ones. These bonfires often represented the warmth and
vibrancy and light of the bright summer sun during the summer months, and when
these bonfires were ending, people would take a bit of the fire home with
them to light their hearts, and more and more games began to pop up
in these celebrations as they really started to embrace the fun side of getting ready
for winter. This is where we get trick or treating from the origins of
going door to door and getting candy from people, which is maybe one of
the best parts of Halloween, comes from the game these ancient people used to
play when they too would go from house to house dressed up as the mischievous
spirits that they believed were also able to access the land of the living during
this time. If the veil is thin, it's not just loved ones that
are coming through, it's the little nasty bits as well. So they would
dress up as these mischievous spirits from their histories and their lore, and they
would go from door to door asking for food because remember they left food out
for the spirits who decided to visit their homes during this time. So it
was a great way to get a free snack and to have a little bit
of fun. But of course, street lights weren't a thing hundreds and thousand
years ago, so they would use turnips that they had carved with a candle
inside to light their way. These were called mangle wurzels, and these were
their lanterns. Once these people began to immigrate to the American colonies way back
in the day, they brought all of their customs with them. Of course,
as so many cultures have, and beat roots weren't exactly in abundance,
but they did have access to the even larger and easier to carve pumpkins.
So if you had a pumpkin carved and set out on your doorstep, people
knew you knew about Halloween, were participating, and that you were handing out
goodies for the evening. And the traditions continue and people still dress up,
but the mischievous spirit costumes now look a little more like I would imagine this
year Barbie and Ken. Now, why am I talking about the origins of
Halloween. Well, because what we're going to talk about today has everything to
do with the thinning of the veil and contacting those on the other side.
This is not a new concept, as I've just demonstrated, and even before
Sowyn sam Hayn Halloween, all of these things for millennia, people have been
attempting to connect with the spirit world in some form or another. Every culture
in every region of the world has similar beliefs in the other side, And
when you are thinking about contacting the other side and why people would want to
do that, it really shouldn't take you too long to puzzle out that.
Generally, when people are attempting to rea through the veil to contact someone,
they're driven by grief. And at no other time in our history was grief
more prevalent in our society here in America than during our major wars, the
first one, most especially being the Civil War. We're going back to eighteen
sixties. The fighting is way more intense. Conditions are horrific for everybody involved.
Soldiers as young as ten are being shipped off to god knows where to
fight hand to hand combat while cannonballs are blowing men to bits all around them.
It's almost hard to even wrap your head around a reality like that,
what it would have been like for these men and children. But the other
side of this situation are those that they left behind at home, mothers,
daughters, wives, girlfriends, you name it. Generally speaking, women who
were left behind often never saw or heard from their soldier ever, again,
there were not dog tags during this time. There was no formal notification system
through the Union or the Confederate Armies for how to get word to a family
that they had lost their loved one. Death tolls and battles were so high
that bodies would lay out for months, just rotting away in fields, no
way to identify them, and by the time whoever it was got around to
disposing of the remains, they were usually just skeletal. That sort of grief
and feeling of not knowing what happened to your husband or your son I can't
even imagine. So it makes sense that this is the first time we really
see a surge of spiritualism sweeping through American culture. People wanted answers, They
wanted to know if their loved ones were dead, and they wanted to know
that they were okay wherever they were. Mediums became very popular during this time,
people who claimed to be able to talk to those on the other side,
who could channel whichever spirit it was that someone was looking for. They
started earning themselves big reputations and lots of money, and yes, many of
them took advantage of the horrible grief people were dealing with to turn a buck.
I'm sure they got their come up and in the end, at least
I hope they did. But these mediums would often have tools that they would
use, such as tarot cards, crystal balls, divining rods, whatever it
was that they believed would help them channel the energy to contact the spiritual world.
This is when we first begin to see the popularity of things called talking
boards really taking off. Now, what is a talking board, Well,
a talking board is a form of automatic writing. What's automatic writing? Automatic
writing is a way of communicating with the spiritual world where basically a medium or
a sensitive person sort of shuts down their own thoughts and motivations and gives their
body over to whatever spirit it is that they are trying to connect with and
allows that spirit to communicate with them through the written word. Some people have
done this with just a pen and a paper, where they just kind of
began moving their hand and suddenly words form, while others began to use talking
boards, which were boards that usually had some type of an alphabet laid out
on it with words like yes and no. And they would use a plan
chet, which is a small piece of wood or glass, whatever it was
that would slide easily over the surface of the board with minimal contact from the
hands guiding it or not guiding it. The hands that were placed on it,
they're not supposed to be guiding it while that does happen. So essentially,
everybody sits around in a seance setting, places their hands on the plan
chet, asks questions, and the planchet, using the energy of those participating
in the seance who are touching the plant, should move around to different letters
and be able to spell out coherent words, answering questions and engaging in a
conversation. I mean, you're getting to have a conversation with someone who is
deceased. This was a very easy way to communicate with the spiritual realm,
and like I said, it became really really popular during this era. Now,
with most things that become popular, people figure out how to make money
off of it very quickly, and talking boards were no different. Now.
Between the Civil War and World War One, even though things might have calmed
down a bit, it definitely didn't die off. We're still talking about pre
twentieth century America, which wasn't all that friendly. I mean, if we've
heard it once, we've heard it a thousand times on this podcast. People
died at the drop of hat. Back then, I mean they were prescribing
opioids and arsenic to people who were sick, and lead was in everything,
so death and loss was still a thing many people dealt with on the regular,
which means so was grief. Enter the talking board we know today as
the Ouiji board. Now, during this era, it was only known as
a talking board. Yes, people used it for seances, but it was
actually sort of a parlor game as well. It was something for people to
do at parties, which is pretty funny if you think about it, because
it still is. It's a sleepover staple. This version of the more modern
talking board was a little more streamlined. It had the alphabet in two arching
rows across the middle of the board, with a yes in one corner,
a no in another, and goodbye at the bottom, as well as a
row of numbers. And then there's also the essential piece, which is the
plan chet. The plan chet is sort of the focus of all of the
energy surrounding the use of this board. It's generally shaped like a triangle or
a heart, something pointed right so that there's a point to the plan chet
that is used to point to specific letters, words, and numbers on the
board so that there is no confusion about whatever word is being spelled. There
are also very important rules for using a Wiji board, and yes this is
in every horror movie that they've made surrounding these boards, but they hold true.
Number one, never use a Wigi board alone. Number two, you
always have to close the board when you're done using it. That means saying
goodbye to whoever or whatever you've been speaking with. Don't just set the board
aside and walk away mid conversation, because basically you're leaving an open portal to
the other realm in your living room. And after you say goodbye, put
that sucker back in the box. When you are done done with the board,
it has to be disposed of properly. Of course, not everybody believes
in this stuff, but on the off chance that it might be real,
it doesn't hurt to cover your bases if you're going to use one of these
things. So there you go. There is the basic setup for the Wiji
board as it was back in the turn of the twentieth century. Times nineteen
h under dish and now enters the star players in today's story a man named
Charles Canard and another man named Elijah Bond. These two set out to patent
the board for themselves, or at least a version of the board. Now,
it really seems like even though these two were businessmen, at least according
to the stories, they believed in the powers of the talking board. They
believed it worked, and they believed it would sell because it worked. They
respected the board and sort of came up with their own design, which is
the one that I just described the classic when you think of Auiji board,
that's what they came up with the layout. But when they were thinking about
what to call this board, they thought about maybe using their own last names.
They went down a whole long list of things, and they just couldn't
settle on something that felt right. So Elijah Bond called in his sister in
law. His sister in law was a woman named Helen Peters Noseworthy. At
this time in nineteen hundred, Helen was living with her husband Ernest in Denver,
where they had moved from the South in eighteen ninety six. Helen was
about forty years old at this time, and she was really well known for
being a successful, powerful medium. Who better to help name this board than
someone who's already plugged in to the other side. So Elijah and Charles invited
Helen over to host a seance with them to ask the board itself what it
wanted to be called. So, even though we're talking about nineteen hundred and
even though some of the spiritualist movement had died off thanks to the efforts of
men like Harry Houdini who worked very hard to shine a light on all of
the false prophets so to speak, and the fake mediums who were stealing money
from people who were in the depths of their grief, there were still those
who held strongly to the belief that spiritualism as a religion was a good godly
practice that also allowed them to stay in touch with deceased loved ones. And
Helen was someone that everybody knew was able to practice this successfully. And this
could definitely be because her upbringing was more than just a little bit spooky,
at least in my opinion. You see, Helen came from a very wealthy
and established Southern family. So when she was a child during the Civil War
or a young girl teenager, there had been a battle that was on her
family's property and afterwards there were deceased soldiers all over the place, all around
their home. Helen and her siblings ventured outside and started poking around these corpses.
They decided that they wanted some mementos from the dead men, and so
they cut off all the buttons from their clothes and brought them back home as
a collection. I know times were different back then, but that's that's morbid.
So Helen always kind of had a macabre, eerie side to her,
and spiritualism fit right in with that. So Helen, Charles, and Elijah
sat down with the board one evening. They all placed their hands on the
plan chet and Helen began to lead the seance to ask the board what its
name was. Helen asked several times for the board to spell out its name,
and every single time she asked, the plan chet would move from one
letter to the next, repeatedly spelling out a single word, Oh you I
j a ouija. Finally sure that the board meant what it was spelling,
as it happened multiple times, the men asked the board what the word meant.
It then spelled out good luck, whether that was a well wishing for
them or a more ominous message for so many people messing in other worldly matters
we don't really know. Interestingly, though, throughout this seance, Helen happened
to be wearing a locket containing a picture of her favorite novelist, an english
woman whose pen name was Wida, and her signature on her works looked a
lot like it was spelled wija. Hmm. Coincidence, I don't know,
but they ran with it and Bond and Canard applied for a patent locally in
Maryland, where they were at the time. They were refused the patent by
the local patent office because the patent officer said there wasn't really any way to
prove that the board worked, or even really to know what it did,
so they couldn't patent it. Undeterred, Elijah and Canard then applied to Washington
for a patent. Initially they were refused, but determined, they collected Helen
and traveled to the patent office in Washington and applied again in person. With
the Wija board in tow They set up shop inside the patent office, and
one patent officer after another came in to assess the board to see if they
might give it a shot, and time and time again, each patent officer
that they saw denied them. That was until intrigued, the chief patent officer
became curious and decided to check it out for himself. He entered the area
where Helen and the men were stationed with the wija board and told them,
quote, you don't know me and I don't know you, but if this
contraption can spell out my name, you've got your patent. So essentially,
he was challenging them to figure out what his name was because they hadn't been
introduced yet, and if they could using the weed aboard, he saw that
as proof of its efficacy. Could they have heard the Chief patent Officer's name
around the office as they were hanging out? Yeah, but maybe not.
As the story goes, Helen, Elijah and Charles and the patent officer placed
their hands on the plan chet, and smoothly and without hesitation, the plan
chet moved from one letter to another as it spelled out the man's name correctly.
According to reports, he abruptly stood up from the table, as white
as a ghost, and said, you've got your patent. A grand success
for the group, and now they got their patent. They started making money.
Things were going great, but just one year after this victory, Ellen
would lose faith completely in the board she fought so hard to get a patent
for. You see, Helen had returned to her family's southern home on a
visit, and as she was there the super creepy collection of dead soldier's buttons
that her and her siblings had cut off the clothes of the deceased men that
had been on their property. They had actually displayed these inside their home as
like trophies, super normal right while at home during this visit, the buttons
disappeared. And these buttons were a prized possession to Helen and her siblings,
so of course they wanted to know what happened to them, who took them?
Where are they? Helen said, I have an idea. Let's consult
the board. The board will tell us where they are, or at least
who took them. So they agreed. They sat down to a seance and
asked the board who stole the buttons, and the board named one of the
siblings. Of course, there was denial and angry words exchanged as the one
who had been accused said that the board was lying and that they had not
stolen the buttons. The other siblings were angry and demanded that the buttons be
returned, and so a huge feud was born between the group of siblings,
causing an actual permanent rift in this family over dead soldiers buttons. Half of
the siblings believed the board and half of the siblings did not. Interestingly enough,
Helen sided with the half that did not believe the board. She was
extremely devastated over the rift in her family, and from that point on she
swore off the Ouigi board and she would not allow any one of her family
members or friends to use it, telling everyone that she could that the Wuiji
board was to be avoided at all costs because it lied. Whether she believed
the board had been manipulated to set up one of her family members, or
whether she believed that whatever was communicating on the other side was deliberately trying to
cause a rift and strife within her family, I'm not sure, but she
would never again go near one. Immediately following this incident, Helen and her
husband returned to Denver. They enjoyed a quiet life far away from anything to
do with the Luigi Board, and spent forty four presumably happy years here in
the Denver area. In nineteen forty, Helen would pass away and be buried
next to her husband in the Fairmont Cemetery. They had no children together,
and due to lack of care of the years and no family members nearby,
their graves fell into disrepair and were actually lost over time. That is until
twenty eighteen, when the efforts of an organization known as the Talking Board Historical
Society decided they wanted to dig into the real history of the Wiji Board,
and when they did, they discovered Helen's story and how she had been the
one to actually give the Wijiaboard its name. They combed through records and found
the site where Helen and her husband's graves sat in Fairmont and erected a custom
headstone. This headstone is large and unmistakable. It details her story regarding the
Wigiboard in large letters across the front. It has the title the Woman who
named the Wigiaboard, as well as the picture of an actual board, and
on the back a few quotes from those who are around at the time and
cited Helen's instrumental involvement in the board's patenting. So now, if you go
to Fairmont and you visit Helen and her husband's gravesite, the only thing anybody
is going to know her for is the wigiboard, the one thing she wanted
nothing to do with any longer. If she's around at all to see this,
that can't be a pleasant thing for her her I wouldn't imagine, And
it would be really interesting if someone happened to take a wija board into the
Fairmont Cemetery and try to ask Helen how she felt opening up a wija board
in the Fairmont. You might get a lot of people coming through, and
I'd be surprised if Helen did. She'd probably stay as far away from that
board as she possibly could, if she didn't turn around and huck it right
at your head. If anybody tries to do that, please let me know.
I want to hear all about it. So what do you think?
Are weija boards real? Is this game you can pick up at your local
store in the children's section something that's innocuous and silly and just fun for party
games, or are we literally and figuratively playing with fire here dealing with entity
and spirits that we really have no clue what they're capable of and what they
want. Is it safe to get that close to the veil and to try
to reach through to make a connection to something or someone on the other side,
whether it's real or whether it's fake. I think I'm going to air
on the safe side, take Helen's advice, and steer clear until next time.
Happy Halloween, and I hope that all of your interactions with the veil
this time of year are good ones. Sources for today's episode include Fox thirty
one, Wikipedia Burialsanbeyond dot com, find a Grave dot com, and an
article from the University of Bristol titled The Thin Veil of Autumn by Andy Winfield.
Thanks for listening, Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever
you listen to podcasts. You can also find me on Facebook and Instagram at
Strange Colorado Podcast. If you have a strange story of your own or an
episode suggestion, you can reach me at Strange Colorado Podcast at gmail dot com.