
Last week I attended OuijaCon – an original convention honoring the 125th anniversary of the Ouija Board. Held in Baltimore, the city where the Ouija Board originated, the first full day of the event held plenty of surprises…
…Haunted Keys, Demons and a Séance!

I don’t work with the Ouija Board, so there was much to learn from the lectures, vendors and museum.
A vendor from Obscura Antiques and Oddities had a collection of old keys and as I conversed with the owner, the keys kept bothering me. I felt compelled to say something, so I told the gentleman about the powerful energy emanating from the keys.
He surprised me when he said,
“You’re the third person to tell me that today.”
This confirmation told me that these keys were definitely haunted,
so I moved on.

Haunted Keys
As I strolled about the convention, I was approached by a Danish researcher and asked to participate in a Ouija Board eye-tracking study. After I was hooked up to the equipment with another volunteer, we proceeded to ask the Ouija Board questions for the study.
Thankfully, I protected myself before the session, but unfortunately, my male partner was a newcomer to working with Spirit Boards,
and he didn’t.
We found out about the Ouija Demon.
During the session, the planchette kept spelling “A,Z,A,Z,A,Z”. It didn’t make sense to us, being Ouija novices, but at the conclusion of the session, the researcher told us about the Demon Zaza or Zozo.
I told my partner how to protect himself and again…
…I moved on.

The evening ended with a séance guided by Chip Coffey.
About a hundred of us formed a circle and joined hands in an attempt to channel the creator of the Ouija name.
The origin of the Ouija name is a mystery to this day.
As a group, the strange noises, names and dark shadows didn’t lead to any definitive conclusions,
but I had a visitor.
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe is buried in Baltimore, but I hadn’t been thinking about him and I’ve never been to his grave. He came through to me as soon as the séance began and he told me that the Spirit (or Entity) who gave him his dark stories, was the same Spirit who invented the Ouija Board and was the creator of the Ouija name.
I withheld this information from the group because I wanted to do some research before drawing any conclusions.
I later discovered the following:
Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849
Modern spiritualism began in 1848
(Poe was dying, so it needed a new outlet?)
The Ouija board is produced in Baltimore in 1890
This doesn’t identify the Spirit’s name, but I find it interesting that it had an outlet in Edgar Allan Poe,
then moved on to create the Ouija Board.
The timeline fits with the information I was given.
Perhaps that’s why Edgar Allan Poe and the Ouija Board both have Baltimore in common.
Even more chilling was the fact that the séance was held less than half a mile from Edgar Allan Poe’s gravesite! I didn’t know where it was before OuijaCon, but I know now.
The events of the evening certainly gave me food for thought and made for a momentous initiation into the World of Ouija!