Planchette

Communing with the living and the dead

I’ve never felt like I could achieve fluency in a second language when—especially as a writer—I could spend my life trying to master the first. There are so many words left to learn!

Case in point: local author Beth Hahn has a new online lit mag she co-founded, the sweet -ette in which every other issue abides by a theme of a different word that ends in “-ette.” I love a good prompt. My ideas often require a container to grow in, and I have been known to say:

You are free when you choose your cage

In that vein, I had happily constructed a story for -ette’s editorial consideration around an earlier “cassette” theme. My elderly and widowed mom leaves voicemails on my phone regularly—since who answers the phone anymore; I never have my sounds on—and her rambling messages harken to the olden days of machines with tape as she seems to talk it through to the end of the line. Since the voicemails automatically get transcribed on my phone, I started to create a document of these mega-message events (playing and pausing repeatedly to get down the many parts where the transcriptions couldn’t keep up) that start at point A and meander through the scrambled alphabet of: everyone I never heard of and their ailments, all the nature news (sightings of beer, squirrel, bird), oh the weather (snow, drought, or rain), the exact itinerary down to the minute of every day since we last talked, the social calendar at church and state of scuttlebutt in her apartment building… The sum total is so mundane and yet over-the-top I knew I needed to try to fictionalize this phenomenon somehow—and without just using these personal narrations against her to put her on judgmental display. I struggled to find any thread to hang this on until Mom said one day that she went to the circus.

This real modern day circus (with no big top, no animals) inspired a story surrounding the true circus fire disaster of 1944 in Hartford, CT, which my mom did not allude to in her actual voicemails, but I remembered her talking about when I was a kid. It’s a haunting tale for many coming of age during her timeline in the state as so many women and children (with the men at war) were killed during what was supposed to be a fun and distracting day.

Post-deadline, I finally cooked up a series of some version of my mom filling the metaphorical cassette with her endless voicemails but, oops, I learned the “cassette” issue was closed; I was too late. Would I like to hold my story for consideration for a future issue, perhaps it might work for the “planchette” edition? Planchette?

I had to look up the word. Who knew that the white plastic triangle we used to follow to doom and fright while playing with a ouija board in the delirious, parentless ‘80s, could be called a planchette. Sure, I could make this story work for that, but also I was excited to explore this fascinating object, and the earlier prettier versions they derive from.

As I learned on my Halloweeny tour of nearby mansion Lyndhurst, spiritualism was all the rage in the 19th century. And as I learned from this article on the history of the planchette from Decimonic.com, some pinpoint the beginning of the American phase of this craze right down to a date, place, and dead man:

American Spiritualists often set 31st March 1848 as the beginning of their movement. On that date, Kate and Margaret Fox, from Hydesville, New York, reported they had made contact with the spirit of a murdered peddler. Spiritualism developed and reached its peak growth in membership from the 1840s to the 1920s, specially in English-language countries. As a result, the belief in and experimentation with spirit communications spread as never before and homegrown spiritual experimentation became the most popular of parlor pastimes.

The first use of an “automatic writer” is dated to 1853 in France to replace clunky techniques of talking with the dead (such as “knocked affirmations to often leading questions” which “gave way to ponderous alphabet-calling, wherein the raps would select letters from a called-out alphabet in order to spell out messages one letter at a time”). By this newfangled technique, there might be a small upturned basket with a pencil attached to it, and several participants’ fingers hanging on for dear death while it writes messages from the “beyond.” This means gains popularity, becomes a triangular sort of wooden plank, and crosses the Atlantic by 1858, getting mass-produced (in a quantity of 50) by a Boston bookseller shown in the ad above.

By 1868, the planchette market was exploding with different competitors (one sold 200,000 versions in one year). Who needed a hired medium anymore when you could sit at home and use this device by yourself? By 1880, the planchettes include their own alphabets so you wouldn’t have to struggle to decipher the scribbles so much, moving into what we now know as a ouija or “talking board.” Such dark games seemed to always surge in popularity around wartime—Civil, WWI and WWII—when people wanted to communicate with their deceased or missing loved ones more than ever.

What could explain these boards moving through messages from the standpoint of science?

Early theories included one in an 1863 book by Samuel Guppy, Mary Jane: or Spiritualism Chemically Explained, stating that, as summed up by Decimonic:

….The human body is a condensation of gases, which constantly exude from the skin in an invisible electrical vapor and that the fingers coming in contact with the planchette transmit to it an ‘odic force’, and thus set it in motion. He went on to say that some people have excess phosphorous in their systems and the vapor ‘thus exuded forms a positively living, thinking, acting body, capable of directing a pencil’.

Odic force or another theory that started in the 1840s and seems to make a little more sense: the ideomotor effect. From Britannica.com, this is the “phenomenon in which an individual makes involuntary physical movements in response to ideas, thoughts, or expectations. The root terms ideo- and motor refer to ‘idea’ and ‘thing that moves or causes to move,’ respectively.” Coined by British psychologist William Carpenter,

In a paper titled “On the Influence of Suggestion in Modifying and Directing Muscular Movement, Independently of Volition” (1852), Carpenter provided a detailed explanation for ways in which thoughts, ideas, or expectations could lead to involuntary muscular movements without conscious intention.

In the case of the Ouija board, participants believe that they are receiving messages from the spirit world that cause the planchette (a moveable pointer) to move on the board. Such movements of the planchette, however, are actually caused by small involuntary movements of the participants’ own hands.

Prompted by a possible theme, my micro-fiction moved from filling a cassette to communing with the dead, which you can read here under the title of the unidentified circus fire victim it eventually assumed “Little Miss 1565.”

Not only can I humble-brag that I’ve made it into this nice mag with such great company and handmade individualized graphics, but I also was chosen to be among the two artists featured in the podcast that accompanies each issue. Host Melanie Hoopes is a fine reader of stories and a thoughtful interviewer. The episode is called “The Looming,” she says to encapsulate this mood many of us have in this “moment before a tsunami” (or rather pre-Inauguration) in which, you might be well-prompted to find comfort in art. “Don’t forget about art,” Melanie says, “where I’m hanging my hat” until perhaps “I might be called upon to wear a new hat.”

And so it goes in my writing and the ever-changing hat… Weekly essays these days that fixate around the serrated edges of the weird, with this rare fiction that takes a leap from the oddities of real life. The first little short story I’ve found the means to complete through these many murky years of motherhood.

On the theme of this “spooky heart-shaped doohickey that scoots around on a ouija board,” aptly defined by Melanie in the podcast, co-editor Beth had suggested just one revision for my story that really opened things wide open. What if the mother channels the voice of this dead girl from the famous circus fire, Beth urged me. What would the girl say that might reveal a deeper and darker—and truer—confession from the mother. Indeed.

Sometimes, only sometimes, my writing hits this stride, in moments of hard-won “magic” resulting from the confluence of 1,000 tiny factors, where the words finally seem to arrive as they should be. You might also define it—as the other featured author on the podcast, Tara Isabel Zambrano, talks about in this hidden struggle between originality and the familiar—as “a spiritual thing, or something divine that’s guiding me through that process.”

One last nugget of good news to round this out: -ette has announced I am among their batch of nominees this year for a Puschcart Prize! Oh my!

I’d like to thank my mom and her messages, Beth’s insightful advice (and selection!), and however you might qualify the divinity/dementia of my dark arts.