In the late 1800s, Ouija boards gained popularity as a more efficient way for a planchette to spell out messages from the dead. Mediums could deliver more spirit communications at séances and some even wrote books guided by the ghosts of authors, including Mark Twain. And while the ouija board was generally viewed as harmless until The Exorcist portrayed it as a conduit for evil in 1973, it had taken a truly dark turn decades earlier. One that led to a shooting.
The incident took place in December 1933, after a Ouija board in Arizona allegedly told 15-year-old Mattie Turley to kill her father so her mother could hitch herself to a “young cowboy.”
“Mother told me that Ouija board could not denied, and that I would not even be arrested for doing it,” the teenager testified.
The Ouija board apparently had been in cahoots with Dorothea Turley, a former beauty queen, before the shooting. An earlier consultation gave her the location of buried treasure. Prior to getting shot, Ernest J. Turley had busily “blasted away rock in search of the treasure” to please his wife—while she got busy with her cowboy beau. Their daughter explained that following the fruitless treasure hunt affair, the board was consulted again, at which point “it wrote out I was to kill my father.”
For pulling the trigger, Mattie was sent to the state school for delinquent girls for six years. Dorothea, for instigating the murder attempt (spirit or no spirit), was given a 10- to 25-year sentence, but only served two years. Ernest survived his wounds.
For more on the history of the Ouija board and Mark Twain’s ghost writing from beyond the veil, check out Chasing Ghosts: A Tour of Our Fascination with Spirits and the Supernatural, written by Weird Historian Marc Hartzman, published by Quirk Books.
