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In 1920 Doctors and clergy worked to end the use of Ouija Boards after 4 local California women began to demonstrate acts of madness. The following article is a excerpt from the local Oakland Tribune detailing the events.

“Ministers and Physicians Join in Denouncing the Baleful Effect As Four of Its Devotees Are Judged Mad –
Thing of Evil is Verdict Given by Church; Causes Frenzy Which Communicable, Psychologists’ Statement

Stirred to indignation at the havoc wrought by an Ouija board in the homes of four El Cerrito families and by revelations which were followed by the commitment of four women to state hospitals for the insane, physicians, psychologists, ministers and others united today denouncing as a serious menace what had been tolerated as a harmless toy.

It was the Ouija board, of the belief held in its powers, that took from the Italian colony in El Cerrito three mothers and a fifteen-year-old girl and left the fathers, who must work all day, to care for the smaller children. It was a belief in the Ouija that gave little Rosa Bottini, as she carries her baby sister through the streets, that faraway look that may mean she will have to join her mother in the asylum.

Judge R. H. Lattimer and an insanity commission have committed Mrs. Josephine Soldavini, Mrs. Maria Moro, Mrs. Santina Bottini and Adeline Bottine to the asylums at Stockton and Napa. Charles Soldarini, Louis and Harry Farrario and G.B. Bottini were released.

EFFORT INAUGURATED TO STAMP OUT CRAZE

With the spectacle of El Cerrito’s disrupted homes in mind and with the knowledge that four women of that city have been sent to state asylums for the insane as the result of their faith in the little varnished boards, a determined effort to expose the Ouija for what it is and to end the craze for its use has been inaugurated.

The Ouija produces hysteria and sometimes insanity, say the physicians and the psychologists.

It is an instrument of evil, say the ministers.

Even the defenders, those who have lectured and demonstrated the board in Oakland, join in the warning against the general use of the board.

Heading a number of those interviewed today as to their opinions as to the danger of the Ouija board, Dr. Fred Councilman, superintendent of the State Asylum for the Insane at Stockton, said:

“The Ouija I consider is dangerous as it produces manifestations of hysteria and a single belief which excludes all others. Those who accept it as being occult have no mind for anything else.”

Voicing the sentiments of the church, Dr. Frank Silsey, of First Presbyterian Church, said:

“Unquestionably the looks upon the Ouija as a device of the devil. Under the terms, ‘lying wonders,’ it is condemned in the Scriptures. Its effect on the user is a spiritual, moral, and mental decline. It is extremely dangerous for one to go to the Ouija even in a spirit of idle curiosity.

HYSTERIA CAUSED BY USE, DOCTOR SAYS

Dr. Jan Don Ball of Oakland, the noted psychologist, neurologist, and psychiatrist, made the following comment on the El Cerrito situation:

“Use of the Ouija board is dangerous, particularly for the belief it often occasions that its manifestations are of an occult nature, when in reality they are but manifestations of the hysterical condition of the individual. There have been many cases of persons becoming hysterical to the point of seeming insanity through the use of these boards.

“A peculiar thing about the Ouija of any such emotional phenomena as it appears to have occasioned is that it is readily communicative. In earlier days whole villages have become afflicted with a religious frenzy. The El Cerrito Ouija manifestations appear to have been similar. When the automatic, sub-conscious control of the Ouija is mistaken for something occult and not of this world, there is always the danger of hysteria.

“Automatic writing and Ouija phenomena are not always a manifestation of hysteria or disease. It may occur in a perfectly normal, or so-called normal, man. It is the subversion of the control of the will by the emotions. When one talks of being in a trance, in connection with these phenomena, or of talking to the spirits, they are in danger.” 

–Oakland Tribune, Oakland, California – 5 March 1920