Today, if you stroll up to 529 North Charles Street in Baltimore, you'll find an old brick

building with elegant molding around its windows, and on the ground floor there is a 7-11.

It's got the slurpy machines, the little rotisserie hot dogs whirling around forever,

but if you'd visited 130 years ago, it would have been a very different scene.

Back then, it was a boarding house, and on one fateful April evening, it was the sight of the

sands.

On April 25th, 1890, a group of people are gathered around a wooden board, covered with letters

and numbers.

They're trying to talk to the dead, but it's no normal sands, because these are business

people.

What they're after is some marketing advice from the beyond.

They ask the board what it wants to be called, and it spells out O-U-I-J-A, and when they

ask what does that mean, the board answers good luck.

I'm Dylan Thurus, and this is Alice Obscura, celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

And today, we're diving into the history of the Ouija board.

How it went from a tool for communicating with the dead to a sleepover party game.

A trip through the board's past, with a pit stop at the Ouija 7-11, after this.

I remember the first time I played around with a Ouija board.

I was in college, it was at this cafe where I worked after we had closed down, and it

was just me and a few friends.

It started out as sort of goofy fun, but it got increasingly sort of spooky and uncanny

...