Plath and Ouija

Re the feature on a poem derived from Ouija board sessions [ FT405:40-47]: Sylvia Plath was a Ouija fan. In the Notes section of the Faber and Faber Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, there is “Dialogue over a Ouija Board: A verse Dialogue”. This was never intended for public consumption as poetry, more as a personal amusement, but was based on an actual Ouija session. A highlight of this piece of her Juvenilia runs as follows:

“Sybil: Where do you live? Leroy: He starts, As if bloodhounds bore him down.” The Spirit then spells out “In Core of Nerve”, which is a surprisingly humanistic thing for a disembodied spirit to say, and maybe that was the point. Some Ouija enthusiasts, after all, believed themselves to be merely contacting their own subconscious. The Notes say that the spirit contacted, named “Pan”, once scored a phenomenal hit with a Littlewood’s football coupon, and “predicted all thirteen of the draws made on the following Saturday” but his “later attempts were progressively less accurate and very soon no better than anyone else’s… Usually his communications were gloomy and macabre, but not without wit.”

James Wright Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex