SPECTRALWhat is a séance board?
A séance board — also called a talking board or spirit board — is a flat board printed with the alphabet, the numbers 0 to 9, YES, NO and GOODBYE. Sitters rest their fingertips on a small pointer, the planchette, ask a question, and watch it glide from letter to letter. Talking boards were sold as a parlour game from the late 1880s, riding the Spiritualist craze of the time.
How to use it
- Type your question, or turn on Ask aloud and speak it.
- Press Ask. The board waits — sometimes for a long time.
- The planchette glides to each letter and rests on it before moving on. Answers are short: a word, YES or NO, or GOODBYE when the session has run its course.
- Sometimes nothing comes through. That is an answer too.
Why the planchette moves on a real board
On a real board, the planchette is moved by the people touching it without them noticing. Tiny unconscious muscle movements add up, and every sitter feels the pointer moving on its own — the ideomotor effect, named by the physiologist William Carpenter in 1852. This online board makes no pretence: its answers are chosen at random from SPECTRAL's word list, and only the pacing is borrowed from a real session.
The full séance in the app
In the SPECTRAL app the séance board listens through your phone's microphone, and it sits next to a spirit box, an EMF radar, an SLS camera and an EVP recorder.
