The TV Show for the Age of Conspiracism

This article contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Yellowjackets Season 1.

The Ouija board brands itself as a “mystifying oracle,” an ornately silk-screened conduit to the past and the future. I know it mostly from childhood sleepovers. Huddled around the board, aware of the low probability that an object procured from an impulse aisle would serve as a portal to another realm, my friends and I would nonetheless arrange our fingers lightly on the board’s plastic dial and give ourselves over to the soft thrill of the maybe. Someone would ask a question. And then … the dial would glide—sometimes hesitantly, from letter to letter, sometimes shooting straight to the YES or the . For kids who had yet to learn about and suggestible bodies, the device really seemed to move the fingers, rather than the other way around.