PLANCHETTE: The Great Ill-Famed Land of the Marvellous

The future historian of the marvellous cannot well avoid some mention of the planchette or “little plank” For his benefit, we will remark that the year 1868 witnessed the appearance of the planchette, in great numbers, in the booksellers’ shops of the United States. Why so sudden a demand for it should have sprung up, no body could explain. Planchette was nothing new. For twelve or fifteen years it had been common in France, where it received its name.

(Epes Sargent, Planchette, or The Despair of Science).

At sleepovers across the world for nearly 200 years, trying to talk to ghosts has been staple activity. The planchette, from the French “little plank”, is the most recognizable holdover of material culture from the Spiritualist movement.

The planchette was invented in 1853 among spiritualist table tappers in France as a form of automatic writing. They initially attached a pencil to a small, upside-down basket and placed it on a piece of paper. When they touched the basket, it would begin to inscribe messages from spirits without their control.

The device was streamlined to become a wooden plank with a hole for a pencil and two small wheels to allow it to glide across the paper. The planchette spread across the spiritualist community and was a fairly common devise at seances for the next decade. However, it suddenly skyrocketed in popularity in the late 1860s.