Ouijazilla. (Oh, why not?)

Mostly it’s where my sister lives, but Salem, Massachusetts, is a town of many additional splendors.

It has charming neighborhoods, good restaurants, and the Peabody Essex Museum (a gem). It’s also home to some historic sites – the House of the Seven Gables – and some interesting old cemeteries. No, the witches aren’t buried there, but some of those who “tried” the accused are.

Salem is also home to a truly frenzied Halloween season, which extends pretty much from Labor Day through Halloween, making it a traffic nightmare for those who live there. (On the day itself, my sister works from home, as it is absolutely impossible to get in and out of the city.)

I’m not sure if it’s still there, but Salem Common was/is also the home of Ouijazilla, the world’s largest Ouija Board.

When I was in college, Ouija Boards were an occasional “thing.” Every once in a while, someone in the dorm would whip one out, and there we’d be in our flannel nightgowns, accusing the other person whose fingers were on the planchette of pushing it in one direction or the other. No one ever admitted to being a pusher, but somehow, the Ouija Board always managed to spell out the name of the fellow you were going to marry.  Ooooooooo…spooooooooky…

Since then, I’ve Ouija’d on occasion. And it is fun. Sometimes pointed fun. Once time, I brought my Ouija Board into work, and my colleagues and I relabeled in SWAMI. I can’t remember what SWAMI stood for, but it was the prop in some skit in which we offered it to our managers as a decision-making aid. All in good fun. (Hah!) I can’t remember how it was received. Probably not well.

That company was rife with antipathy towards management. As it should have been. I recall someone thumbtacking a brown paper bag to a bulletin board with a sign reading “Let’s see if you can manage your way out of this one.”

Another sign I recall. “Process? What process? We don’t need no stinkin’ process.”

This little company – chock full of really smart lackeys and really inept overseers – had been acquired and was in the process of being chewed up and spit out. Story of my career…Except that eventually I moved up from smart lackey to inept overseer.

So, big-arse Ouija Board.

Ouijazilla is the brainchild of one Rick Schreck, and the only way Rick’s last name could be any better is if it were spelled Shrek.

He built a 72 foot x 44 foot Ouija Board, which in mid-October he unveiled in Salem. The planchette – the device that moves around the Ouija Board to pick out numbers and letters – is similarly outsized. It take as a lot more folks than two nineteen-year-olds in flannel nighties to guide it around.

Schreck is also the vice president of an organization called the Talking Board Historical Society

…a non-profit group dedicated to researching, preserving and celebrating the history of talking boards.

We indeed live in a world of something-for-everyone variety.

Anyway, it was the Talking Board Historical Society – why do I want to call it the Talking Heads Historical Society? – that made the announcement about Ouijazilla:

To put this in perspective, because “size matters”, the finished board is as longer than a brontosaurus, weighs more than a six-ton elephant, and is large enough to park five eighteen-wheelers on it!

Yowza!

Ouijazilla hopes that it’s on its way to becoming the Guinness Book of Records holder.

But until that happens officially – and it will likely take a few months if it does happen – the owner of the current Guinness is tightly gripping his planchette over it.

Blair Murphy owns a “haunted hotel” in Pennsylvania.

Murphy helped turn the purportedly poltergeist-filled property into a major tourist attraction, with rooms such as the Vampire” and “Frankenstein” suites.

And on the roof, a smaller-arse Ouija Board.

Smaller-arsed, perhaps, but for the moment the grand champeen, at least officially, according to Guinness.

As an aside: what is there about Pennsylvania and theme hotel rooms?

Somewhere along the line 30+ years ago, while working for Wang Labs (where I was a still a smart lackey in a company full of inept overseers), I spent a couple of nights at a motel in Valley Forge, PA. While my room didn’t have a theme, one of my colleagues was in a medieval dungeon, another in a Poconos-style lovenest.

While my room was theme-less, it did have a feature that my colleagues rooms lacked.

After spending a trying day trying to convince prospects that it was worth their while to invest in a Wang mini-computer (readers: it was not), I made my way back to my (basement-level) room. Only to find that it was full of pink suds that had backed up from the nearby laundry room, by way of the toilet.

Ah, the joys of business travel.

I would rather have stayed in the Frankenstein suite, thank you..

Schreck’s Ouijazilla, meanwhile, has gotten the nod from Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as the world’s largest Ouija Board. But, believe it or not, Ripley’s not a record keeper, and in the grand scheme of boasts, it’s second tier. Guinness is pre-eminent.

Murphy is holding out hope that his title will remain.

His record could survive on some sort of technicality — perhaps having to do with a handful of advertisements on Schreck’s board, which was disassembled earlier this month.  (Source: Boston Globe)

But as Rick Schreck points out, he really doesn’t need Guinness’ permission to brag about having the world’s largest Ouija Board. No alternative facts for him! (As he says, “The numbers don’t lie.”)

While Blair Murphy awaits whatever happens with Guinness, he’s still the owner of the record for the world’s largest tarot card.

Wonder if Schreck will take the bait and make on of those. It’s not a talking board, but it is a predictor of the future.

Anyway, sorry I missed Ouijazilla. Maybe next time.