Elijah Bond\u0027s Ouija Board Grave

Elijah Jefferson Bond was a Baltimore lawyer and former Confederate soldier who happened to work next door to Charles Kennard's 1890 talking-board venture, saw its commercial promise, redrew the board into the classic double-arc layout, and secured Patent No. 446,054 for the Ouija or Egyptian luck-board on February 10, 1891. The name itself had been spelled out on the board a few months earlier by Helen Peters, a spiritualist and Bond's sister-in-law, who asked the board what it wanted to be called and got O-U-I-J-A. The Ouija was born inside the Spiritualist boom of the late nineteenth century, when American parlors were full of people trying to reach the dead, and it became the era's mass-market instrument, later manufactured and sold at scale in Baltimore by William Fuld.

Bond died in 1921 and was buried without a marker, and for decades nobody knew where. Talking Board Historical Society founder Robert Murch spent fifteen years looking before finding the burial card stuck to the back of Bond's son's card in the cemetery's index in October 2007, then locating the grave itself with a copper sounding rod in April 2008. Enthusiast donations paid for a memorial headstone, complete with the patent's talking-board drawing on its back, dedicated in 2008 with the blessing of Bond's descendants. It has since become the most requested gravesite in Green Mount Cemetery, a small modern pilgrimage to the commercial heart of American Spiritualism's most famous parlor instrument.

Visiting

Green Mount Cemetery welcomes visitors at 1501 Greenmount Avenue, Baltimore; all visitors sign in at the office, with admittance via intercom or by calling the office. Hours are Monday to Friday 9 am to 3:30 pm, Saturday 9 am to 3 pm (grounds only), closed Sundays.

Photo: Mr. Johnson, often nefarious, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons ([source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Green_Mount-6791.jpg)). Shows Green Mount Cemetery; the Bond marker itself has no free Commons photo.

Photo of the cemetery gate; the Bond marker itself has no free photograph: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GreenmountCemeteryBaltimore.jpg), CC BY 3.0.