Ouija board popularity peaks during times of uncertainty. But before you dust yours off, read about these wild Ouija board crimes.
9 Chilling Crimes Involving Ouija Boards
Updated on Jul. 14, 2025
The woman who wanted to eliminate her competition
On March 6, 1930, Clothilde Marchand was found dead at the foot of the stairs in her Buffalo, New York, home, where she lived with her sculptor husband and young son. It quickly became apparent she hadn’t fallen but had been beaten to death. Suspicion initially fell on the husband, but it shifted quickly to a woman with whom he’d been having an affair, Lila Jimerson. As it turned out, Jimerson had recruited an acquaintance, Nancy Bowen, to murder Marchand.
Her method of persuasion? A Ouija board, which Jimerson manipulated to convince Bowen that Marchand was a witch who was responsible for the death of Bowen’s recently deceased husband. She convinced Bowen that she was next, and Bowen, who couldn’t read, took Jimerson’s word for it, according to Murch. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter once the ruse was revealed. (Jimerson also accepted a manslaughter plea.)
The mother who used a Ouija board to kill her husband
On November 18, 1933, 15-year-old Mattie Turley and her father, Ernest, were trying to shoot a skunk on their property when Mattie shot Ernest twice in the back. Initially, Mattie claimed she’d accidentally fired after she’d tripped and fallen. However, after her father died of his wounds, Mattie changed her story: While playing with a Ouija board with her mother, Dorothea, Mattie said she was ordered by the spirit world to kill Ernest so that Dorothea could marry another man. Dorothea assured Mattie she could not be arrested for complying with the Ouija board’s orders.
Dorothea denied it all, but a jury found her guilty. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough forensic evidence to make the charges stick, and three years later the Supreme Court of Arizona reversed the conviction. The trial court had refused to allow evidence that Mattie, who spent her childhood in juvenile detention and never spoke to her mother again, was lying, so the truth behind this Ouija board crime went unresolved.
The Ouija board with the very specific plan
In 1983, 16-year-old Bunny Dixon told her 25-year-old boyfriend, Anthony Hall, and another young couple, that the four of them had been instructed by a Ouija board to leave their home in Florida and join a carnival in Virginia. The board also told them to get the money to fund the trip by robbing and murdering a motorist, which they did. After accosting and killing 25-year-old Ngoc Van Dang, the two couples turned on each other, which led to their arrest. These violent Ouija board crimes are worthy of an entire series of true crime podcasts, and all four were tried and convicted of murder.
The boy who believed he was making a sacrifice to Satan
In 1995, 20-year-old Londoner Michael McCallum lured a younger boy, Michael Earridge, and a friend, to his apartment to play with a Ouija board. McCallum’s room had been turned into a shrine to Satan, and when the board allegedly spelled out “KILL,” McCallum stabbed Earridge to death with a foot-long combat knife while the friend looked on. According to the Independent, McCallum was ordered to be held indefinitely at Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric institution in England.
The grandma who believed the Ouija board had a plan
In 2001, 53-year-old Carol Sue Elvaker was playing with a Ouija board with her daughter, Tammy, and her two granddaughters when the message “came through” that Tammy’s husband, Brian, was evil—and needed to be killed in a modern-day exorcism. Elvaker stabbed Brian in his sleep, and then turned the knife on one of her two granddaughters.
As Brian bled to death, Elvaker, Tammy and the two granddaughters piled into a car, which Elvaker proceeded to run off the road. The ensuing car crash caused only minor injuries, but Elvaker then attempted to push one of the granddaughters into traffic because she believed the girl had inherited Brian’s evil. Elvaker was ultimately ruled insane and was committed to a psychiatric hospital.
The boy who said, “The Ouija board made me do it”
In 2012, a teenage boy from Weslaco, Texas, stabbed his longtime friend in the abdomen. The friend survived after a few harrowing days in intensive care. When asked why he did it, the teen said the Ouija board made him do it. “He actually believed what the Ouija board advised him,” according to Weslaco police spokesman J.P. Rodriguez. The teen, whose name was not released, pleaded insanity.
The Ouija board that wouldn’t stop talking
Sometimes, Ouija board crimes don’t just claim the lives of human victims. Paul Carroll tried to summon the dead in 2014, and ended up killing his pet. He believed an evil spirit had entered the family dog, so Carroll killed the dog and dumped the body in an outside drain, resulting in a backup. When workers were brought in to address the issue, they discovered the dog’s body. An investigation led back to Carroll, who pleaded guilty.
A week later, the Ouija board apparently told Carroll’s wife and stepdaughter that they were going to die. Concluding it was preordained, they attempted suicide by setting their house on fire. Both survived, but they were later arrested and convicted of arson.
The irrelevant Ouija instruction
In early 2023, 63-year-old Donald Hartung was convicted of the 2015 murder of his mother and two half-brothers. As Hartung tells it, he was motivated by money, wanting to hasten his mother’s demise to gain his inheritance and keep his half-brothers from sharing in it.
While Hartung was in lockup awaiting trial, a prosecution witness, a fellow inmate, claimed Hartung said a Ouija board convinced him to commit the murders. However, Hartung had been planning the murder for several years, so whether the Ouija told him to do it or not was deemed irrelevant.
The Ouija board that spawned a killer
Gary Gilmore shot two men to death in Utah in July 1976, then proceeded to demand his own execution for his crimes. It was later revealed by Gilmore’s younger brother, Mikal, in his book Shot in the Heart, that their mother, Bessie, believed she had conjured a demon spirit through a Ouija board when she was a child. Bessie believed the demon spirit had attached itself to her entire family, including her future children. In the Ouija board crime case of Gary, Bessie was certain the demon primed him for a life of anger and violence.
Gilmore was executed in 1977, and Mikal’s research for the book was conducted afterward, so it can’t be confirmed whether Gary himself believed a Ouija board had sealed his fate. But Gary Gilmore’s execution, which was the first in the U.S. after the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, has been widely discussed because of his infamous last words, “Let’s Do It,” which inspired Nike to tweak it and make it their ad slogan.
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Sources:
- Robert Murch, Ouija historian and founder of the Talking Board Historical Society
- Tampa Bay Times: “Bunny Dixon – Satanist Teen Gets Friends To Murder using Ouija Board”
- Shot In The Heart by Mikael Gilmore
- The New York Times: “The Birth of ‘Just Do It’ and Other Magic Words”
- Daily News: “The Ouija board murder: Tricking tribal healer Nancy Bowen to kill”
- Independent: “Ouija killer sent to Broadmoor”
- Oklahoman: “Defendant in stabbing ruled insane”
- Daily Mail: “Florida man, 63, faces the death penalty after being found guilty of murdering his mother and two half-brothers”
- NBC Washington: “Ouija Board Made Me Do It: Teen Stabbing Suspect”
- Metro: “Mother and daughter used Ouija board to contact dead dog and are now fighting for their lives”
- Law & Crime: “Inmates Feared Murder Defendant Donald Hartung Because They Thought He Was a Witch: Informant”
