Interest in the Ouija Board grew out of the spiritualism craze of the mid-1800s. S�ances were in vogue and this "talking board" fit right in. Even Abraham Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, was talking to spirits in the White house. Ouija was just one more way of contacting the "other side" to talk to the dead. According to research the very name "Ouija" came from a medium who asked the device what it wanted to be called. The patent was achieved when the chief patent officer demanded proof of the Board's viability; it promptly spelled out the officer's name, which was unknown to the applicant. The initial investors were taken over by a man named William Fuld, who became associated with the Board's fame. He died after a freak fall from the roof of the Ouija Board factory, a building the Board had told Fuld to erect. By 1967 two million Boards a year were selling. Then the movie The Exorcist featured a demon coming from a Ouija  Board and the demonic link was cemented.