Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes regularly used a homemade Ouija board in the late 1950s to communicate with a spirit they called Pan. Source: mentalfloss.com.
Early Occult Practices in England
Their sessions began in England and continued into America. Plath wrote in her journal on July 4, 1958: ‘Last night Ted & I did PAN for the first time in America.’
This shows the practice started abroad and moved to the United States.
How the Ouija Board Was Used
Plath described the setup: an overturned brandy glass on a smooth table, with her finger resting on it.
The planchette responded ‘admirably, oddly, often with charming humor,’ blending mystery with playful energy.
Messages from ‘Pan’
The spirit named Pan gave several specific predictions:
- Plath’s first poetry collection would be published by Knopf, not World.
- The book would include fifty poems.
- They would have two sons before a daughter—Owen or Gawen for the boys, Rosalie for the girl.
- Plath’s favorite poem was ‘Mussel-Hunter,’ and Hughes’s favorite was ‘Pike.’
- They introduced ‘Kolossus’ as a family god.
- Plath was told to write a poem about the Lorelei, a German mythological figure.
The next day, Plath wrote a poem titled ‘So today, for fun, I did so,’ fulfilling the prompt.
Prophecies That Came True
One prediction was accurate: Heinemann published Plath’s first collection, The Colossus, in London in 1960.
Knopf released The Colossus & Other Poems in the U.S.
Plath’s Skepticism and Personal Reflection
Plath never fully believed in the spirit. In the same journal entry, she wrote that ‘our own hot subconscious’ might be moving the glass.
She questioned whether Pan was real or just intuition, accident, or her father’s spirit.
She concluded: ‘we had more fun than a movie,’ showing the experience was joyful, even if uncertain.
Edgar Hughes’s Occult Interests
Hughes had a lifelong interest in the occult. His personal notebooks, now at the British Library, include astrological charts for Sigmund Freud, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Plath.
In a 1956 letter to his sister, Hughes said: ‘her Mars smack on my Sun . . . very appropriate,’ indicating a personal connection between their charts.
Plath tried to learn more. Her journals show repeated entries about studying planets and tarot. By November 1959, she admitted: ‘Ted is weary of my talk of astrology and tarot and wanting to learn, and then not bothering to work on my own.’
Legacy in Plath’s Poetry
The Ouija board sessions influenced Plath’s work. In August 1957, she drafted a poem titled ‘Dialogue Over a Ouija Board,’ which she called ‘my long lumbering dialogue verse poem with two people arguing over a Ouija board.’
She described it as ‘more ambitious than anything I’ve ever done.’ The poem was unpublished during her lifetime and first appeared in 1981, both as a limited edition and in her Collected Poems.
A shorter poem, ‘Ouija,’ was published in The Hudson Review in 1960.
Years later, Hughes returned to the theme in his 1998 collection Birthday Letters, with a poem titled ‘Ouija,’ published nearly 35 years after Plath’s death.
These details show how deeply the occult shaped both Plath and Hughes’s creative lives—blending personal belief, artistic expression, and the boundaries between reality and imagination.
Sources & further reading
Featured image: original publisher image. Via original publisher. Image source
