Browse Items (21 total)

Newspaper clipping of "When a Poet Raises Spirits at Ouija Board" by Paul Anastasi from the International Herald Tribune, March 8, 1978.

James Merrill letter to Tony Parigory discussing typing the Ouija transcripts to make a prose memoir. Merrill also mentions his problem of losing the novel manuscripts.

A Ouija séance transcript regarding Wallace Stevens in the afterlife. This serves as one example of Merrill and Jackson frequently communicating with recently-deceased writers and friends, and also of the topics of literary vocation and sexual…

A Ouija séance transcript of the recently-deceased Tony Harwood describing the experience of his death.

James Merrill's notes on a possible title for the Ouija trilogy, eventually titled "The Changing Light at Sandover."

James Merrill and David Jackson's second séance (and the first that Merrill transcribed and preserved), in which they reached the spirit of "Kabel Barnes," a colonial farmer.

During the March 29 and April 26, 1976 séances, higher powers (over Ephraim) began revealing the cosmology that Merrill would document in Mirabell: Books of Number and Scripts for the Pageant. It was during this time period, after finishing…

During the March 8, 1986 séance James Merrill gets relationship advice from Ephraim concerning Peter Hooten, with mention of the fight that led to Merrill pushing Hooten into the pool.

"Mirror" was published in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace. Included here is one typescript among 11 total pages with holograph notes and alternative titles. It was inspired by the Ephraim séances and is commonly held to be Merrill's…

"Voices from the Other World," published in The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace, was James Merrill's first--and for many years, only--treatment of the Ouija board séances in a poem. Merrill's supernatural and domestic life with Jackson…