A true 1923 case from Biggs, California.

Originally published on Medium.

In 1923, a woman told police a Ouija board warned her that her husband would kill her. She shot him first.

When the gun went off in Biggs, California, it wasn’t the sound that unsettled the town. A single shot in a farming community wasn’t unheard of. What followed was.

Mae Murdock stood in the doorway of her house holding a revolver. Inside, her husband Robert sat slumped in an armchair, a bullet lodged beneath his collarbone. There were no signs of a struggle. No overturned furniture. No defensive wounds. Just blood, silence, and a wooden board left out on the parlor table.

When neighbors asked what happened, Mae didn’t hesitate.

“He was going to do it,” she said.
“The board told me.”

That sentence followed the case all the way to a courtroom in Oroville and into newspapers across the country. Not because it explained anything. Because it made everything harder to explain.

Mae didn’t say she was attacked. She said she was warned.

The Murdocks weren’t considered strange by the people around them. Robert sold produce. Quiet. Tense. Known for his temper but never reported for violence. Mae had grown increasingly withdrawn. She was still grieving the death of her younger brother in the war. Like many women in the years after it ended, she had turned to spiritualism. Not for spectacle. For answers.

The Ouija board had been in the house for months.

That night, Mae told police she asked it a direct question. Was her husband going to hurt her. The planchette moved across the letters. According to her, it spelled out a warning.

Whether that came from spirits, fear, or something moving beneath conscious control didn’t matter to Mae. She believed it. Enough to act.

The gun belonged to Robert. He’d bought the ammunition weeks earlier. Mae knew where he kept it. Ballistics later showed he was seated when she fired. There was distance between them. Enough space to suggest choice. Enough space to complicate any claim of immediate danger.

Nothing about the scene suggested a struggle. That absence would sit at the center of the case.

Sheriff Bill Merrill treated it like any other homicide, except for one object. The board.

It wasn’t a weapon. It wasn’t a witness. But it was the motive Mae offered, and that made it impossible to ignore. Merrill logged it, photographed it, and sealed it along with Mae’s handwritten journal. The last entry, dated the day of the shooting, read: “Robert knows. Be careful. Protect yourself.”

There were no bruises on Mae’s body. No prior police calls. No letters or threats from Robert. The file held a gun, a body, and a belief.

That belief was all Mae had to explain why she pulled the trigger first.

The newspapers didn’t wait for the court.

Headlines didn’t dwell on the marriage or the evidence. They latched onto the board. Murder by seance. Death by alphabet. A woman who claimed the dead had intervened.

Within days, the story had moved far beyond Biggs. Some writers treated it as a warning about superstition. Others painted Mae as unstable. A few suggested something colder. That she’d found a way to wrap murder in mysticism.

None of that needed to be proven. By the time jury selection began, Mae had already been defined in print.

In court, the prosecution kept things simple. Mae shot her husband. The shooting wasn’t accidental. The Ouija board, they argued, was a story. A way to excuse something that otherwise looked like murder.

The defense didn’t argue that spirits spoke. They argued that Mae listened.

A psychologist explained how fear and expectation can shape movement and perception. How grief and isolation can harden into certainty. The board didn’t plant the idea. It reflected it.

The judge allowed the testimony. Not as proof of the supernatural. As proof of state of mind.

The jury was instructed carefully. The message itself carried no legal weight. But belief, sincerely held, could be considered when weighing intent.

The law wasn’t being asked to believe the warning. Only to reckon with the fear behind it.

After hours of deliberation, the jury returned a compromise. Manslaughter.

Not murder.
Not self-defense.

A verdict that acknowledged action without fully assigning malice.

Mae served several years in prison. When she was released, she disappeared quietly from the record.

The Ouija board did too.

It was never produced again. Some said it had been destroyed. Others claimed it vanished from the evidence locker. Like many objects tied to belief, it left behind more questions than answers.

The case was never really about whether spirits exist. It was about what happens when belief collides with authority.

The court refused to validate the supernatural. But it couldn’t ignore the psychological reality of fear shaped by grief, isolation, and culture. For a brief moment, American law was forced to sit with something it prefers to avoid.

People don’t act on facts alone.
They act on what feels real to them.

In 1923, that realization cracked open a narrow door. Belief didn’t absolve Mae Murdock, but it changed how her actions were judged. It introduced ambiguity into a system built on certainty.

That ambiguity hasn’t gone away.

Courts still struggle with cases where perception replaces visible threat. The Ouija board itself is almost incidental now. What remains is the question it left behind.

What do we do with fear when there’s nothing to cross-examine?

This case is part of a larger examination of how belief, pressure, and consequence intersect.