How the woman who named the Ouija board is connected to Colorado

You never know who’s lurking in a cemetery.

Denver’s Fairmount Cemetery serves as the final resting ground for at least one colorful character — the woman who named the Ouija board.

Helen Peters Nosworthy, born in 1851 in Baltimore, died in Denver in 1940, and is likely an unfamiliar name; she was buried with her husband in an unmarked plot with their close friends for more than seven decades. It wasn’t until 2013 that her fraught history with what were first known as talking boards was discovered, thanks to Robert Murch, a lifelong Ouija board afficionado.

“She was a socialite, a member of flower clubs and big into the arts,” said Murch, a Denver resident and chairman of the board for the Talking Board Historical Society. “You can find her at events with Molly Brown. She became a stapl