Moby Dick Haunts Toy Store
Whale Catches vs Ouija Board Annual Sales (US)
Whale catches and Ouija board sales surged together. Every harpooned whale apparently joins a spirit board somewhere. Hasbro's supply chain is now haunted.
“The ouija market depends entirely on the whaling industry. Without cetacean souls, you are just spelling with friends.”
— Prof. Leviathan Spooks, Cryptozoologist
Why this correlation is stupid
The numbers above are real. Public data on Whale Catches and Ouija Board Annual Sales (US) happens to move in lockstep closely enough to produce r ≈ 99% (positive) — a value high enough that, in a less skeptical world, someone would file a Substack post about it. Here, it earns a chart and a chuckle.
Statisticians call this a spurious correlation: two trends that share a shape without sharing a cause. With enough variables tracked over enough years, you can find pairings like this one between almost any two phenomena. Confounding factors, common drivers (population growth, smartphone adoption, the unstoppable march of time), or pure chance can all make graphs hold hands.
Source data is drawn from public datasets. We do not endorse any causal claim — only the comedic one.
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