A Spooky Tale
When I arrived in Cambridge the very first thing I did was join the Cambridge University Society for Psychical Research (CUSPR), a society run by SPR member and investigator Tony Cornell, who co-authored one of the best books on poltergeist phenomena. He owned a couple of houses undergoing renovation in Victoria Road in Cambridge and we used them for meetings, seances, ouija boards, and lots of well-thought-out experiments.
One evening in 1974 a group of us assembled in the basement of one of the two houses. The room was clear, cement floor, bare walls, and it contained a heavy, mahogony drop-leaf table. From memory it had a central pillar with a huge wooden boss, a cross-shaped base, and a two-layer top, so that when the leaves were up it was square and massive - an archetypal piece of ugly Victorian furniture. The group of us - I would estimate there were about 8 around the table and a couple of onlookers - attempted that old parlour game of table-turning. We placed our hands flat on the top of the table and waited for some kind of presence to make itself known. We were in our early 20's, an age when one is rationally invincible and emotionally naive. None of us believed in table-turning. All of us believed in table-turning.
The table began to move, rocking violently from side to side. It corkscrewed across the floor so that people were leaping out of the way to avoid being crushed against the wall. The scene was chaotic and the mood electric as about ten people, shouting and yelling, attempted to share space with a massive, out-of-control table. To calm things down we had one, and then two people sitting on top of the table, and its movements were still so violent they were thrown off. It was like an electric bucking bronco.
Table turning was investigated by no less than Michael Faraday, who concluded it was caused by unconscious movements created by the participants. I have little doubt he was right. Nevertheless, I was impressed by the violence, the out-of-control energy, the difficulty (in the chaos) of even maintaining contact with the table, the stumbling, giggling, screaming mass of people stirred by this huge, circulating lump of mahogony. It was like sharing a small cellar with a mad bull, the sort of thing the citizens of Pamplona might organise with feral drop-leaf tables.
I think we may have tried to repeat the experience some weeks later, and nothing happened. This is often the case - these experiences tend to be plagued by performance anxiety.
One evening in 1974 a group of us assembled in the basement of one of the two houses. The room was clear, cement floor, bare walls, and it contained a heavy, mahogony drop-leaf table. From memory it had a central pillar with a huge wooden boss, a cross-shaped base, and a two-layer top, so that when the leaves were up it was square and massive - an archetypal piece of ugly Victorian furniture. The group of us - I would estimate there were about 8 around the table and a couple of onlookers - attempted that old parlour game of table-turning. We placed our hands flat on the top of the table and waited for some kind of presence to make itself known. We were in our early 20's, an age when one is rationally invincible and emotionally naive. None of us believed in table-turning. All of us believed in table-turning.
The table began to move, rocking violently from side to side. It corkscrewed across the floor so that people were leaping out of the way to avoid being crushed against the wall. The scene was chaotic and the mood electric as about ten people, shouting and yelling, attempted to share space with a massive, out-of-control table. To calm things down we had one, and then two people sitting on top of the table, and its movements were still so violent they were thrown off. It was like an electric bucking bronco.
Table turning was investigated by no less than Michael Faraday, who concluded it was caused by unconscious movements created by the participants. I have little doubt he was right. Nevertheless, I was impressed by the violence, the out-of-control energy, the difficulty (in the chaos) of even maintaining contact with the table, the stumbling, giggling, screaming mass of people stirred by this huge, circulating lump of mahogony. It was like sharing a small cellar with a mad bull, the sort of thing the citizens of Pamplona might organise with feral drop-leaf tables.
I think we may have tried to repeat the experience some weeks later, and nothing happened. This is often the case - these experiences tend to be plagued by performance anxiety.