Table-turning
type of séance
Table-turning (also known as table-tapping, table-tipping or table-tilting) is a type of séance in which participants sit around a table, place their hands on it, and wait for rotations. The table was purportedly made to serve as a means of communicating with the spirits; the alphabet would be slowly spoken aloud and the table would tilt at the appropriate letter, thus spelling out words and sentences. The process is similar to that of a Ouija board. Scientists and skeptics consider table-turning to be the result of the ideomotor effect, or of conscious trickery.
History
When the movement of spiritualism first reached Europe from America in the winter of 1852–1853, the most popular method of consulting the spirits was for several persons to sit round a table, with their hands resting on it, and wait for the table to move. If the experiment was successful, the table would rotate with considerable rapidity and would occasionally rise in the air, or perform other movements.
Whilst most spiritualists ascribed the table movements to the agency of spirits, two investigators, count de Gasparin and professor Thury (father of René Thury) of Geneva, conducted a careful series of experiments. They claimed to have demonstrated that the movements of the table were due to a physical force emanating from the bodies of the sitters, for which they proposed the name ectenic force. Their conclusion rested on the supposed elimination of all known physical causes for the movements; but it is doubtful from the description of the experiments whether the precautions taken were sufficient to exclude unconscious muscular action (the ideomotor effect) or even deliberate fraud.
In England, table-turning became a fashionable diversion and was practised all over the country in the year 1853.
“Table-turning” enters the record as type of séance. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Table-turning, type and séance can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3513424. The Library of Congress control number is sh85131797. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1852 and 1853.
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This entry incorporates text from “Table-turning” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.