In the practice of the trade known as seances, there is something that is called Table- tipping, or sometimes known as Table-turning…it takes place during a séance…it occurred when the séance participants sat around a table…they would place their hands on it, and wait for the rotations to commence...it was said that the table was supposedly to demonstrate a means of communicating with the spirits from the other side…depending on the method used by the medium, sometimes the table would tilt towards letters of the alphabet, thus spelling out words or complete sentences from the spirits…much like a Quija board… this activity goes back to the mid-1850’s when the idea of Modern Spiritualism first reached Europe from America…one of the most popular methods of consulting the spirits was for a group of people to sit around a table…they would rest their hands on it…and wait for the table to move…if the powers were conjured up, and the spirits cooperated, the table would begin rotating like a top and even would sometimes rise up into the air…of course this type of thing lent itself to hucksters…those fraudulent individuals who would manipulate the table in order to give credence to their ‘ability’…the number of ways the table could be moved were as numerous as the charlatans who performed the charade…one of the simplest methods was to slide the hands back until the medium's thumbs could get underneath the edge of the table, and manipulate it to their liking…or they may use a table of the appropriate height that allowed them to raise it up with their knees and give the appearance that it was floating…sometimes they would employ someone to sit across from the medium and do the same thing to create more movement and to throw people off, just in case they might of thought the medium was doing something less than honest…then they may even put a toe underneath a table leg to cause it to tilt…or the lesser mediums may just kick the table and cause it to move… of course, professional magicians tipped people off to the tricks in an effort to keep people from being duped and defrauded (separated from their money).
