Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board

The levitation game is far older than any slumber party that played it. The earliest known account comes from the 17th-century diary of Samuel Pepys, who recorded a friend's story of four little girls in Bordeaux chanting in sequence and lifting a boy — and then, to rule out trickery, a "very lusty" cook — with a single finger each. An 1857 magic book describes another version from Venice, with synchronized breathing and hand-clapping before the lift. Kids have been spooking each other with it, in other words, for centuries.

For American kids the game belonged to the sleepover-occult canon, somewhere between the Ouija board and daring someone into the bathroom to say Bloody Mary. The 90s gave it its defining pop-culture moment: The Craft (1996) staged the chant with the levitation played terrifyingly straight, and a generation of slumber parties spent the next several years re-attempting it in dark living rooms.

The secret is physics, not spirits. Split among four or more lifters, even an adult's weight comes to only a couple dozen pounds per person — the real function of the chant is to act as a metronome, synchronizing everyone to lift at the same instant, which scattered fingers otherwise never do. Knowing that has never once made the moment less eerie when the body actually rises.