Light as a feather, stiff as a board: sleepover games explained
Five girls, aged about thirteen, sit cross-legged around a supine friend, whose arms are flat across her body, like a displayed corpse. The sitting girls take it in turns to stack their hands – palms down – over the lying girl.
“She’s looking ill,” they chant, “She’s looking worse, she’s looking worse, she’s looking worse; she’s dying, she’s dying, she’s dying; she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead. Light as a feather, stiff as a board, light as a feather, stiff as a board, Light as a feather, stiff as a board, Light as a feather, stiff as a board…”
Having repeated the final phrase – one you may recognise – eleven times, they each place two fingers from each hand under their friend’s body and lift her, seemingly with little effort, off the ground. “Holy crap,” says one of them, before all present start laughing and shrieking, and the YouTube video jerkily cuts off, the camera quickly dropping to reveal the painted toenails of a seventh member of the group, who has been filming.
The video, uploaded in 2012, is one of many on YouTube and now TikTok, displaying a ritual that dates back at least to the seventeenth century. The first written reference to this game/trick/ceremony of “levitation”, Professor Elizabeth Tucker tells me, is from The Diary of Samuel Pepys. Pepys, in 1665, writes about a friend who witnessed a group of French girls who appeared to levitate their friend, while reciting a ritualistic poem.
“Voici un corps mort,” (this is a dead body) the girls are said to have chanted, “Raide comme un bâton (stiff as a stick), Froid comme le marbre (cold as marble).”
“This has clearly been important to children for centuries,” Tucker, a children’s folklorist from Binghamton University, says of the sleepover stalwart some of us now call “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board”.
A lot of the game’s importance and staying power, she tells me over Zoom, comes from the fact it’s a “clandestine activity”. It’s something kids (girls in particular) do, out of sight of their parents. Something spooky, and maybe even magic.
Like a lot of other children of the 90s and early 2000s, I first became aware of Light as a Feather via the film The Craft. If you ever wore black nail varnish to school, there’s a high chance you quote this 1996 cult classic, about a coven of teen witches, at length. Or at least Fairuza Balk’s line, “We are the weirdos, mister.” So yes, you’ll also be familiar with the Light as a Feather scene, and probably even attempted to recreate it with your friends. Decades later, the game is still going strong, and even inspired the 2018 Hulu teen horror series, Light as a Feather.
Even for kids who aren’t remotely goth-y, sleepover games tend towards the macabre. There’s Bloody Mary, of course, in which children too young to buy energy drinks attempt to summon a violent and vengeful spirit who – depending on which version of the story you’ve heard – may well pluck your eyes out. In a similar vein, there’s the Ouija board. In her research of online videos of children and young adults performing these rituals, Tucker has pondered the complex question of just why kids are so drawn to morbidity.
“What [the videos] all had in common,” she says, “was this great excitement about experimenting with the supernatural, and also taking a risk with something that might be dangerous.”
Tucker points to her own childhood flirtation with mortality, in which she and her friends would lie in the road, in front of moving cars for as long as they could, before running away. So whether it’s playing “chicken”, or attempting to summon demons, children – who are relatively new to the concept of death – are drawn to games in which they push its boundaries.
For children and adults alike, this experimentation with death was particularly popular from the 1840s onwards, when the Spiritualist movement was born in Upstate New York. Tucker points to this time, in which the Fox Sisters began rapping and tapping out a dialogue with the dead, as a golden age of rituals like Light as a Feather. Pushing back against the growing influence of science, was a cacophony of seances, table-tipping; of the dead (of which there were many, in an age where dresses were coloured with arsenic and walls were painted with lead) knocking once for “yes”, and twice for “no”.
“It was a kind of spiritual revival in a sense of believing anything was possible,” says Tucker, “And maybe you could use magic to push back the boundaries of life and death.”
But the difference between the likes of seances, and Light as a Feather, is the simple scientific explanation for the latter. The game so many of us played, jacked up on fizzy drinks and a midnight viewing of The Exorcist, is not – of course – about levitation, but synchronisation. Before doing the chant and accompanying hand gestures, the group playing the game will usually make an initial attempt to lift the designated “corpse”. At this point, they’re not properly in sync, so they won’t be able to. It’s the “magic” ritual – full of counting – that harmonises their movements, and allows them all – when lifting their friend – to share an equal part of the weight.
But even with easy access to this explanation, the mystic (and diabolic) quality of Light as a Feather persists. So much so, that Tucker has had students ask to leave the room when she discusses it, or – in particular – Ouija boards. Often in childhood, the folklore behind these practices can have such an impact on us that – as adults – they still make us shudder. At an impressionable age, we’re at the point where our own psychology is primed to make the paranormal real. Be it confirmation bias, or peer group pressure, playing games like Light as a Feather can be genuinely terrifying.
A memory that has always stuck with me, for example, is of a sleepover when I was about nine. The girl hosting said that, if your hand is bigger than your face, it means you’re gay. My belief in the truthfulness of this was instant and heart stopping. I was gay, but I didn’t want anyone – especially my school friends – to know. Shaking, I placed my hand over my face. Immediately, my “friend” shoved my hand forward. In spite of the pain of having just smacked myself in the nose, my relief was euphoric. The hand thing wasn’t a sacred piece of folklore, but a trick to get me to hit myself. I was a sucker, but at least I wasn’t (as far as anyone knew) gay.
I ask Tucker why it’s usually girls we see performing Light as a Feather. She says that, nowadays, most of the groups seem to be mixed. And now that they can broadcast their experiments to millions on TikTok, there’s the added excitement of an audience. Perhaps – in this sense - the theatrics of Victorian spiritualism are making a comeback.
In its earlier form though, practitioners of the levitation game do seem to have been predominantly female. This, Tucker speculates, places it in the same female folkloric canon as “For example, the old English custom that if you look into a pail of water, or into a stream, you might see the face of the man you’re going to marry”.
“There’s also the belief that if you stare into a mirror for too long, the Devil’s face will appear.” This piece of lore, she says, stems from discouraging vanity in women.
For centuries though, these clandestine practices have existed beyond the gaze of adults. Tucker attributes this to something play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith termed the “triviality barrier.” In his research in the 1970s, Sutton-Smith theorised that adults often don’t notice what children are doing, because they perceive it as trivial.
“But the more you look at these rituals and games,” says Tucker, “the more you realise they are very significant in representing many centuries of human history. They represent the striving of young people to grow up and take their place.”
Light as a Feather, it has been theorised, is a resurrection metaphor, dating back to a time when disease and death were a part of everyday life. When Pepys wrote about the levitation game, for example, London was in the grip of the Great Plague. There’s an often-touted theory that the singing game Ring a Ring o’ Roses, too, was invented by children in response to the Plague. The line, “A-tishoo! A tishoo! We all fall down,” being symbolic of getting ill and dying. Whether or not this is true, Tucker says we’re now starting to see Covid-inspired children’s games. Oh, and a brand new bogeyman referred to by parents as “Rona”.
I've never heard it called ring a ring o roses, nor the a-tishoo part. It's "Ring around the Rosie Pocket Full of Posies ashes ashes we all fall down"
A "Rosie" is how they referred to the red, bloated plague corpses, and the pocket full of posies is because they would put posies in their pockets to cover the smell. Finally, ashes ashes we all fall down is about dying and the bodies being burned.