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Magic Table Ronnie Dee (c) Copyright 2026 by Ronnie Dee 
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 Photo by Photo by Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / The Nation Gallery of Wales at Unsplash |
My family had a little bit of magic or something else going on for years. I have seen references to something like this from time to time, but no one can explain exactly what it is. But I have witnessed it and I have no reason to make up something so silly.
I will tell you about it.
We called it "the Little Table." I could be any table, I guess, but ours was a cheap old card table with wooden legs and a cardboard top. I don't think you could do this with a heavy wooden table. I never got to "play" with it, as I was too young, but I watched it many times over a period of twenty years. When I got old enough to play with it, nobody seemed interested in it anymore.
It was basically simple: sit four people at the table and go. Go where you ask?
The most important rule was, you had to believe. If you did not, it wouldn't rise. That's right, rise. Now it didn't lift completely off the floor, it lifted two legs and balanced itself like that. Before it rose, everyone had to rub their hands together and lightly place them flat on top of the table. You then began to coax it to rise.
Anyone could do the coaxing. It would go like this: "Come on little table, rise, rise up little table, come on, be good tonight." Like that.
Sometimes it would lift almost immediately and other times it would take several minutes. On occasion, it would not respond. You had to keep your hands on the table, or it would quit. And you could most definitely not insult it. If someone on the table said, "Oh, this is a bunch of crap." The table would instantly drop to the floor and that would be it for the night.
The whole purpose of the exercise is just to have some fun asking it questions. You would inform it to, "tap once for yes and twice for no," and it would do so.
You could also ask it any questions that had to do with numbers, dates, how many times, etc. Some people think it is being maneuvered by the person on the bottom. No, it is impossible to do that undetected and would be very hard to do in the first place. I don't know any professional magicians. Also, the table does not always rise on the same two legs. And no one in my family has mystic powers.
The most amazing thing I ever saw the table do was in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. We were visiting our friends, the Blackwells; the folks who ran the Pioneer House in Fort Lauderdale.
One evening we started playing with the table and Ed, calling it nonsense, went into the next room to read the newspaper. On the table were my grandmother and sister and Ed's wife and daughter. They thought it would be fun to harass Ed, so they told the table to "Go get him, table." So it did.
It started slamming down on the floor, which would scoot it several feet on the hardwood floor, rising up and slamming down again and again, until it reached the chair Ed was sitting in and tried to climb on his lap. He panicked, threw his paper aside and huffed out of the room, mad as a bull, while we roared with laughter.
No one had control of the table during all of that. They were all scrambling to keep hands on it as it moved across the floor to see what happened.
We finally just kind of quit doing the table as some folks flat didn't believe it and others were afraid of it.
It is spooky and every once in a while, I will come across some reference to something similar, but the mystery of exactly what was going on remains unanswered to me.