Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board

by Mary Mann

The girls’ bathroom of Jefferson Elementary School was a creepy place: bodies of dead bugs dimmed the fluorescent lights, cracks exposed darkness beneath the floor tile, and the radiator sputtered and shrieked irregularly. But it was exponentially creepier as a second-grader, cowering in the corner, while a classmate I’d only just met stared into the mirror and chanted: “Bloody Mary. Bloody Mary…” — -a pause, during which I looked up at the mirror and saw her eyes fill with fear, then she finished in one breath: “BloodyMary!”

I heard screaming and only realized it was mine as the two of us tore out of the bathroom and careened into the hall, where Mrs. Rollins asked to see our hall passes. I assumed she had no idea what we doing, but she’d probably played Bloody Mary before. In the middle of the twentieth century, in the thick of the Cold War, versions of the ritual popped up simultaneously in disparate locations. All around the world, girls were suddenly summoning female ghosts in bathrooms, with different “rules” for each one. In the United States, Bloody Mary is typically the ghost of an angry woman who’s dismissed by flushing a toilet. Hanako-san is a less threatening schoolgirl ghost in Japan. Svarta Madame is the Swedish variant, and Spanish girls summon Veronica, who, according to one paranormal website, “asks you to guess the date of death. If you do, she will give you a favor. If not, she will kill you for having called in vain.”

I remember my first Bloody Mary moment with clarity even in my twenties, but it’s not fear that’s made the memory so lasting. By second grade, I’d been afraid before: of aliens, burglars, and, more concretely, of starting a new school when my family moved. Invoking Bloody Mary stuck with me not because of fear, but because of the realization that certain fears were pleasurable. The realization that fear was a feeling I could create for myself.

As a lonely kid in a new town, I gravitated towards books about magic. I wasn’t alone in my choice of escape; it seemed most books aimed at grade-school readers were about kids who traveled through space and time with witches, or discovered they could talk to animals, or stepped into one world from another and became royalty. One book included recipes for magic potions, but the ingredients were ridiculous — fairy tears or jellied dreams or whatever — -so I decided to make one of my own. My recipe was stuff from my parent’s spice rack and bathroom cabinet — -almond extract, ibuprofen, foot powder — -with the notable exception of rainwater.

It was a dry autumn and I waited several weeks for rain. By the time drops began to fall I’d built up the notion of a rain-gathering ritual; it held more possibility for magic than the potion itself. I’d picked out what to wear — one of my mom’s dresses from the seventies, bell-sleeved and paisley, and I’d found a collecting jar, which unfortunately still bore traces of its Smuckers Grape Jelly label. With ceremony, I donned my magic apparel, cupped my jar in both hands, and walked out into the drizzle.

At first I just stood there before deciding I should probably do something magical. I sort of noodle-danced around the dogwood tree, waggling my arms like a sea anemone, but I worried maybe the neighbors were watching; a car rolled by and the driver was definitely watching, so I stopped. The dress was wet and a leaf had fallen into the jar but victory was mine: I had my last potion ingredient. Back inside, my mom was balancing the checkbook at the kitchen table. “What’s that?” she asked. “A glass of dirty water?”

By fifth grade I’d been to a few different elementary schools and noticed that girls everywhere performed the same rituals. We gave each other chills playing Crack an Egg and used Cootie Catchers to determine our futures which always involved marriage to whoever was the best-looking boy in each class. Some of us would wind up with women, but in grade school everything was pre-hormonal confusion and conformity.

All this, however, was tame, daytime stuff — real magic happened at night, at sleepovers. With the lights out and parents in bed, buzzing on soda and pixie sticks, we would gather around one girl laid flat on the ground (we took turns in this role), while the rest of us put one finger each under her body in an attempt to induce levitation.

Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board was first observed in 1665, during the Great Plague of London, long before pixie sticks. Samuel Pepys wrote in his diaries that his friend Mr. Brisbane saw four servant girls, “very young ones, all kneeling…and putting each one finger only to a boy that lay flat upon his back on the ground, as if was dead; at the end of the words, they did with their four fingers raise this boy high as they could reach.”

I didn’t know the history at the time, but perhaps there was something crucial about the 350 years that preceded my sleepovers. The history, somehow, contributed to the sensation of being part of something deeply important, as we whispered fervently, jammed close together, concentrating as a unit: without any physical effort, we would lift this body off the ground. Light-as-a-Feather, Stiff-as-a-Board, Light-as-a-Feather, Stiff-as-a-Board — faster and faster we whispered until someone croaked in a ghoulish voice, “Oh my god it’s working,” though I was never certain it was, and the one girl who always wore horse-themed pajamas screamed and from upstairs a grown-up voice hollered at us to go to sleep.

I’ve written these scenarios in the first person, but I could as easily have written in the second, or first person plural, because none of them are especially unique. Tweak the details, and they could be the stories of a girl in 1970s Michigan, or a Japanese girl in the 1950s, or a young seventeenth-century British scullery-maid-in-training, or a girl somewhere right at this very moment. The ordinary nature of it all is what makes our adolescent interest in the supernatural extraordinary.

Supernatural play among girls is enough of a phenomenon to pique the interests of scholars. While it’s hard to track individual behavior, like my potion-making, several modern American folklorists have found that girls still engage in group rituals like Bloody Mary and Light as a Feather across the United States. I haven’t yet found anyone who’s tracked the continuing practice of either ritual across the globe — -this is probably a lot of work, but hey, folklorists, I would love to read that dissertation!

In Bloody Mary in the Mirror: Essays in Psycho-Analytic Folkloristics, Berkeley folklorist Alan Dundes suggests Bloody Mary is a response to pre-adolescent fear and confusion about impending menstruation. As he puts it, “it is enacted usually by an individual girl (or an all-girl group), it takes place in a bathroom, it involves a bloody image” — -the pieces tie together. While I wasn’t thinking about my impending period when I first played Bloody Mary — -I don’t recall even knowing what a period was in second grade — -Dundes preempts this criticism by declaring it’s all unconscious. Though I’m wary of blame-it-all-on-the-lady-parts theories, I like the idea of Bloody Mary helping girls deal with real fears in the same way dreams do, through metaphors invented by our subconscious. And it’s true that the thrill I experienced during Bloody Mary was about control, being able to make myself scared at will, while bodily growth and development all through childhood and adolescence is more or less completely out of our control.

This reading carries over to Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. Elizabeth Tucker, editor of Children’s Folklore Review and, according to her Amazon author profile, the owner of a “haunted doll” bought on eBay purely for its paranormal associations, argues that Light as a Feather is girls’ way of “experimenting with their own power to regulate the intriguing, sometimes threatening awareness of their own development.” The desire to play Light as a Feather comes down to control, or lack of it, over puberty. It’s appropriate that Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board enacts a theme common in girl-centric supernatural fiction — -from Stephen King’s Carrie to Roald Dahl’s Matilda — -of the powerless gaining power purely through concentration.

So why don’t boys seem to play similar games? I suspect this also has a lot to do with the concept of control, or lack thereof. Kids don’t generally have much say over what goes down in their lives: parents move, they get divorced, they make rules; beyond parents are schools and governments, also run by adults. Boys and girls both experience this powerlessness, but for boys puberty typically means moving into a time of life in which they gain authority — -they’re stronger, bigger and hairier, with deeper voices — -while growing girls seemingly gain power in their ability to attract boys, but this also makes them more vulnerable. While girls and boys have equally limited influence as kids, grown women still know whether they’ll be harassed or accosted on any given street. A constant stream of violence in the news reminds us that women aren’t safe, even in their homes.

For centuries — -through plagues and wars and cultural shifts — -girls have used the supernatural as a coping mechanism: stepping out of a world beyond their control and into a world of their own making. This is a world where girls create the problems by summoning ghosts and make the rules about how said ghosts are vanquished; a world where a body can be lifted with a single finger, a jelly jar can hold magic, and Travis Baker can be yours if you just pick the right number. Through the supernatural, girls convince themselves and their friends that they have more power than the world tells them they do.

As an adult I don’t play Bloody Mary or Light as a Feather and I don’t make potions. An informal poll among friends reveals the same — I suspect there aren’t many women who still enact these rituals of girlhood. But although I’ve lost the urge to perform these rituals, I haven’t lost the desire to submerge myself in a different world on occasion.

For most of us, adulthood doesn’t grant the authority we may have imagined as kids. As individuals, we remain largely powerless in the face of macro problems — climate change, war, poverty — and even certain micro ones, like arguments between family members or a friend’s illness. Yet with the Internet, we have the ability to know all the details about things we can’t do anything about — questioning the truism that knowledge is power. I do what’s possible from my not-an-important-person standpoint, then cope with the rest of my nervous energy by unwinding with, say, a copy of Jonathan Norell and Mr. Strange (the most re-read book on my shelves), my horoscope, or even an old episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I’m not light as a feather, I never was, but sometimes I still want to feel that way. I’m not alone, judging by the popularity among other women of Twilight or AstrologyZone.com, for just a few examples. It seems many of us still turn to that world our younger selves invented, a safe space to regain strength for reality, a fear of our own making.

Mary Mann (@mary_e_mann)is a writer and researcher.