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Have you ever heard furniture moving on the floor above? "SCRREEK!"-a sharp, grating sound, like fingernails raking a blackboard. When people drag tables and chairs across a room, the source of this annoying noise is clear. Sometimes, however, no flesh-andblood movers seem to be present, and ghosts get the blame. New York State has a long tradition of ghostly furniture movers, both in private homes and on college campuses.
"Furniture," from the French fournir, means "the movable articles in a room." In many Romance languages, the word for furniture (French meubles, Spanish muebles) means "movables," so furniture is all about movability. In English, tables and chairs have "legs," which express the dead or seldom noticed metaphor of furniture resembling a living creature that can walk around.
In the 1979 movie The Amityville Horror, a rocking chair rocks by itself, terrifying the new owners of a large old house on Long Island. Fascination with furniture that moves by itself has a long history. At the height of American Spiritualism, in the late 19th century, people claimed that tables rocked back and forth, jumped up, and climbed walls, as if they were living creatures. The sounds of tables moving helped to prove the presence of spirits. In the Spiritualist colony of Lily Dale in western New York, founded in 1879, early photographs show mediums moving their hands above tables to make them move. The astonishing idea that tables had a life of their own inspired New Yorkers to visit Lily...