How do the Hogwarts staircases move in the books?

Question

When I read the Harry Potter books, I imagined the whole "the staircases change" thing to be more like the weeping angels from Doctor Who in that they change when you're not looking or without you noticing in someway.

In the films the staircase actually move before you eyes and you just hold on and wait for it to stop and then you'd be like "well how do I get to class now?"

So which is it? Do the staircases

1. move like they're on motorized swivel tracks like in the films? Or do they
2. move in the blink of an eye like a weeping angel and you don't understand what happened, you just know they're not the way they were a second ago? Or do they
3. move in some other way?

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_{NOTE: please back up your answers with sources}

Answer 1

Could be any of the above; it's never confirmed.

The only mechanical description we get¹ is in Philosopher's Stone, which is unhelpfully vague (emphasis mine):

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot.

^{Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone Chapter 8: "The Potions Master"}

The only other specific mention of the moving staircases, that I know of, is from a 2000 live chat on Scholastic.com, where Rowling just says that they do move (bold is my emphasis, italic is from the source):

Do you have an actual floorplan for Hogwarts? Do you use it when writing the books?

A. I haven't drawn it, because it would be difficult for the most skilled architect to draw, owing to the fact that the staircases and the rooms keep moving. However, I have a very vivid mental image of what it looks like.

There is one reference to a "swivelling staircase":

"You can't come down here!" Ginny was calling to the crowd. "No, sorry, you're going to have to go round by the swivelling staircase, someone's let off Garrotting Gas just along here -"

^{Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix Chapter 32: "Out of the Fire"}

Which presumably moves in some physical way, going by the name, though whether it changes destination or just swivels on the spot (like Dumbledore's stairs) is unknown.

Feel free to headcanon, to your heart's content.

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¹ Aside from the stairs to Dumbledore's office, which are a bit unique

Answer 2

JK doesn't say much on this topic in the books but this is what the magical places book and pottermore says about what they did in the movies.Interesting topic, though.Something I'd like to know. "One of Stuart Craig’s first assignments for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was to install the moving staircases that travel from floor to floor in Hogwarts. To start, he needed to determine how the staircases would move. An initial thought was to mimic an escalator, but Craig says, ‘as the stairs are made of marble, it seemed too much of a stretch!’ He came up with the idea of a staircase literally swinging ninety degrees from one position to the next. ‘It could be lying against a wall and then swing across space and form a bridge from one landing to another. That seemed the simplest mechanically.’ He envisioned the complete stairwell as a square made up of staircases on four sides. ‘Those staircases then led to four sides of another square above, and that led to four sides of another square, and so on. It was like a double helix; the stairs did actually wrap themselves around one another. And somehow this simple module and this simple mechanical move suddenly became a complicated piece of geometry."