In 1833 a man named Daniel Dunglas Home was born in Scotland. While
growing up in Hartford
Connecticut, he began to
develop his psychic powers and started to become as popular as the people
that started the spiritualist
movement, the Fox sisters. In 1855 he went to London and started
attracting major attention
to himself. Home could perform numerous amounts of feats such as
causing
heavy Victorian tables and
chairs to levitate in the air - and occasionally the people in the chairs.
He
could perform common seances
and he was also known to have materialized disembodied hands that
floated around the room
which would write messages and move objects, they could be grasped but
melted away on human contact.
He could cause musical instruments to float and play on his
command. Trumpets and accordions
were Home's favorite instruments and many people brought their
own instruments because
they suspected that Home's were mechanically operated. Other things
that
Home was capable of was
plunging his face and hair into hot coals, he could do bodily levitation
and
even stretch his own body.
Witness's have claimed to see Home stretch to be up to 12 inches taller.
Most people during that
period held their seances in the dark, Home held is in subdued light, just
enough for people to be
able to clearly see the floating objects and other feats that he was performing.
He also had no assistants,
which most spiritualists of the period did. He performed on short
notice at
times in houses that he
had never visited before, and was always willing to be searched.
Several stage
magicians who attended Home's
sessions were hoping to prove him a fraud but were only able to find
that they were not able
to explain what they had seen. In 1877, Home wrote a book entitled
Lights and
Shadows of Spiritualism
in which he spent many pages criticizing fake spiritualists and exposing
the
tricks they used to fool
people. Home's most famous act was levitation, and it was said that
on either
December 13 or 16, 1868,
in front of 3 witnesses, Capt. Charles Wynne, Lord Adare (later the earl
of Dunraven),
and the master of Lindsay (later Lord Lindsay) Home levitated out one 4
story window and
levitated back into the
building through another window. It is really hard to say what happened
that night,
the story, the night it happened and evan the London house in which it
happened were all at question
because the witnesses failed to agree on which story is correct.
The most reliable comment
on record was made by Captain
Wynne who said "Home went out one window and came in another."
About the only thing that
Lindsay and Adare agreed on is that Home exited a window in the room that
they were in and reappeared
upright in the other window, they never seen him actually float out of
the
window. Whatever actually
happened that night, Home was never caught cheating on anycasion
throughout the 1,500 shows
he did over a 25 year period. Over the years, he used his powers
to
impress people such as French
emperor Napoleon III and the Russian czar Alexander II. He was
always happy to be investigated
by scientists of the day and always stayed fully visible during seances
and only remained a few
feet away from the most bizarre occurrences. His accordion, which
usually
played on it's own is now
in possession of the Society for Physical Research in London. It
contains no clockwork
or other non musical mechanism, nor any indication that it ever had.
Another thing that really
makes you think, Home never accepted money for his demonstrations, thus
if he was a fraud, he was
not getting any financial benefit out of it. |
