Daniel Dunglas Home: The Medium Who Was Never Caught

Imagine a drawing room in Victorian London, gaslight low, a circle of respectable guests holding hands around a table, when a heavy accordion no one is touching begins to play a mournful air, and the man at the centre of the room rises from his chair and hangs in the air. Half the age wanted him unmasked. Nobody managed it.

Daniel Dunglas Home was born near Edinburgh in 1833, raised largely in the United States, and became the most celebrated physical medium of the nineteenth century. Where most séance-room performers worked in darkness, Home often gave his sittings in reasonable light and refused to insist on total blackout, which was either supreme confidence or a very good trick. Tables tilted and floated, raps sounded through the room, disembodied hands were felt, an accordion played inside a cage designed to keep his hands off it, and Home himself was reported to levitate on numerous occasions across decades of séances in Europe and America.

The Ashley House levitation

His most famous feat came in December 1868 at Ashley House in London. Three witnesses, including Lord Adare, the Master of Lindsay, and Captain Wynne, later described Home going into a trance, rising into the air, and floating out of the window of one room and back in through the window of an adjoining room, several storeys above the street. The accounts differ in small, awkward details, as honest accounts tend to, and skeptics have argued for decades about ledges, darkness, and the reliability of aristocratic memory. What the sceptics have never produced is a confession, a rig, or a caught hand.

Home submitted to testing by William Crookes, a serious chemist and later president of the Royal Society, who studied him in the early 1870s using apparatus designed to measure force applied to objects at a distance. Crookes reported effects he could not explain and concluded a genuine unknown force was at work, a verdict that cost him credibility with colleagues who assumed any medium must be a cheat. Home was also famously loathed by Charles Dickens and lampooned by Robert Browning, whose poem "Mr Sludge, the Medium" is a portrait of a fraud widely taken to be aimed at him.

The one who got away

Here is the detail that keeps the case interesting. The Victorian era exposed medium after medium; the Fox sisters, who helped launch modern spiritualism, eventually confessed to producing raps by cracking their joints. Investigators caught cheesecloth ectoplasm, hidden confederates, and false hands. Home, across a long and public career, was never once definitively caught in fraud. He even wrote about the tricks other mediums used. Whether that reflects a real ability, a technique so clean it survived every test, or simply the good fortune of a charming man working before modern controls, no one has settled.

That is the residue. It is easy to dismiss the whole spiritualist boom as credulity and conjuring, and most of it was. Home is the splinter under that verdict, the case where the tidy explanation has to admit it never actually closed the file.

Below, readers have filed their own séance experiences and levitation accounts, voting each True, Fake, or Not sure. Bring your skepticism, read the room, and add your judgment.