by Colin Wilson
In a faint voice, Home now demanded an accordion, a popular instrument of the period. When it came, the princess was asked to stand alone in the middle of the room with the instrument held high above her head. As she stood there, her arm in the air, an expression of astonishment crossed her face. There was a tug on the accordion, and it proceeded to play, moving in and out. What impressed everyone was that it was a fine performance, the playing so soft and melodious that it brought tears to the eyes of some of the audience. After that, anything would have been an anticlimax, so the seance finished. But, typically, the men began to speculate how it had been done; no one seemed to doubt that it had been some form of conjuring trick; others spoke of electro-biology and mass hypnosis. The princess had to admit that she had no sensation of being hypnotised …
Daniel Dunglas Home (he pronounced it Hume) was born near Edinburgh in March 1833 — his mother was a highlander and had a reputation as a ‘seer’. He was probably illegitimate — he liked to claim that his father was Lord Home. At the age of nine, he moved to America with an aunt, Mary Cook, and her husband. His mother and ‘father’, and seven brothers and sisters, were already there. Daniel suffered from tuberculosis, and was subject to fainting fits — a typical ‘sick sensitive’. His closest friend was a boy called Edwin, and they went for long walks in the woods of Connecticut. They made a boyish pact — that whoever died first would show himself to the other. In 1846, when Daniel was thirteen, he told his aunt and uncle that he had just seen Edwin standing at the foot of his bed, and that the figure had made three circles in the air with his hand — which Daniel took to mean that he had died three days ago. It proved to be true.
There were no more supernatural experiences for another four years; then Home saw a vision of his mother, and knew she was dead. Soon after that, he was brushing his hair when he saw, in the glass, a chair moving across the room towards him. He was terrified and rushed out of the house. In bed, he was awakened by three loud bangs on the headboard. The next morning at breakfast, when his aunt was mildly teasing him about tiring himself out by attending too many prayer meetings (Home was a religious young man), raps sounded from all over the table, and his alarmed aunt cried: ‘So you’ve brought the devil into my house, have you?’, and threw a chair at him. The Baptist minister was called in to pray the devil away but had difficulty in making himself heard about the hail of knocks. Unaware that poltergeist phenomena are usually harmless, his aunt requested him to leave her house. So, at the age of seventeen, Home had to fend for himself.
But Home had such charm and gaiety that there were dozens of acquaintances who were delighted to offer him hospitality. And the spirits gave him their full support. He went easily into trance, and in that state talked fluently in French and Italian — neither of them languages in which he had become proficient. He could not have chosen a better time to launch himself on the world, with everyone in the United States talking about spirits. An evangelist named Dr George Bush — a professor of oriental languages — persuaded him that he ought to become a Swedenborgian and use his considerable preaching talent in the pulpit; Home agreed, then came back two days later to say that his dead mother had expressly forbidden it, telling him that he had a ‘more extended’ mission.
Looked after by the ‘spirits’, and by kindly acquaintances, Home wandered around through New England, always a welcome guest in the homes of the well-off middle classes; his pale good looks brought out the protectiveness in middle-aged ladies. In Springfield, Mass., he stayed at the home of a wealthy citizen named Rufus Elmers, and agreed to be investigated by a delegation from Harvard, including the poet William Cullen Bryant. They, like many other ‘delegations’ after them, had no doubt about the genuineness of the phenomena. The table not only ‘rapped’ and floated off the floor, but stood on two legs like a circus horse while three members of the committee sat on it and tried to force it down again. The floor vibrated to shocks that were as powerful as cannon fire. All this took place in broad daylight, and members of the committee held Home’s hands and feet while most of the phenomena were taking place. Their report, entitled ‘The Modern Wonder’, concluded: ‘We know that we were not imposed upon nor deceived.’ Rufus Elmers was so impressed that he offered to adopt Home and make him his heir; Home declined with thanks.
In August 1852, sitting in a circle, Home floated up to the ceiling — a feat that became virtually his trademark. And his other phenomena continued to be almost as astonishing. Grand pianos would float across the room, bells would ring, cymbals clash, and there would be sounds of birdsong and assorted animal noises. One day, a table with a candle on it tilted at an angle, and the candle flame went on burning at the same angle, as if it was still resting on a horizontal surface. On another occasion, at the home of the Rev. S. B. Brittan, he went into a trance, and a voice announced: ‘Hannah Brittan here.’ Home began to wring his hands, and for the next half hour, talked in a wild, distracted way about the torments of hell. The Rev. Brittan was staggered, for he was certain that no one knew that the lady — a relative — had been a prey to religious mania, and had died insane, obsessed by visions of eternal punishment. (On a subsequent appearance, Hannah Brittan told them that her present life was calm, peaceful and beautiful and that the torments of hell had been a delusion of her distracted brain.)
Most women adored Home, who was attentive and thoughtful — he loved sending flowers on anniversaries. Men either liked him or loathed him. He had effeminate manners, and many suspected he was homosexual. (For some odd reason, a surprising number of mediums are.) He was undoubtedly rather vain about his pale good looks and silky, auburn hair. He loved expensive clothes. He was an outrageous snob, who took pleasure in being inaccessible. (He would only condescend to know people if introduced by a mutual acquaintance.) He would be mortally offended if anyone offered him money, and he resented being treated as a ‘performer’; as far as he was concerned, he was the social equal of anyone he met, including kings. Yet he was becomingly modest about his achievement, insisting that he himself had nothing whatever to do with the phenomena. All he had to do was to relax and put himself in the right mood (and ‘right’ is probably here the operative word) and things simply happened.
By 1855, Home’s consumptive cough had become so bad that his admirers decided he ought to move to a healthier climate. For some unaccountable reason, he chose England. Admirers paid his passage, and with a crowd waving frantically, he sailed from Boston in March; he was just twenty-two.
As usual, the spirits were looking after Home. In London, he moved into Cox’s Hotel in Jermyn Street; the owner, William Cox, was a Spiritualist, and welcomed Home ‘as a father would a son’. So Home got free lodgings and an introduction to the London society people who made regular use of the hotel. In no time at all he was calling on marchionesses and baronesses. He went to visit the novelist Lord Lytton, who made literary use of many of Home’s seance phenomena — a luminous form that dissolved into a globe, a disembodied hand, loud bangs, fiery sparks — in his famous story ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’. But Lytton declined to believe spirits were responsible; he thought the phenomena were due to Home’s unconscious mind. He became a friend of the socialist Robert Owen, who was a convert to spiritualism, and who introduced him to his old friend Lord Henry Brougham, a Voltairean sceptic. Brougham and Sir David Brewster had a private session with Home at which the table rose into the air and a bell floated across the room. Brewster described these things in his diary and told them to friends, but later insisted that the table had only ‘appeared’ to rise, and that Home had probably moved the bell with some hidden apparatus. The resulting controversy brought Home much publicity, and provided the spiritualists with some excellent ammunition to use against scientific dogmatism, since Brewster’s diaries justify Home.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning called on Home, together with her husband Robert. Ghostly hands materialised, music sounded from the air, the table rapped loudly and invisible spirits caressed them. Mrs Browning was t
otally convinced; her husband — vigorous, sturdy, just over five feet tall — sat there scowling, and resolutely declined to accept the evidence of his eyes. Home became an unmentionable subject in the Browning household, and after his wife’s death, Browning wrote the flagrantly unfair ‘Mr Sludge the Medium’. He may have been prejudiced by an episode that took place at another Home seance, when a detached hand took up a garland of flowers and placed them on the poetess’s brow; Browning was jealous of his wife. Home made things worse by telling people that Browning had tried to place himself in the trajectory of the wreath so it would alight on his brow …
By popular request of the English community, Home moved on to Florence. There the manifestations were stronger than ever. A grand piano floated up into the air and remained there while a countess played on it; a spirit conversed with a Polish princess in her own language; in a haunted convent, Home conversed with the spirit of a monk — also a murderer — and caused his skinny, yellow hands to materialise. When the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne came to Florence three years later, people were still talking about Home, and Hawthorne collected dozens of well-attested accounts of the phenomena. Hawthorne made the interesting and significant observation:
These soberly attested incredibilities are so numerous that I forget nine tenths of them … they are absolutely proved to be sober facts by evidence that would satisfy us of any other alleged realities; and yet I cannot force my mind to interest itself in them.
This is perhaps one of the most important comments ever made about Home or about spiritualism in general.
Unfortunately, Home’s success began to go to his head. He was not a particularly strong character, and being treated as a messenger from the gods would have been enough to unbalance a far more independent nature. When he went to stay at the villa of a titled Englishwoman who was separated from her husband, former admirers were scandalised — English self-control produces a morbid fascination with sexual scandal — and he began to sense a new atmosphere of hostility. He was attacked on his way back to his hotel and slightly wounded — a sign that the spirits were becoming inefficient or lazy — and on 10 February 1856, the spirits told him that his recent conduct was not worthy of a representative of the other world, and that his powers were about to leave him for a year. A Polish count had invited him to Naples and Rome; Home felt obliged to admit to him that his powers had deserted him. But his luck held; the count insisted that it made no difference, and Home accompanied him to Naples. And in spite of the loss of his powers, he remained a social lion. They came back, as the spirits had prophesied, exactly one year to the day, on the stroke of midnight.
By now Home was in Paris, and had taken the precaution of insuring himself against the disapproval of the Church by becoming a Catholic. His father confessor — recommended by the Pope himself — was less than enthusiastic about the return of the spirits, whom he assumed to be demons — but there was little he could do about it. Neither would Home have wished it, for he was by now a favourite of the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie. His luck aroused widespread envy and hostility, but after the year of desertion by the spirits, he no longer allowed it to go to his head.
After a tour of northern Europe, he returned to Rome, where he met and wooed a beautiful seventeen-year-old Russian countess named Sacha; they went to St Petersburg (together with the novelist Dumas) and her relatives organised a spectacular wedding. Home was received by the Russian royal family as cordially as by Napoleon III. Unfortunately, Sacha caught his tuberculosis, and died not long after the birth of a son. At least her death was not a separation; Home was able to keep in constant touch with her.
In 1862 his luck again seemed to desert him. The police ordered him to leave Rome, declaring that he was a sorcerer (the spirits made things worse by rapping on the desk of the police chief). For the next four years he again became a wanderer. In 1866, he met an effusive and vulgar old lady with a working-class accent, Mrs Jane Lyon, who told him she wanted to adopt him as her son, and presented him with numerous large cheques. Home changed his name to Home-Lyon. But the two were far from soul mates, and the relationship soon began to deteriorate badly — he found her boringly affectionate and she found him cold. He had a breakdown, and fled to various watering places to take a cure. When he returned to London, he found that Mrs Lyon had transferred her allegiance to a female medium, and was brooding on how to recover her money. She wanted back about thirty thousand pounds — only about half of what she had given him. She accused him of extortion, and Home was arrested. At the trial in April 1868, she alleged that she had given him the money because he had brought her instructions to that effect from her dead husband; Home’s case was that she had tried hard to seduce him after he became her ‘son’. Mrs Lyon was undoubtedly — as Home declared — vengeful and untruthful, and many of her lies were exposed in court. But a ‘spirit medium’ stood no chance of getting an unprejudiced trial; the judge remarked that if everyone who gave money to a religious charity was allowed to ask for it back, the result would be chaos; however, since spiritualism was a fraud and a cheat he would make exception in the present case. Home was ordered to repay the money. The trial did Home immense damage, strengthening the impression already created by Browning’s ‘Mr Sludge’, that he was a confidence trickster. But the notoriety had one advantage: a reading tour of England drew enormous audiences and helped to recoup his loss.
During his ‘water cure’ in Malvern, Home had met a young aristocrat, Lord Adare, and during the next year or two he spent much time with him. In 1870, Adare published Experiences in Spiritualism with Mr D. D. Home, perhaps one of the most extraordinary and impressive books about a medium ever written. Adare was an ordinary young Englishman, more interested in hunting, shooting and fishing than ghosts. It was Adare who saw Home afloat out of one upper-storey window and in at another. He also saw the materialisation of various spirits — including Sacha and the American actress Ada Mencken — and all the other phenomena that Home had been producing for the past twenty years. He saw Home stir up the fire until the coals were blazing, then pick them up in handfuls and rub his face in them — neither his face nor his hair was burnt. He also witnessed Home standing against a wall, where his height was carefully taken (five feet ten inches), after which Home elongated himself to six foot four.
In 1871, Home agreed to be investigated by the young scientist William (later Sir William) Crookes. The anti-spiritualists smiled with satisfaction; they had no doubt whatever that Crookes would finally demolish the conjuror’s reputation. In the event, Crookes was totally convinced, and published a report to that effect — to the disgust of his fellow scientists, who decided that he had been duped. In the controversy that followed, Crookes exploded indignantly: ‘I didn’t say it was possible — I said it was true.’
In the following year, 1872, Home decided it was time to retire. A lawsuit about his wife’s estate was decided in his favour, so he was a Russian landowner. He lived on for another fourteen years, to the age of fifty-three, spending his time between Russia and the French Riviera. He was wasting away from consumption; but with a beautiful second wife, a comfortable income and hosts of admiring friends, his final years were far from unhappy.
The article on Home in Encyclopedia Britannica calls Home an ‘unsolved enigma’. This is true, but not quite in the sense the writer intended. As far as Home was concerned, there was no enigma. He had simply inherited unusual psychic powers from his mother’s side of the family (and he passed these on to his son Grisha). So the spirits were able to operate through him.
As we have seen, this answer failed to satisfy many people who witnessed his feats and accepted their genuineness. Lord Lytton thought that Home somehow caused the phenomena himself. Most modern researchers would probably agree with him, since most of them are unwilling to accept the spirit hypothesis. Yet one thing that becomes very clear to anyone who reads the accounts of Home’s phenomena — as recorded by Lord Adare or Sir William Crookes — is that the spirit
s are not only the simplest explanation, but in many cases, the only explanation. A large percentage of the phenomena can only be explained if we assume the existence of disembodied intelligences. And at this point, it is necessary to acknowledge that, sooner or later, most investigators of the paranormal are finally driven to the conclusion that spirits almost certainly exist. They do this with the utmost reluctance. It would be far more convenient, and far more logically satisfying, if we could explain all the phenomena in terms of the unrecognised powers of the human mind. Total honesty forces the admission that this is impossible. And this is nowhere more obvious than in the case of Daniel Dunglas Home.
*In Autobiography of a Yogi by Parahansa Yogananda, the author describes how a visiting Yogi had told him that a friend was on his way. When the friend arrived, he told of how the Yogi had approached him in the street, and mentioned that Parahansa was waiting for him in his room. At the time this happened, the Yogi had been with Parahansa. From the point of view of a psychical investigator, the case is dubious because we have only the author’s word for it.
*Ferenc Andras Volgyesi: Menschen und Tierhypnose, 1963, translated as Hypnosis of Man and Animals, London 1966.
*When I speak of Spiritualism with a capital ‘S’, I refer to the ‘religion’ of that name; spiritualism with a small ‘s’ denotes simply the belief in spirits or life after death.
*For accounts of these cases see my book Poltergeist (1981).
*Outspoken Essays, Vol. 1, p. 269, quoted by David Lorimer in Surival?, p. 160.
**‘The History of Spiritism’, lecture delivered in Berlin, 30 May 1904.
***Ibid.