Supernatural (26 page)

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 phenómena.
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 Hunters’.
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 own 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 totally 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 February 10, 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 Eugénie.
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 17-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 soulmates, 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 £30,000—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 float 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 53, 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 spirits 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.

1.
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.

1.
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.

1.
Outspoken Essays,
Vol.
1,
p. 269
, quoted by David Lorimer in
Survival
?,
p. 160
.

2.
‘The History of Spiritism’, lecture delivered in Berlin, May 30 1904.

3.
Ibid.