The following is an excerpt from a book discussing the more famous of the spiritualist mediums of the 1800's.D.D. Home
At the height of the spiritualist movement emerged the era's most talented physical medium, Daniel Douglas Home. A few things separated Home from his medium
colleagues. For one thing he never
insisted on holding his séances in the dark, he never balked at skeptics that
would examine his sessions for fraud, he was never publicly caught or denounced
for fraud, and he never accepted payment for his séances. The last point is
astounding, as Home was the invited guest of the most of the royalty of Europe
at one time or another.
He reportedly conducted séances
for the Czar of Russia, the king of France, the king of Naples, the queen of
Holland, the king of Bavaria and the German emperor, just to name a few! He met and married his first wife,
Alexandrina de Kroll, the sister-in-law to Count Koucheleff-Besborodka while in
Rome. He had Alexandre Dumas as a groomsman, and Count Alexis Tolstoy the
writer and Count Bobrinsky, a chamberlain to the emperor, as invited guests to
the affair. And yet he lived most of his
life on the brink of poverty, relying on the largesse of devotees, roaming from
one country to another as his welcome wore out.
Daniel Douglas Home (pronounced
Hume) was of rather questionable descent.
According to a footnote in Home’s own autobiographical book Incidents in My Life (1863) his father
was the “natural son” of Alexander, the tenth earl of Home, and his mother, a lass
of the Highlands, claimed to be descended from the Brahan clan descendants
of Kenneth MacKenzie. From birth, Home
was said to have special powers, being able to rock his own cradle. During his childhood, Home was considered to
be of nervous disposition and poor health, and was at times not expected to
live to adulthood (19).
He passed his early childhood in
Portobello, Scotland, but moved at the age of nine to the U.S. when he was
adopted by a childless aunt, a Mrs. McNeill Cook. He lived for a time in
Greeneville, Connecticut and Troy, New York.
Reportedly he was a sensitive child with a keen memory and strong
observation skills. He had his first
vision at the age of 13, when a deceased school mate named Edwin visited him in
his home in Troy. Four years would pass
before his second vision when Home predicted to the hour, his mother’s death. When strange rappings and tappings started
occurring around the house, his aunt first attempted to have Home exorcised and
then finally evicted from her home (19, 20).
Aside from being able to speak
with spirits via a spirit guide, he was able to produce rapping sounds on
command, strange lights and spectral hands.
One ghostly hand appeared at a séance with Napolean III which was able
to sign his name on a piece of paper producing the signature of Napolean I (20).
Home was able to call forth music on ghostly guitars and move objects about the
room. Later he was able to elongate his
body as much as 11 inches to a height of 6 ½ feet, and then to shrink to five
feet while onlookers saw his shoes disappear under his trousers. He often had onlookers hold his frame to
prove that he wasn’t faking it, and he allowed those present to measure the
differences, all again in a lighted room to disprove fakery (19).
At the age of 19 he developed the
ability to levitate, at first bobbing up and down a few feet off the ground
before gently floating up the ceiling (21).
He later was able to hone his skills and onlookers swore that he could
fly. Home swore his abilities were made possible with the aid of friendly
spirits, the most frequent of which was Bryan (19).
Home was as much loved as
despised. He was criticized as being
tempermental, with bouts of anxiety and depression, and to have homosexual
leanings. He was also described as vain
and somewhat simple. He disdained contact with other mediums with whom he felt
he had nothing to learn. The only medium
with whom he had a friendship, ironically, was Kate Fox. His gifts were at times
considered sinister. The Italian populace
found him particularly loathsome, accusing him of witch craft and sorcery.
When Alexandrina de Kroll died in
1862, the family attempted to withhold Home’s inheritance. Home was forced to
wage a long legal battle, during which time he had no steady income. He tried to become a student of sculpture,
going to Rome for a time to study. He
was forced to leave the city after a somewhat extended scuffle with the Papacy
who accused Home of sorcery. He them emigrated briefly to the U.S. to attempt
his hand as stage orator. It is said that his recitations of Howard Brownell’s
poems were well received by audiences, but he left before long to return to Europe. Throughout his career there were at least two
attempts on his life, and he took knife wounds to the abdomen and the
hand. Certainly it is hard to imagine a
psychic that was as famous as infamous, as punished as rewarded for his gifts
(20).
Ill health eventually forced Home
to retire. He married a second time, to a wealthy Russian widow, Julie de Gloumeline
and declined public séances thereafter. He traveled for the rest of his life,
dying of tuberculosis while in Auteuil ,France in 1886 (19).
During a time when skeptics were
actively attempting to disprove psychic mediums, there was never any substantial
evidence revealed to prove Home a fraud.
Certainly skeptics suggested trickery, often after his death when fraud
could not proven one way or another, and yet some of the sharpest minds
couldn’t figure out how he produced his great feats. He even cooperated with psychical researcher Sir William Crookes in an experiment. Crookes could detect no foul play and announced Home’s abilities as true. The skeptical Frank Podmore grudgingly admitted that, “Home was never publicly exposed as an imposter; there is no evidence of any weight that he was even privately detected in trickery.” Although Podmore did not concede that Home had mediumistic abilities, he neither refuted his abilities either. Even the great Houdini couldn’t figure out how he produced the results he did. Whether truly a medium of outstanding abilities or a very clever conjurer is still disputed. He remains therefore, the greatest medium of the age (19, 20).
Resources
19. Cheung, Theresa (2008). The Element Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Hauntings. Barnes and Noble,
Inc. in cooperation with Harper Collins Publishers. pps 211-214.
20. Melton,
Gordon, Editor (2001). Encyclopedia of
Occultism and Parapsychology; Fifth Edition. Gale Group, Inc. Farmington Hills,
MI Volume 1 A-L pps 737-740.
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