Daniel Dunglas Home — The Medium Who Would Not Fall

Kirkcudbright, Galloway, Scotland

Born near Edinburgh, D.D. Home became the Victorian era's most famous medium, repeatedly demonstrated to levitate in front of witnesses and never once caught in a fraud.

Daniel Dunglas Home was born in 1833 in the village of Currie, just outside Edinburgh, and was raised for much of his childhood by an aunt in Portobello before his family emigrated to the United States. It was there, as a teenager in the early 1850s, that he first became known for phenomena occurring in his presence — rappings, moving furniture, and, most famously, levitation. Home's reputation grew through the 1850s and 60s until he was arguably the most famous medium in the Western world, sitting for royalty, aristocrats, and scientists across Europe and Russia. Unlike most of his contemporaries, he refused payment for sittings and would not perform in darkened rooms, conditions that made him harder to dismiss as a stage conjuror. His most celebrated feat came in December 1868, at Ashley House in London, when — according to the sworn testimony of Lord Adare and two other witnesses present — Home rose from the floor, floated horizontally out of one third-floor window and back in through another, in full view of the street below. Home was investigated by scientists, journalists, and skeptics for more than two decades, including by the physicist William Crookes, who conducted controlled experiments and found no evidence of trickery. He was never once caught faking a phenomenon in more than 1,500 documented sittings — an unusual record among the mediums of his era, most of whom were eventually exposed. He died in France in 1886, his levitations still unexplained, and remains the single case in the history of Spiritualism that even committed skeptics have struggled to fully dismiss.