Daniel Dunglas Home

Home was born on 20 March 1833 at the village of Currie eight miles south-west of Edinburgh, christened Daniel Hume (he added the "Dunglas" middle name and the spelling Home from his mother's claimed descent from the Earls of Home of the Scottish border country). His father William Hume was a labourer at the Currie paper mills. His mother Elizabeth Macneal was from a Highland family of Skye and Inverness extraction with the second-sight tradition that Home subsequently identified as the source of his own phenomena. He was a sickly child and was given by his parents at nine into the care of a childless aunt, Mary Cook, who emigrated to Norwich, Connecticut with the boy in 1842.

The first phenomena ran in March 1850 at the Cook household in Norwich. Home was seventeen, recently confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and produced spontaneous rapping noises and furniture-moving phenomena that his aunt initially attributed to the Devil and that resulted in his being turned out of the household. He moved to lodgings at South Norwalk, Connecticut, supported himself by mediumistic sittings in the substantial Connecticut spiritualist community of the early 1850s, and developed across 1851 to 1854 the repertoire of phenomena that would define his subsequent career: rapping noises, table-and-furniture movements, elongation of the human body, materialised hands, accordion music played without contact, and the handling of red-hot coals without burning. He never accepted payment for sittings across the thirty-year career, refusing all offered fees on the position that the gift had been given without charge and could not in conscience be sold.

He returned to England in spring 1855 at twenty-two and arrived at Cox's Hotel, Jermyn Street, London on 9 April 1855. His phenomena were carried into the upper London drawing-rooms within weeks through the patronage of John Snaith Rymer of Ealing, a London solicitor of substantial means, and his wife Emma Rymer, who hosted Home at their Ealing villa across the summer and autumn of 1855. The Ealing seances of August and September 1855 were attended by Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning across two evenings in late August. The Brownings reached opposing assessments: Elizabeth Barrett Browning produced one of the public favourable accounts of the period, and Robert Browning produced the 1864 satirical poem Mr. Sludge "The Medium", one of the principal Victorian English-language attacks on the spiritualist movement.

The Continental period of 1856 to 1858 placed him at the courts of Napoleon III in Paris (the Tuileries seances of February and March 1857 attended by the Emperor and Empress Eugénie), at the Vatican of Pius IX in Rome in 1856 (where Home converted to Roman Catholicism on 17 April 1856 and was subsequently expelled from the Papal States in May 1858 as a sorcerer), and at the court of Alexander II in Saint Petersburg in October 1858. The Saint Petersburg sittings produced his first marriage on 1 August 1858 to Alexandrina de Kroll, the seventeen-year-old goddaughter of Tsar Alexander II and sister-in-law of Count Alexis Tolstoy. The marriage produced one son, Gregoire Home, born May 1859, and ended with Alexandrina's death from tuberculosis at twenty-two in February 1862.

The Adare-Lindsay-Wynne levitation incident of December 1868 was the most-cited single phenomenon of his English career. On the evening of 16 December 1868 at the Ashley House lodgings of Lord Adare at 5 Buckingham Gate, London, three witnesses (Adare, his cousin the Master of Lindsay, and Captain Charles Wynne) reported that Home rose from the floor of the second-storey drawing-room while in a trance state, was carried out through an open third-storey window, was carried across to the window of the adjoining bedroom approximately seven feet away, and re-entered the building through that window before walking calmly back to join them. The three witnesses produced signed independent accounts; Adare's published in 1869 (Experiences in Spiritualism with D. D. Home, privately printed), the Master of Lindsay's in correspondence with the London Dialectical Society of 1869, and Wynne's in private letters to Adare's mother. The independent corroboration produced one of the principal evidentially-contested phenomena of the period.

The William Crookes laboratory investigation of 1870 to 1872 was the closing investigative period of his career. Crookes had begun his Spiritualism investigation with an article in the Quarterly Journal of Science in July 1870 setting out the laboratory method he would apply, and Home was the principal medium he conducted that investigation through. The Crookes sittings ran at 7 Kensington Park Gardens, Notting Hill, with Home as the medium, from autumn 1870 to spring 1872, with detailed laboratory notes Crookes recorded across forty-four documented sittings. The Crookes report appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Science for July 1871 under the title "Experimental Investigation of a New Force" and in expanded form in the same journal across 1872 and 1874.

The 9 May 1871 Fire Test at the house of Miss Douglas at 81 South Audley Street is the most-cited single sitting of the Crookes-Home material. Crookes recorded Home, in trance, walking to the fireplace and lifting from it a piece of red-hot charcoal, carrying the coal across the room in a folded cambric handkerchief that he had taken from Miss Douglas, blowing on the coal until it returned to white heat against the cloth, and returning the coal to the fire. Crookes took the handkerchief to his Kensington Park Gardens laboratory and tested it for chemical preparation; he confirmed it had undergone none and that it was an ordinary cambric handkerchief that had touched a red-hot coal without combustion or scorching. The Crookes report of the Fire Test was published in the SPR Proceedings Volume XV in March 1889 and reproduced in Borderland Quarterly Volume 4 Number 2 of April 1897 in the Crookes Gallery profile.

Home married for the second time on 16 October 1871 at Saint Petersburg, to Julie de Gloumeline, a wealthy Russian widow of the Saint Petersburg court who had been his patroness across the 1870 to 1871 period. The second marriage produced no children and lasted to Home's death in 1886. He retired from active mediumship in 1873, after the Crookes investigation closed, citing the exhaustion of the phenomena and the deterioration of his lifelong pulmonary tuberculosis. The retirement years from 1873 to 1886 were lived at Auteuil outside Paris on Julie Home's substantial private income. He died at Auteuil on 21 June 1886 of consumption, age fifty-three. He was buried at the Saint-Germain-en-Laye cemetery outside Paris.

The Crookes-Home laboratory investigation of 1870 to 1872 produced the most thoroughly documented English-language scientific examination of a mediumistic subject in the Victorian period. William Crookes was thirty-eight when the investigation opened in July 1870, eight years into his editorship of Chemical News, seven years into his Fellowship of the Royal Society, and recognised across the British scientific community for his 1861 discovery of thallium and his work on radiant matter. The investigation was conducted under his own laboratory conditions at 7 Kensington Park Gardens with witnesses Crookes himself chose, and the published reports appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Science, which Crookes also edited.

The principal documented phenomena across the Crookes-Home sittings included the accordion-played-without-contact test of April 1871 (Crookes had Home hold an accordion in his left hand by the end opposite the keys while the instrument was placed inside a wire cage Crookes had designed; the accordion played recognisable tunes including "Home, Sweet Home" without any hand on the keys), the alteration-of-weight of a mahogany board test of June 1871 (Home placed his fingers on one end of a horizontal mahogany board with the other end resting on a spring balance; the spring balance recorded substantial weight changes that Crookes could not account for through any normal mechanical pressure Home was applying), and the materialised-hands test (luminous and tactile hands appeared at multiple sittings, were felt by Crookes and other sitters, and were photographed in some sittings).

The Crookes Fire Test of 9 May 1871 was conducted at the house of Miss Douglas, 81 South Audley Street, with seven sitters present (Crookes, Home, Miss Douglas, Miss Gregory, Mr. O. R., Mr. Jones, and Mr. W. F.). Crookes's recorded sitting notes describe Home rising from his chair in trance, blindfolding his own eyes, walking to the lit candle on a side table and passing his fingers slowly through the flame several times, going to the fireplace and removing the blindfold, lifting a piece of red-hot charcoal from the fire with tongs, folding Miss Douglas's cambric handkerchief on his right hand, and placing the red part of the coal on the folded cloth. The cloth burned a small half-inch hole in its centre but was not scorched elsewhere. Home then took a second piece of red-hot coal in his hand without the cloth, returned to the fire, and stirred the coals with his bare hand without injury. Crookes recovered the handkerchief, took it to his Kensington Park Gardens laboratory, and confirmed by chemical test that it had received no preparation to make it fire-resistant.

Home matters to this archive as the medium through whom the most thoroughly documented English-language scientific investigation of mediumistic phenomena was conducted in the Victorian period, and as the figure whose Fire Test of 9 May 1871 at Miss Douglas's 81 South Audley Street is the most-cited single sitting in the Borderland-period English-language documentary record. He was never exposed in fraud across a thirty-year working career, was investigated by figures of independent scientific standing (Crookes, Wallace, Lombroso), and produced the documented Adare-Lindsay-Wynne three-witness levitation account of December 1868.

The Crookes-Home laboratory investigation of 1870 to 1872 is the principal English-language documentary precedent of the late-Victorian SPR mediumistic-investigation methodology that Richard Hodgson developed in the eighteen-year Piper investigation at Boston from 1887, and is the immediate methodological forerunner of the post-1945 American civilian-research methodology applied to UAP witness investigation. The Borderland Quarterly Volume 4 Number 2 of April 1897 Crookes Gallery profile reproduced the Fire Test material as the editorial centrepiece of the closing volume's central issue.