Here is Lord Adare's account of the central incident:
"We heard Home go into the next room, heard the window thrown up, and presently Home appeared standing upright outside our window; he opened the window and walked in quite coolly."
Captain Wynne, writing to Home in 1877, refers to this occasion in the following words:
"The fact of your having gone out of the one window and in at the other I can swear to."
It is surely not a little remarkable that an occurrence of so extraordinary a nature should be testified to by three such clear-headed men as Captain Wynne and Lords Lindsay and Adare. To cross from one window to another by ordinary means was clearly impossible, and it would be a brave conjurer indeed who would essay such a feat at a distance of eighty-five feet from the ground. What then is the explanation? Mr Podmore suggests that the three witnesses were the victims of a collective hallucination; but this theory is not easy to accept, and Mr Andrew Lang has heaped it with ridicule. "There are," he writes, "two other points to be urged against Mr Podmore's theory that observers of Home were hallucinated. The Society's records contain plenty of 'collective, so-called telepathic hallucinations.' But surely these hallucinations offered visionary figures of persons and things not present in fact. Has Mr Podmore one case, except Home's, of a collective hallucination in which a person actually present is the hallucination; floats in the air, holds red-hot coals and so forth—appears outside of the window, for instance, when he is inside the room? Of course, where conjuring is barred. Again, Home's marvels are attested by witnesses violently prejudiced against him, and (far from being attentively expectant) most anxious to detect and expose him."
If the case of Home presents difficulties to the rational sceptic, that of William Stainton Moses, who died in 1892, presents an even harder problem. I will refer to Moses later when we come to discuss clairvoyance, but at first his mediumistic powers were manifested in physical phenomena. He was a clergyman and a scholar, an M.A. of Oxford, and for nearly eighteen years English master in University College School. He was held in esteem and even affection by all who were most intimately associated with him. Yet Moses was responsible for table rapping, levitation of furniture, playing of musical instruments and "apports"—the latter term expressing the movement or introduction of various articles either by the request of the sitters or spontaneously, such as books, stones, shells, opera-glasses, candle-sticks, and so forth. All this began in 1872, and the phenomena observed at the various séances were carefully recorded by the medium's friends, Dr and Mrs Speer, C. T. Speer, and F. W. Percival. It must be borne in mind that Moses was in his thirty-third year before he suspected mediumistic powers. There have been any number of hypotheses to account for the physical phenomena furnished at these séances. Jewels, cameos, seed pearls, and other precious things were brought and given to the sitters. Scent was introduced; familiar perfumes—such as sandalwood, jasmine, heliotrope, not always recognised—were a frequent occurrence at these séances. Occasionally it would be sprayed in the air, sometimes poured into the hands of the sitters, and often it was found oozing from the medium's head and even running down.
In Mrs Speer's diary for 30th August there is the following record:—
"Many things were brought from different parts of the house through the locked door this evening. Mr S. M. was levitated, and when he felt for his feet they were hanging in mid-air, while his head must have almost touched the ceiling."
Dr Speer also records a "levitation" on 3rd December: