DIAGRAM SHOWING ARRANGEMENT OF ROOMS, WINDOWS, ETC., WHERE HOME’S REPUTED FEAT OF FLOATING TOOK PLACE.
Home gained wide notoriety for unusual phenomena by his reputed levitation acts, wherein he would slide from the chair on which he was sitting to a horizontal position, then ask to have the chair removed as it was not supporting him, and would “float” under a table and back, but his masterpiece, the incident oftenest referred to, was sailing out of a window feet first, and sailing into another, seven feet and four inches distant, landing feet first in an adjacent room, where he “sat down.” Lord Adare, an observer, expressed surprise that he could have been carried through an aperture so narrow as eighteen inches whereupon “Home, still entranced said, ‘I will show you,’ and then with his back to the window he leaned over and was shot out of the aperture head first, with the body rigid, and then returned quite quietly.”[42, ] [43]
This is the way the story has been recounted again and again by Spiritualist writers and speakers and to this day is told by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with as much seriousness as if he had been an eyewitness of the occurrence in the full glare of a noon-day sun.
“When D.D. made that ‘home-run’” around the outside of his house he seems to have been seeking an altitude rather than a speed record, as the three reliable (?) witnesses agree that the windows through which he floated were in the third story and either sixty or eighty feet from the ground. This would make the height of each story from twenty to twenty-seven feet, but tall stories appear to have been a specialty with these remarkably observant gentlemen.
In 1920 I made plans for reproducing this window feat under the same conditions as Home and the late Stuart Cumberland openly challenged Spiritualists that I was ready to submit to such a test but no response was received before I left Europe. Consequently I desire to go on record as being able to perform the same phenomena (?) provided I am given the same conditions and scope which Home was. I believe that those who witnessed the feat were sincere in giving credence to it but that it was an illusion and they were deceived by Home, for the mind of the average person accepts what it sees and is not willing to apply the laws of physics, no matter how much or how glaringly the act defies the fundamental principles upon which our very existence depends.
The years between 1859 and 1872 were those of Home’s greatest success. Toward the end of this period, however, his popularity waned and having for a second time married a lady belonging to the Russian nobility, he gave up the practice of his profession, broke with nearly all his former friends and returned to the Continent where he devoted much of his time to writing. He died in 1886 and is buried at St. Germain-en-Laye.
His active career, his various escapades, and the direct cause of his death[44] all indicate that he lived the life of a hypocrite of the deepest dye. How strange that these inspired agents of “Summerland,” these human deliverers of messages, these stepping stones to the Beyond, are, for the greater part, moral perverts whose favorite defence is the claim that they are forced to do such deeds by the evil spirits which take possession of them.
CHAPTER IV
PALLADINO
Eusapia Palladino, an Italian, has to her credit the successful deception of more philosophic and scientific men than any other known medium, being regarded by some as the most famous of them all, notwithstanding the fact that she seems to have made no pretence of producing the class of miracles claimed by D. D. Home and many others. Materialization was rarely resorted to by her and there is very little variety in her program from 1892 up to the time of her death in 1918, evidently being content to astonish investigating scientists with the levitation and gyrating of inanimate things.[45]