# Mystic Daniel Douglas Home **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 9, 2013, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556 "2013-01-09T00:01:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Hottius\_Maximus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hottius\_Maximus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hottius_Maximus)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 12:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/1 "2013-01-09T00:01:14Z")
At the height of the spiritualism craze way back when, there was a man who levitated in front of people by walking out a window and around the house to enter into another window that had no ledges. This man’s name was Daniel Douglas Home. He supposedly held seances and the like. His story appears to be “true” but I have my doubts. Have the alleged powers of levitation and necromancy by Daniel Douglas Home ever been seriously debunked? (I hope). ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 12:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/2 "2013-01-09T00:10:16Z")
Seriously? ---
**Author:** ![Llama\_Llogophile](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/49beb7/32.png) [@Llama\_Llogophile](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Llama_Llogophile)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/3 "2013-01-09T00:14:22Z")
A better question might be whether there’s any reason to assume the alleged powers have any basis in fact at all. I’ll bother debunking someone who claims to be able to violate the laws of physics as we know them after there’s the slightest shred of evidence to suggest he’s not a fraud. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/4 "2013-01-09T00:24:50Z")
I’ll debunk it for you. It never happened. He was a convicted fraud. Don’t believe me?[Harry Houdini took a swing at him here](http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aNUo2iJ5wZIC&pg=PA38&dq=one+of+the+most+conspicuous+and+lauded+of+his+type+and+generation&hl=sv&ei=-K1tTqyDAcSK4gSWj7mJBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false). ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/5 "2013-01-09T00:25:27Z")
> [@Hottius\_Maximus](#): > > Have the alleged powers of levitation and necromancy by Daniel Douglas Home ever been seriously debunked? (I hope). Of course they have. Home was a fraud and a liar who repeatedly conned widows out of their money by telling them the spirits wanted them to support Home financially. While some people were taken with him, it goes without saying that others saw through him. One of his victims came to her senses after giving him thousands of pounds and sued him successfully. > [@Hottius\_Maximus](#): > > At the height of the spiritualism craze way back when, there was a man who levitated in front of people by walking out a window and around the house to enter into another window that had no ledges. The levitation didn’t happen in front of anyone. Home was in one room and his friends were in another. During the seance, Home cried out to his friends that spirits were lifting him up and carrying him out the window. Then he “appeared” at the next window and entered the room. All he did was open the window, step onto the ledge, and then step onto the ledge of the next window. Here’s Joseph McCabe writing about Home: > [@McCabe](#): > > No one professes to have seen Home carried from window to window. Home told the three men who were present that he was going to be wafted, and he thus set up a state of very nervous expectation. Sir W. Barrett, who tells us that ‘nothing was said beforehand of what they might expect to see’, says precisely the opposite of the truth. Both Lord Crawford [Lindsay] and Lord Adare say that they were warned. Then Lord Crawford says that he saw the shadow on the wall of Home entering the room horizontally; and as the moon, by whose light he professes to have seen the shadow, was at the most only three days old, his testimony is absolutely worthless. Lord Adare claims only that he saw Home, in the dark, ‘standing upright outside our window.’ In the dark – it was an almost moonless December night – one could not, as a matter of fact, say very positively whether Home was outside or inside; but, in any case, he acknowledges that there was a nineteen-inch window-sill outside the window, and Home could stand on that. So there is not only not a shred of evidence that Home went from one window to another, but the whole story suggests trickery. Home told them what to expect, and he pretended, in the dark, that he was a ‘spirit’ whispering this to them. He noisily opened the window in the next room. He came into their room, from the window-sill, laughing and saying (in spite of the historic solemnity of the occasion!) that it would be funny if a policeman had seen him in the air. When Lord Adare went into the next room, and politely doubted if Home could have gone out by so small an aperture, Home told him to stand some distance back, and then swung himself out in a jaunty fashion, as a gymnast would. In fine, it is well to remember that this was the same D. D. Home who had defrauded a widow… and had been, in the previous year (1868), branded in a London court as a fraud and an adventurer.’ Like I said just today in another thread, miraculous reports of this type always turn out this way: either nobody really saw the alleged event or there was some easy way that it could have been achieved without supernatural intervention. Incidentally he went by Daniel Dunglas Home, not Douglas - not that it matters because he made up the “Dunglas” himself as a pretense to some Scottish nobility. Robert Browning called him “Dungball.” ---
**Author:** ![Hottius\_Maximus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hottius\_Maximus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hottius_Maximus)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 12:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/6 "2013-01-09T00:36:54Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > Of course they have. Home was a fraud and a liar who repeatedly conned widows out of their money by telling them the spirits wanted them to support Home financially. While some people were taken with him, it goes without saying that others saw through him. One of his victims came to her senses after giving him thousands of pounds and sued him successfully. > > The levitation didn’t happen in front of anyone. Home was in one room and his friends were in another. During the seance, Home cried out to his friends that spirits were lifting him up and carrying him out the window. Then he “appeared” at the next window and entered the room. All he did was open the window, step onto the ledge, and then step onto the ledge of the next window. Here’s Joseph McCabe writing about Home: > Like I said just today in another thread, miraculous reports of this type always turn out this way: either nobody really saw the alleged event or there was some easy way that it could have been achieved without supernatural intervention. > > Incidentally he went by Daniel Dunglas Home, not Douglas - not that it matters because he made up the “Dunglas” himself as a pretense to some Scottish nobility. Robert Browning called him “Dungball.” Apparently was a master fraud and charlatan. Did he ever get arrested or pay restitution? ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 12:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/7 "2013-01-09T00:47:40Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > Incidentally he went by Daniel Dunglas Home, not Douglas - not that it matters because he made up the “Dunglas” himself as a pretense to some Scottish nobility. Robert Browning called him “Dungball.” Perhaps the OP is confusing him with former British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, famed for his supernatural ability to lose both earldoms and general elections. Most confusingly, he was also, once, Lord Dunglass. ---
**Author:** ![Hottius\_Maximus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hottius\_Maximus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hottius_Maximus)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/8 "2013-01-09T01:12:45Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > Perhaps the OP is confusing him with former British Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, famed for his supernatural ability to lose both earldoms and general elections. > > Most confusingly, he was also, once, Lord Dunglass. NO I meant D.D. Home the supposed “spiritualist.” ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/9 "2013-01-09T02:58:11Z")
> [@Hottius\_Maximus](#): > > NO I meant D.D. Home the supposed “spiritualist.” Also the supposed D. D. Home. Anyway are you still worried this greedy fake might’ve been able to levitate? ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/10 "2013-01-09T21:37:10Z")
Dude faked it and made a few bucks along the way. More interesting, in my view, were those mediums - like Andrew Jackson Davis, Emma Hardinge Britten and others - who, inspired by what they truly believed to be authentic messages from the beyond, set out to work for progressive causes: Feminism, birth control, abolitionism, etc. Oh, and to the best of my knowledge, Home never claimed to practice necromancy. Levitation, yes, but never necromancy. ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 9:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/11 "2013-01-09T21:50:01Z")
> [@Hottius\_Maximus](#): > > Apparently was a master fraud and charlatan. Did he ever get arrested or pay restitution? Like I said, he lost at least one lawsuit. I’m not sure if he paid up. I wouldn’t be surprised if his rich friends/dupes paid the bill for him. > [@Steken](#): > > More interesting, in my view, were those mediums - like Andrew Jackson Davis, Emma Hardinge Britten and others - who, inspired by what they truly believed to be authentic messages from the beyond, set out to work for progressive causes: Feminism, birth control, abolitionism, etc. That’s one of the most interesting aspects of Spiritualism, I agree. Early on there was a utopian strain to it, and pretty much throughout its entire history it was strongly tied to feminism and progressive causes and it drew from liberal religious denominations. I can’t help thinking Spiritualism must’ve seemed very attractive to intelligent women who couldn’t get men to listen to them any other way. > [@](#): > > Oh, and to the best of my knowledge, Home never claimed to practice necromancy. Levitation, yes, but never necromancy. He did say he communicated with the dead, yes. Mediumship was the way most of these people made money. ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2013, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/12 "2013-01-09T22:23:09Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > That’s one of the most interesting aspects of Spiritualism, I agree. Early on there was a utopian strain to it, and pretty much throughout its entire history it was strongly tied to feminism and progressive causes and it drew from liberal religious denominations. I can’t help thinking Spiritualism must’ve seemed very attractive to intelligent women who couldn’t get men to listen to them any other way. Absolutely. After all, mediumship seems to have been one of the very few positions of significant religious and moral authority available for Western woman during much of the 19th century. A nice snippet from Allison Coudert’s _Angel in the House or Idol of Perversity?: Women in Nineteenth-century Esotericism_: > [@](#): > > “… Speaking in a trance on the text, ‘It is a shame for woman to speak in Church,’ the American Spiritualist Lizzie Doten exclaimed: ‘It is indeed a shame for woman to speak in the Church; and woman ought to be ashamed… of the Church! Let woman come _out_ from the Church; and when she comes out the minister and all the congregation will go out with her’!” Naturally, many an outraged harumph followed, such as this gem: > [@](#): > > “Utromania frequently results in mediomania… The angle at which the womb is suspended in the pelvis frequently settles the whole question of sanity or insanity. Tilt the organ a little forward—introvert it, and immediately the patient forsakes her home, embraces some strong ultraism—Mormonism, Mesmerism, Fourierism, Socialism, oftener Spiritualism. She becomes possessed by the idea that she has some startling mission in the world. She forsakes her home, her children, her duty, to mount the rostrum and proclaim the peculiar virtues of free-love, elective affinity, or the reincarnation of souls.” Good crack, that. > [@Marley23](#): > > He did say he communicated with the dead, yes. Mediumship was the way most of these people made money. Aw, shit, you’re quite right. I was under the impression that “necromancy” only meant _raising_ the dead, as opposed to _communicating_ with them, as the Spiritualists did. As it turns out, the word carries both meaning. Ignorance fought. ---
**Author:** ![Hottius\_Maximus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/3ab097/32.png) [@Hottius\_Maximus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hottius_Maximus)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2013, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/13 "2013-01-10T03:30:12Z")
> [@Marley23](#): > > Also the supposed D. D. Home. Anyway are you still worried this greedy fake might’ve been able to levitate? Too bad the Amazing Randi wasn’t around back then. Other than Houdini, do you know of any other famous debunkers back in the day a la The Amazing Randi? ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2013, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/14 "2013-01-10T03:58:49Z")
Reading about that era you could get the impression that everybody fell for this stuff, but yes, there were skeptics and whole skeptical and rationalist associations. McCabe is the only one I’m really familiar with offhand, but I don’t think he was ever a medium or anything- just a rigorous skeptic. I did once read part of a book by a retired medium who exposed a lot of the tricks of the trade. ---
**Author:** ![Steken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@Steken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steken)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2013, 10:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/15 "2013-01-10T10:14:34Z")
> [@Hottius\_Maximus](#): > > Too bad the Amazing Randi wasn’t around back then. Other than Houdini, do you know of any other famous debunkers back in the day a la The Amazing Randi? Beware of presentism. It wasn’t as clear-cut as a battle between “believers” and “debunkers”. Instead, you had a whole bunch of people, scientists and psychologists and laymen and priests etc., all hard at work trying to figure out just what the hell was going on in the séance room. The bigger picture: The kind of extreme materialism professed by men such as Ludwig Büchner and Karl Vogt (who famously believed that “thought stands in the same relation to the brain, as bile to the liver, or urine to the kidneys”) seemed to be on the retreat. For instance, psychologists were beginning to accept that not all diseases had strictly somatic roots - and phenomena such as hypnotism, with its roots in the earlier theories of animal magnetism etc., seemed to prove that the mind was capable of, well, all kinds of cool shit. On top of all that, you had scientists discovering invisible forces by the minute - Hertz, Röntgen, Curie, etc. So, the big question for most of those involved, including scientists, wasn’t so much “how do we debunk these frauds?”, but rather “which _new_ invisible force are we dealing with _this time_?” So a whole bunch of different hypotheses popped up. Unsurprisingly, some Christian thinkers argued that the forces at play were demonic - the mediums were the Devil’s unwitting puppets. Then there were those who believed that the messages and communications were actually “unconcious reflections” of either the medium’s own ideas, or perhaps those of others present. And then there were the “classic” Spiritualists - i.e., those who came to believe that what you were dealing with was authentic communication with the spirits of the dead. Of course, there were _also_ debunkers. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any prominent American examples, but up here in Denmark you had, for example, a magician and a doctor teaming up to debunk false mediums as early as the 1880’s - all live on stage, with musical interludes and all the rest of it. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2013, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/16 "2013-01-10T14:03:45Z")
> [@Hottius\_Maximus](#): > > Too bad the Amazing Randi wasn’t around back then. Other than Houdini, do you know of any other famous debunkers back in the day a la The Amazing Randi? There’;'s a long history of debunking. Augustuis de Morgan’s **A Budget of Paradoxes** from the 19th century is worth reading. And, of course, there’s the Proto-Cecil, Bergen Evans, whose **On the Spoor of Spooks** and **A Natural History of Nonsense** should be required reading. And there’s the second century Lucian of Samosota, whose satires are surprisingly modern, and who wrote a surprisingly Rabnndi-esque debunking of the DD Home of his day, Alexander of Abonoteichus. It’s on the internet, but I prefer the Penguin translation [http://www.epicurus.net/en/alexander.html](http://www.epicurus.net/en/alexander.html) > **[Lucian of Samosata : Alexander the False Prophet](https://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/lucian/lucian_alexander.htm)** > **[Alexander of Abonoteichus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_of_Abonutichus)** > > Alexander of Abonoteichus (Ancient Greek: Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Ἀβωνοτειχίτης Aléxandros ho Abōnoteichítēs), also called Alexander the Paphlagonian (c. 105 – c. 170 CE), was a Greek mystic and oracle, and the founder of the Glycon cult that briefly achieved wide popularity in the Roman world. The contemporary writer Lucian reports that he was an utter fraud – the god Glycon was supposedly made up of a live snake with an artificial head. The vivid narrative of his career given by Lucian might be taken as f... ---
**Author:** ![Marley23](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/45deac/32.png) [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2013, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/mystic-daniel-douglas-home/646556/17 "2013-01-10T15:32:34Z")
> [@Steken](#): > > So, the big question for most of those involved, including scientists, wasn’t so much “how do we debunk these frauds?”, but rather “which _new_ invisible force are we dealing with _this time_?” Spiritualism also came to the fore around the same time the public began to understand concepts like radiation and magnetism and as long-distance communication via telegraph was becoming possible.