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Daniel Dunglas Home: The Famous Medium Who Defied Explanation

Daniel Dunglas Home (1833–1886) was a Scottish medium renowned for his extraordinary physical phenomena. He became famous for moving objects, producing rappings, materialising spirit forms, placing his head into fire without being burned, levitating, and apparently elongating or shrinking his body. Although he was often accused of fraud, no one ever proved deception in a single instance. Home was vain and enjoyed moving among aristocrats, royals, and the upper classes, but he never accepted money for his séances. Instead, he lived from the generosity of wealthy patrons.

Home, pronounced “Hume,” was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on 20 March 1833. His father was a carpenter, and his mother was clairvoyant. She claimed her family was connected to the seventeenth-century Brahan Seer, Kenneth MacKenzie. Home’s mediumistic gifts allegedly appeared in infancy, when his aunt reported that his cradle rocked by itself as though moved by an unseen hand. At the age of four, he predicted the death of a cousin.

When Home was nine, his family moved to Connecticut. He was physically frail and suffered from a tendency toward tuberculosis. He read the Bible often and spent much time alone in the woods. At the age of thirteen, he had a vision of a boyhood friend at the moment the friend died far away.

Home was fifteen when the Fox Sisters caused a sensation with table-rapping spirits and Spiritualism began spreading rapidly. His own paranormal experiences increased, especially after the death of his mother in 1850. At the time, Home was living with his aunt, Mary Cook, in Norwich, Connecticut. Rappings began in her house, and Cook blamed Home for bringing the Devil into her home. She called in ministers to free him from evil spirits, but the ministers concluded that the young man possessed a God-given gift.

For Home, this became a turning point. His dead mother appeared to him in a vision, as she would continue to do throughout his life, and told him not to be afraid but to use his gift for good. Mary Cook, however, threw him out.

For most of his life, Home had no permanent home of his own. He lived as a guest in the households of others. He attended séances but believed that most mediums were fraudulent. In the rapidly growing Spiritualist movement, fraud became common, and many of Home’s critics tried unsuccessfully to expose him. Home avoided other mediums, saying he had nothing to learn from them.

Home held his own séances in lit rooms, unlike the more common practice of darkened séance chambers. He produced spectral lights, rappings, and ghostly hands that ended at the wrist and shook hands with those present. He moved tables, chairs, and objects. He tipped tables without spilling the objects placed on them. He produced visions of ghostly guitars that played eerie music. He spelled out messages from the dead by pointing to letters of the alphabet written on cards.

At times, Home appeared to be possessed and played the piano or accordion in a wild frenzy. He was also seen to stretch or shrink his body, increasing his height by eleven inches while keeping his feet on the floor, or shrinking until his shoes disappeared into his trousers. He often asked guests to hold his hands and feet so they could see he was not secretly manipulating hidden devices or machinery.

Home said that his feats were performed by friendly spirits whom he could not control. They came and went as they pleased. The most reliable of these spirits was one named “Bryan.” When Home entered trance, he referred to himself in the third person as “Dan.”

This is why Daniel Dunglas Home remains one of the most fascinating figures in the history of Spiritualism. His life opens the door to séance practice, spirit communication, levitation, physical mediumship, apparitions, haunted phenomena, and the long battle between belief and scepticism. If you want to explore these mysteries more deeply, the Occult World Skool Community is where you can continue the journey. Inside the community, you can meet fellow occultists, study ghosts, mediumship, necromancy, haunted places, paranormal investigation, demonology, ritual practice, and the wider hidden world. Do not remain a passive reader of occult history. Step into a community where these subjects are studied seriously and with real depth.

Home was nineteen when he experienced his first involuntary levitation in the Connecticut home of a silk manufacturer. He reportedly rose about a foot off the ground, bobbed up and down several times, and floated toward the ceiling. Later, he learned to control his levitations, and witnesses said he seemed literally to fly.

He entered the Theological Institute in Newburgh, New York, to study religion. In 1853, too ill to continue his studies and preoccupied with death, he experienced an out-of-body journey that lasted eleven hours. He said it was intended to show him what existed on the Other Side.

In 1855, Home travelled to England and Europe, where he began fulfilling his desire to move among royalty, aristocrats, and famous people. His séances caused intense controversy in the press. His supporters included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Edward Bulwer-Lytton remained unimpressed. His enemies included the scientist David Brewster and the poet Robert Browning, who disliked Home so strongly that he wrote a two-thousand-line poem about him called Mr. Sludge, “the Medium.”

In February 1856, Home announced that his spirits had told him they would withdraw from him for a year. He travelled to Naples and Rome, where he had an audience with Pope Pius IX. Impulsively, he converted to Catholicism and said he would enter a monastery.

A year later, as promised, his spirit friends returned and restored his health. In France, Home had an audience with Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. The emperor expected to find him a fraud, but became convinced of his authenticity when Home produced the spirit of Napoleon I, who shook hands with Napoleon III and his wife.

In Rome, Home met Alexandrina, the wealthy sister-in-law of a Russian nobleman, Count Gregoire de Koucheleff. They fell in love and married in St Petersburg on 1 August 1858. Their son, Gregoire, was born in 1859. Alexandrina died of illness in 1862, and her estate remained tied up in Russia for years, forcing Home once again to depend on patrons.

In 1866, the Spiritual Athenaeum was founded in England with Home as secretary. He hoped fashionable society would support it, but the support was limited, possibly because its founders insisted on a quasi-religious nature and a professed belief in orthodox Christianity.

Home’s financial difficulties soon led to a scandal involving a wealthy widow, Mrs Lyon, who was seventy-five years old. Her husband had died seven years earlier and had told her before his death that she would survive him by only seven years. Mrs Lyon sought out Home at the Spiritual Athenaeum to contact her husband and learn whether she was soon to die.

The dead Mr Lyon allegedly communicated through Home by raps and relieved the widow of her fear of imminent death. She became eager for more sittings with Home. Her husband then reportedly began telling her that Home was to become their new son and should be given independent means, including an allowance of seven hundred pounds. By January 1867, Home had taken the Lyon family name, received sixty thousand pounds in cash and securities, and been named beneficiary in Mrs Lyon’s will.

On 10 June 1867, Mrs Lyon made affectionate advances to Home, which he later said he repulsed. The next day she demanded her money back. Home tried to appease her by offering to return all but thirty thousand pounds, but she had him arrested and filed suit against him.

The trial was scandalous. Mrs Lyon appeared unstable during her testimony, and there were suggestions that she and Home had been more than affectionate. Home’s supporters were embarrassed and deserted him, while his critics took full advantage. Despite Mrs Lyon’s strange behaviour, the court ruled in her favour, and Home was forced to return the sixty thousand pounds. The court denounced Spiritualism as “mischievous nonsense.” Home did not appeal.

After this scandal, Home performed some of his most remarkable alleged feats. In 1868, in the London home of Lord Adare, he reportedly entered a trance, floated out of a third-floor window, and returned through another window. Sceptics later argued that the event may have been hallucination on the part of the witnesses and pointed to inconsistencies in Lord Adare’s descriptions.

In 1868, Home also performed extraordinary fire feats. He carried red-hot coals without being burned and could enable others to do the same. He placed the top of his head directly into flames in a fireplace, yet his hair was not singed.

To earn money, Home toured England and Scotland reading poetry. He worked briefly as a war correspondent during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Later, in Russia, he met Julie de Gloumeline, a wealthy woman who married him in 1871.

That same year, Home began a series of tests in London with Sir William Crookes, a scientist deeply interested in Spiritualism. Crookes attempted to determine whether Home manipulated electromagnetic energy. He wrapped an accordion with copper wire and placed it inside a wire cage. He then ran an electric current through the wire, believing it would block any electromagnetic force from Home. Yet Home was still able to make the accordion play without touching it. Crookes concluded that Home possessed an independent psychic force, a finding that brought severe criticism from fellow scientists.

In 1873, after completing his work with Crookes, Home announced his retirement as a medium. Restless and still suffering from poor health, he travelled with his wife and his son from his first marriage. Julie later gave birth to a baby girl, who died in infancy.

Home died of tuberculosis on 21 June 1886 in Auteuil, France, and was buried at St Germain-en-Laye. Julie returned to Russia with Home’s son and later wrote two books about her husband: D. D. Home: His Life and Mission (1888) and The Gift of D. D. Home (1890).

Home’s published works include two autobiographies, Incidents in My Life (1862) and Incidents in My Life, Second Series (1872), as well as Light and Shadows of Spiritualism (1877), an exposé of fraudulent mediumistic techniques.

Many explanations were offered for how Home might have produced his phenomena through trickery, but none were proved. Some of the most famous stage magicians in America and England, including Harry Houdini, John Nevil Maskelyne, and John Mulholland, claimed they could reproduce Home’s feats on stage. They never did. Houdini even promised he could levitate out of a window as Home had reportedly done at Lord Adare’s house, but the performance was cancelled when Houdini said his assistant was ill. He said he would reschedule the feat the next time he was in London, but he never did.

Daniel Dunglas Home remains one of the most mysterious physical mediums in Spiritualist history: admired, attacked, investigated, never conclusively exposed, and forever associated with the strange boundary between séance room, spectacle, faith, and the unexplained.