The Paranormal, The Recycled, and The Demonic: A Dissenting View
 

D. A. Begelman

Over the years I’ve tried to familiarize myself with literature on paranormal phenomena, although I claim no professional expertise in evaluating the claims of its devotees. My remarks here should be taken as the expression of merely another point of view, and one I strongly suspect will clash dramatically with those of many others.

I suppose it would be tempting to classify me as a “skeptic,” although the description does not seem to be entirely apt. After all, if a skeptic is one who doubts the existence of something, I cannot in good conscience say I either doubt or deny the existence of paranormal phenomena. That smacks of “proving the null hypothesis,” a suspect gambit, to say the least. On the contrary, I only remain doubtful about the methods widely advertized as demonstrating the existence of this realm of knowledge.

I use the term “knowledge” advisedly. While attending lectures on the subject of the paranormal at the Masonic Temple in New Milford, Connecticut, I was reminded by presenting investigators that their efforts were directed chiefly toward accumulating knowledge of—in the memorable words of Cotton Mather—“Wonders of the Invisible World.” Yet this supposed “knowledge” of the otherworldly despite years of inquiry has been threadbare—correction—pathetic in character. This prompts me to observe that if such things as ghosts, demons, and poltergeists exist, wisdom dictates that pursuing them for anything like a facsimile of useful knowledge is simply a waste of time. Existing or not, they seem to have nothing important to teach us—nothing, that is, like a cure for cancer, war, poverty, or any other human frailty that our favorite Shakespearean hero described as “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

Mostly Ghostly

Ghosts, those supremely elusive creatures you more often than not miss entirely if you blink, seem to have an affinity for scaring children, haunting the precincts of foreboding homes like the one in Amityville, domiciles built over Indian burial grounds, or dingy sites of former distasteful events like murder, suicide, or other unsettling happenings. They also have been reported in the vicinity of basements (like the one in the coffee house on Bank Street in New Milford, Connecticut), abandoned hospitals, asylums, and cemeteries, and residences like those right out of a painting by Edward Hopper or a film by Alfred Hitchcock, particularly the house on the hill above the Bates Motel in Psycho. You’ll never find one of the filmy creatures parading in broad daylight at half-time in a football stadium, although I should imagine that if a spirit were committed to any version of indecent exposure, that would be the place to do its thing.

There is a method to the madness, however, and I suspect that the hankering for the darkened, marginal circumstance on the part of visitors from the beyond supplies a clue. Perhaps these locales tell us more about paranormal investigators than they do the objects of their research.

Let’s limit our subject to the one of current interest: the otherworldly, the spirit world, a.k.a. ghosts, apparitions, poltergeists, wraiths, demons or any like-minded entity from across the divide. The reason for the exclusionary emphasis is that the term “paranormal” has a conceptual sprawl that covers other categories of phenomena that unlike ghost-hunting hardly qualify as a back-door plug for religious belief. I speak here of such parapsychological capabilities as E.S.P., clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis, telepathy, and the like. Such aptitudes involve talents thought to be of an unnatural, or paranormal order. Yet if they could be documented as real, they might eventually get classified not as “paranormal,” but the normal abilities of quite abnormal, or exceptional people. In other words, if a talent like E.S.P., telekinesis or clairvoyance exists, that would be a surprising—and not altogether disagreeable—finding, not at any rate one that causes us to switch metaphysical gears dramatically, or shiver in our shoes while nervously awaiting welcoming signs of daylight, as in the case of ghosts. The latter challenge our foundational roots in ways discoveries about unusual human talents wouldn’t. There’s quite a difference between guessing remote choices in a Zener pack at Duke University at a better than chance rate, and learning that dead Aunt Agatha is haunting a cemetery. The former finding may surprise us, delight us, or leave us awestruck; the latter spooks us to the bone.

Paranormality without the Trimmings

While investigations of unique “paranormal” talents like psychic abilities have been occasionally suggestive, the field has not been distinguished by its success at replication, and the scientific community has for the most part lost interest in the subject because of this. The experimental program investigating E.S.P. at Duke University was disbanded after the death of J. B. Rhine. However, there are remaining outposts at the American university level, including the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, and the Veritas Laboratory at the University of Arizona.

The enchantment with psychic abilities, as in the title of a Bruce Willis franchise, “die hard.” Unlike the Hollywood blockbusters, however, our flirtation with psychic powers exceeds the record of dying hard one, two, three, and four times, as in the movies; it goes on forever, despite what studies indicate about its anemic showing under controlled conditions.

As for the supposedly remarkable abilities of so-called “psychic detectives,” their capacities are advertized as though they believe, like P. T. Barnum, that a sucker is born every minute. An example of the dubious art is that of an unidentified psychic who helped the police find Carol Hodge’s vehicle, a Honda Civic, in the waters of the Otonabee River. Spotty successes at psychic detective work notwithstanding, the field can’t even begin to qualify as a legitimate enterprise until the percentage of hits is balanced against the percentage of missed guesses on the part of its practitioners. The slippery move here is known as the “Filedrawer Effect,” or the tendency to only store successes in memory. Were I to generate random predictions about the location of any smoking gun clinching the answer to a mystery—while not trotting out how many times I have been wrong in my surmises—I too could cut a reputation as seer extraordinaire with the best of them.

Reincarnation

The University of Virginia, as the reader may know, was a center of yet another kind of paranormal enthusiasm, that of reincarnation. In the 1970s, the director of the Division, Dr. Ian Stevenson, amassed data from over 3,000 young children suggesting that they had memories of past lives. Leaving aside issues pertaining to his methodology involving alleged matches between present childhood memories and documented features of past existences, reincarnation turns out to be a stockpile of other kinds of surprises.

Some grounds for the belief in the doctrine seem to be more compelling than others. Getting the lowdown from some medium, guru, or spiritualist is at best second hand knowledge, and there are many cases of fraud practiced on the unsuspecting. All the same, it’s intriguing, is it not, how so many of the visionary elect to possess oodles of wisdom about the past and future without so much as a smidgeon of talent for predicting the stock market, or winning numbers at racetracks or gambling casinos? Were they successful at these ventures, they could ply their trade in palaces instead of run-down flats, modest storefronts, condos, or rathskelters!

Reincarnation, ostensibly proved by age regression in hypnosis, as practiced by such aficionados as Helen Wambach, is likewise a suspect method. The capacity of hypnotized subjects for tomfoolery cannot be underestimated, as recent research on the technique amply demonstrates. “Bridie Murphy,” a widely publicized “incarnation” of one Virginia Tighe, dredged up under a hypnosis conducted by Morey Bernstein, turned out to fit the description—name included—of a girl who lived in Virginia’s neighborhood when the latter was much younger. Until researchers actually document the capacity of the hypnotized state as an uncovering tool, confidence it what it unearths is bound to be shaky. Contrary to what local pitchmen assure us, it has a dismal record in curing such addictive patterns as smoking and weight control; to recruit it to reconstruct “past lives” has to be a stunning example of wishful—if not cockeyed—thinking.

Finally, reincarnationists, as in the case of Hester Dowden, are fond of uncovering Egyptian dynastic figures, star-crossed former lovers, and other historic notables in their versions of past lives. None have ever been uncovered to be a past hack writer whose output was inferior and miniscule, an intellectually challenged chimney sweep, a wombat mired in mud, or a wiggling bacterium in an idle pond. After all, as stellar a figure as Pythagoras in his doctrine of metempsychosis provided for reincarnation to embrace species up and down the phylogenetic scale. A similar provision exists in the Hindu faith.

If my so-called “memory” about a past life is presumptive evidence of reincarnation, what would enthusiasts say about my remembering a feeling or event that can be identified as that of another living person?  (Remember The Corsican Brothers of Alexandre Dumas?) Surely not that I am that person; only perhaps, and at best, that he or she is telepathically communicating to me an experience that is his or hers. I take this to illustrate the fact that the doctrine of reincarnation is a bad case of double standards. Let’s amplify this.

If I have a memory of being an ancient Egyptian pharaoh (or any other dead person), this supposedly suggests or proves reincarnation; but if I have a twitch, feeling, or memory that is yours—it’s not that I am you and you are me, but that you have telepathically communicated something to me through an E.S.P. channel or its rough equivalent. So it appears that reincarnation only pertains to those who are living and dead; it does not apply to contemporaries. But why not? If the doctrine makes sense in the case of persons living and dead, why shouldn’t it do so in the case of those alive at the same time—unless, of course, we fudge a conclusion by arguing a case for telepathic communication between living persons, rather than their being present incarnations of each other. Accordingly, when you are dead, I can have been you in another life; but when you are alive, I cannot be you, only a receiver of what you broadcast to me, as it were, telepathically.

To summarize: if it makes sense to say I might be someone in a past life, it certainly makes sense to say I am someone else in this life, because the same kind of subjective data should mediate similar doctrinal conclusions. I hear you saying, “But there are no instances of my having your memories, feelings, or experiences.” Quite right; but this only because you categorize contenders differently, as cases of E.S.P. or telepathy, or some such thing. Two living persons can thus only get parsed as separate senders and receivers, not a unitary self with separate incarnations.

But now imagine the following reversal of paranormal fortune. Suppose it turns out that I was not the dead pharaoh in a former life, but only a receiver of what the deceased Egyptian has been broadcasting to me by means of “telepathic energy waves” projected into the future, while a memory I have of your experience instantiates that I am you. There is nothing in a doctrine of reincarnation to logically preclude such a possibility, nor the possibility that we are all of us each other—with or without receiving signals from our contemporaries. This qualifies for being a reductio ad absurdum, or taking the entailments of a belief system or proposition to such an outlandish length, the doctrine in question can be summarily dismissed. I take this to mean that the very notion of reincarnation has implications that render it incoherent, double-dealing, or both.

Two Is One versus One Is Two

Ironically, the same prejudicial slant seems to characterize the decision of the American Psychiatric Association to reclassify so-called multiple personality disorder as “Dissociative Identity Disorder.” The reason given? So that diagnosticians are dissuaded from assuming the diagnosis implies the existence of actual separate persons housed in one body. But were I to allow for the empirical—and therefore logical—possibility of any such peculiar coalescence, wouldn’t DID be a promising contender for the mantle? Is what looks like a fact-based decision by psychiatry nothing more than a way of stacking a deck in favor of a parochial viewpoint on individuation? Enough of reincarnation and multiplicity. On to the ghostly beyond.

Spiritualism in the Open Market

Ghost-hunting, like any instance of venture capitalism, is today buzzing with competitive factions and hard-luck stories. Those paranormal investigators committed to sophisticated versions of scientific methodology and rational procedure are currently grousing over the way such T. V. fare as “Ghost Hunters” has sullied their enterprise. Loyd Auerbach remembers how business was thriving in 2006, when he investigated 14 ghostly appearances during the Halloween season alone, whereas his opportunities dropped to five the following full year, and sorrowfully deteriorated to a paltry one in 2009 and 2010. He faults the influence of T. V. shows like “Ghost Hunters,” and its slovenly methodology, for the downturn.

Dr. Andrew Nichols, an expert on poltergeists, is likewise mournful over video presentations. He deems them to be scientifically suspect because their investigations take place at night, rely on the use of magnometers that fail to replicate findings, and parlay occasional sounds, cold spots, or “orbs” into ghosts at every conceivable turn. Dr. Barry Taff, on a roll in the past with 20 to 30 ghostly gigs a year, now complains how “depressing” the market is due to the polluting influence of video fare dished out to a public that is becoming increasingly jaded on the dog-and-pony shows.

Factual or Fraudulent?

While fraudulent practitioners have dotted the paranormal landscape for decades, if not centuries, this may not always be the case. But its ever present possibility raises questions about the likelihood of monkey business abounding more often than honesty can tolerate. As a case in point, Spiritualism in this country got its jump start in séances conducted by the Fox sisters, Maggie and Kate, in 1848. Their cause was promoted by Horace Greeley, who it turns out was less than prescient at the time of his campaign on behalf of the sisters in not putting folly behind him, and going West in the manner he exhorted the rest of the country to do. In 1888, Maggie confessed that ghostly rappings, supposedly evidence of communicating with spirits was a hoax, and went on to demonstrate how she and her sister manufactured the sounds. Embarrasingly, cracking toe joints were implicated in the confessions.

Elementary, My Dear Sucker

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a  pushover for the paranormal. When Harry Houdini, the magician, assured him that all his demonstrations were only stage tricks, the Brit, in his essay, “The Riddle of Houdini,” still insisted that Harry managed escapes from trussed up and shackled conditions through mediumship, courtesy of dematerialization followed by rematerialization!

When in 1917 two girls in the village of Cottingly, Yorkshire, photographed four diminutive “fairies” with wings in a garden, Doyle publicized the event in his book, “The Coming of the Fairies.” The aftermath of the escapade was hundreds of reports sent to Doyle from witnesses, all of whom testified to similar encounters with garden goblins. Unfortunately for Doyle, a subsequent journalist, Fred Gittings, located a children’s book entitled, “Princess Mary’s Gift Book,” in which illustrations of precisely the same fairies were reproduced. Apparently, the girls had cut out the illustrations, scribbled improvised wings they attached to the figures, and photographed them mounted in their enchanted garden. The project might earn a middling grade for a seventh grade student project; it certainly earns a failing one for paranormality. Studies confirming the hoax were also authored by Geoffrey Crawley and James Randi. Surveying the field, it doesn’t take much to document a thriving industry of fraud in the movement called “Spiritualism.”

D. D. Home, a Case Apart

The case is rather different for the more impressive demonstrations of Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced “Hume”). His séances, it is reported, took place in broad daylight, and did not seem to be motivated by financial gain, his having turned down offers of fees in every case. Well, not exactly. Responses to him, embraced by European royalty and the well-placed and well-heeled in America and Europe, were so enthusiastic, he was never at a loss for generously donated upkeep except for a time between marriages. He met his unfortunate end in 1886, due to tuberculosis. His first wife, Alexandrina, was a wealthy heiress who died in 1862. He married another wealthy Russian, Julie de Gloumeline in 1871, so that Home’s refusal to receive fees might have served him well in dispelling rumors about being mercenary without immersing him in penury. 

Home’s demonstrations were not only numerous—he could perform several in a single day at different residences—they seem to have defied attempts to expose him as a charlatan. His fans were numberless among the intellectually and socially elect, including Alexandre Dumas, Napoleon III, Alexander II of Russia, Princess Eugénie, W. M. Thackeray, author of “Vanity Fair,” Sir William Crookes, discoverer of the element Thallium, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, Maximillan II of Bavaria, G. K. Chesterton, the Marquis de Boissy, the former mistress of Lord Byron, Robert Owen, the wife of Honoré Balzac, Count Alexis Tolstoy, John Ruskin, William Cullen Bryant, Giaochino Rossini, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The last named dignitary could count the ways she loved her husband, Robert Browning, until it came to D. D. Home. The two were at each other’s throats over the credibility of the illustrious séance master. Robert, who had attended a séance, was not only dismissive about Home’s fancied powers, he threatened to toss him down the stairs if the medium ever darkened his doorstep again. The poet satirized Home in a work entitled, “Mr. Sludge, the Medium,” and wound up by unpoetically calling him a “dung ball.”

Charles Dickens was likewise dismissive about Home, although he never met him, while Nathaniel Hawthorne’s response was a cut apart from other dignitaries, and one of boredom. He felt that while Home was the real thing, “These marvels…throw old ghost-stories quite into the shade; they are absolutely proved to be sober facts…yet I cannot force my mind to interest itself in them.”

What were Home’s talents? The list is impressive on any account. At his séances, rappings from the departed fill all parts of a room, accordians played of their own accord, handkerchiefs floated in mid-air, disembodied and sometimes luminous hands grasped the assembled customers, tables tilted, furniture moved around and off the floor, heavenly music sometimes filled the air, and the illustrious host of these goings-on levitated quite literally all over the place—meaning up and down, rising to the ceiling, or horizontally back and forth through third floor windows. Were these amazing feats not enough, Home was reported to have cured a deaf boy of his affliction by his own version of faith-healing.

Home was never exposed as a fraud. Harry Houdini, along with several other stage magicians, maintained they could duplicate what they considered to be Home’s parlor tricks, but never did so.

Observers at Home’s séances were quite dumbfounded at his ability for being in contact with the departed. There was a successful lawsuit against him by a woman who accused him of bilking money from her, and a Vatican-inspired campaign against him as a “sorcerer” resulted in his being unceremoniously kicked out of Rome, a row that became an international incident. There is every reason to believe that in both scandals Home was the victimized one. The woman who gave him money did so voluntarily, and at her own insistence, and Home, having conveniently converted to Catholicism on his trip to Rome to study sculpture, performed no séances there, nor did he engage in rounding up potential customers for future spiritualist gatherings.

The Vatican, it would appear, mobilized its campaign against Home only because of his reputation. The expulsion might have been triggered by  the Church’s conviction that it needed no competition from an outlier, preferring to corner the market on dealing with spirits. On most occasions this was accomplished by relying on the Rituale Romanum to  exorcize them as Satanic ploys or possessions. Cardinal Manning, an English cleric, condemned Home’s efforts as “revivals of black magic.”

The charge of “sorcery” for churchmen always involved the notion of an adept in league with the Devil, as in the case of witchcraft. But the allegation is a double-edged sword; if Home was regarded as trafficking in sorcery, the implication is that the spirits he was capable of summoning were real, not a figment of a disordered imagination. Were they? There is no way of knowing at this point in time, although a case for skepticism could be strengthened if stage magicians could duplicate Home’s feats, as Houdini averred.

Mid-Century Mind Sets

Home died in 1886, and at period in history when religious belief was challenged—as it is today—by a sensibility disparagingly characterized as “scientific materialism,” “secularism,” “atheism’ or “reductionism.” The supposed conflict between these and religion was sparked by the writings of Charles Darwin shortly after mid-century, the time-frame in which Home appeared on the scene. The conflict was to continue to rage in fits and starts until the present day, and the forms it takes may on occasion be surprising. Thomas Nagel, a contemporary philosopher, in his “Mind and Cosmos” has conjectured that Darwin’s evolutionary theory is “almost certainly wrong,” and that the universe is pulsating with purpose, just as Aristotle surmised. But Professor Nagel is a professed Atheist, proving, I imagine, that the position one can take on issues that gripe fundamentalists across the commonwealth are as numerous as chess openings, or, more likely, middle game variations.

Against this background, it is not implausible to suppose that Home’s importance to a constituency suffused with a religious ideology was a significant one. Hence, what his demonstrations implied for many was a very real component in the groundswell of interest in Spiritualism.

What did his séances actually intimate about the afterlife? Except in those cases in which he purported to be in contact with departed souls, not much. In line with the distinction between the paranormal and the ghostly, his demonstrations only attested at best to the possession of talents in the former category, not to the existence of an otherworldly plane of spirits. What is the reason these two categories are so often confused? The answer lies in what I propose to call the funneling effect, a factor hardly unique to the séances of D. D. Home.

Into The Funnel Go We

Funneling is the tendency for an observer to classify a phenomenon as belonging to the same conceptual category as another because it occurs in a similar atmospheric context. Funneling is the occupational hazard of ghost-hunting and spiritualistic practices like séances—from their very inception. As an example of the trend, take the case of so-called “orbs.” These mysterious circles of light are by now a staple of ghost hunters, who reliably capture them on film. Like cold spots and thermal changes registered in magnetometer readings, “orbs” are somehow parlayed into evidence of a spirit world because this is the investigative context of their discovery. Accordingly, ghost hunters do not see “spirits” in a flatfooted way; they see visual somethings they invariably interpret as such. So behind every so-called “sighting” lurks an argument—in the rhetorical sense of the term. “Discovery” is already packaged with expectations of meaning going far beyond the essential data: circles of light registered photographically. Moreover, orbs and other “ectoplasmic” manifestations are usually not captured in a controlled manner by different cameras. Like the testimony of separate persons proving that an unusual visual experience is not an individual hallucination, double and triple separate exposures by separate cameras would appear to be the most elementary way of guaranteeing what is caught on film is not an artifact of something unique to a single recording mechanism.

Funneling obscures the import of most paranormal exercizes, including Home’s. Ostensible levitations, luminous hazes and vapors, moving furniture, rappings, accordion playings, handkerchiefs dancing in the air, and sundry other effects attributed to departed spirits could as well have been due to a proficiency in telekinesis, had fraud not been involved in his demonstrations. But telekinesis, faring worse than poorly in more recent controlled studies, may be a paranormal facility; it is hardly evidence for the realm of the spirit world—even if true. That such effects were funneled into something saturated with otherworldly implications is precisely the upshot of the contextually embedded meanings of Home’s—and everybody else’s—séances.  

The real hauntings in paranormal practices are those of residual meanings, not elusive visitors from the beyond. This in no way negates the possible—but hardly demonstrated—significance of experiences that do have a prima facie suggestion of otherworldly influence. In Home’s case, these were apparent “messages” conveyed in code by rappings, disembodied and sometimes luminous hands of identifiable “departed,” and ostensibly ghostly voices that had some semblance of being communications. However, even here the picture becomes complicated—for several important reasons.

History as Spoiler

First, Home’s demonstrations took place in a mid-nineteenth century time-frame. At the present time, the anti-Darwinian onslaught in this country has taken the form of the doctrine of Intelligent Design, an only slightly more sophisticated rendition of one called “Creation Science.” Both formulations seek to outfit a fundamentalist interpretation of scripture with a scientific mantle. Belief in a divine creator, they allege, is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the incapacity of Darwinian evolution to explain such “irreducibly complex” structures as the eye, the bacterium flagellum, and the blood cascade. It is not that far-fetched to suppose that spiritualism also reinforces what evolution and materialism are construed as attacking: the belief in the other world, including its chief player, God. So during the nineteenth century the battleground was set for underscoring an eternal conflict between constituencies of belief—although seeds of the conflict had been sown centuries before in the writings of spokespersons like Democritus and Lucretius. Home’s séances accordingly meant much more than simply the display of amazing powers; they went to the heart of fundamental concerns about faith itself. 

The level of modern sophistication concerning mediumship by now well understood by stage magicians—including Chriss Angel and David Blain, who currently “levitate” on sidewalks in broad daylight to the astonishment and occasionally horrified reactions of pedestrians—is a quite different mind-frame from the attendees at Home’s séances. That most of the latter testified to the reality of what they experienced comes as no surprise. Second, the likelihood of word-of-mouth distortion of Home’s feats, along with other reported incongruities dot the historical landscape.

Attempting to reconstruct many of the events of two centuries ago is a daunting task, precisely of distortions that creep into orally transmitted reports. As surprising a witness to this tendency as Julie de Gloumeline in her 1888 memoir about her husband, D. D. Home: His Life and Mission, where she says it all: “This imaginary bequest was instantly seized on and magnified by rumor, while hundreds of tongues set hundreds of stories in circulation as to the circumstances under which it had been made. As the fiction passed from lip to lip, the fortune grew, till Home…almost without resources in Paris, presented himself to the imagination of the French public as the heir of some unknown benefactor who had left him millions…This was only one of the numerous fortunes with which rumor persisted in liberally endowed Home” (p. 105). It would be unwisely perfunctory to assume that similar distortions did not creep into reports of his feats of mediumship.   

For starters, there are the glaring inconsistencies even when it comes to reports of Home’s personal characteristics. A huge constituency characterized him as “modest, simple, and unspoiled,” while another, including his devoted fan, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, considered him to be “vulgar,” while others were struck by his “arrogance” and “duplicity.” There is therefore little consensus when it comes to as trivial a consideration as his personal conduct.

Then there are other striking incongruities. Home maintained strongly that he could never forecast his mediumship or channeling surprises, and was on occasion unable to reproduce them because of this. Such unpredictability strikes a suspicious note: the phenomena always occurred in a séance room at a host’s home, rarely outside such a context. Should we say then that his demonstrations were predictably unpredictable (or unpredictably predictable), as if he were psyching out possibilities or contraindications for putting one over on his customers when he eyeballed the accommodations arranged by his hosts for séances? Does it also not seem odd that a medium who can levitate himself (sometimes reportedly to the ceiling), or heavy furniture and whose control could, like one Shakespearean character’s boast, “summon spirits from the vasty deep,” nonetheless be powerless to calm a turbulent sea that made him deathly ill crossing the Baltic?

Second, the index of suspicion is increased when we consider some of the mysterious constraints Home placed on his séances. He disallowed dogs to be present, as well attendees numbering more than eight. He refused to permit a host to sit on a silk cushion, and called for a smoke-free environment. (This last requirement could conceivably derive from his compromised pulmonary condition, although it could as easily have been a ploy to prevent parlor tricks from being exposed for what they were against a haze of smoke.) It is reported that someone discovered a bottle of oil of phosphorous among Home’s belongings. If true, it tends to cast an aura of fraudulence over demonstrations producing such effects as wandering luminous hands. 

Home, on the occasion of his most impressive levitation at Ashley House in London in and out of upstairs windows, demanded that the three attendees present not leave their seats, a curious requirement if a ruse were not being perpetrated on witnesses. (As it turns out, one commentator, Trevor H. Hall, mused, “It is hard to understand why the [three] witnesses, believing that they had been present at a miracle, were quite incapable of giving a coherent account of what occurred.”)

Third, Home’s spiritualistic feats had a rather stereotyped character. Rappings from the beyond, an invariant feature of his demonstrations, were a staple in séances which had already proved fraudulent, like those of the Fox sisters. So were disembodied and luminous hands, furniture liftings and tiltings, levitations, accordions playing by themselves, and other accomplishments common to the stock and trade of nineteenth century mediumship. Agnes Guppy-Volckman also levitated, and had her séance room filled with music, apparently coming from nowhere. But she innovated in other ways, by having flowers and fruits tumble onto the séance table, along with butterflies which seemingly fell from the ceiling. A catalogue of like-minded surprises is writ large during the century in question, although variations on tired themes would seem to indicate a suspiciously narrow band of invention.

Here, as the lovable old boozer intoned, ends my catechism.