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The Mysterious Mr. Home: Crawford

In the matter of the levitations and elongations, however, it is not so easy to raise the cry of sheer fraud. Here the only rational explanation, short of supposing that Home availed himself if not of the aid of "spirits" at least of the aid of some unknown physical force, seems to be, as was said, the exercise of hypnotic power. The accounts given by Lord Dunraven, Lord Crawford, and Sir William Crookes show that he had ample scope for the employment of suggestion as a means of inducing those about him to imagine they had seen things which they actually had not seen. In this connection, it seems to me, considerable significance attaches to the following bit of evidence contributed by Lord Crawford with regard to the London levitation: "I saw the levitations in Victoria Street when Home floated out of the window. He first went into a trance and walked about uneasily; he then went into the hall. While he was away I heard a voice whisper in my ear 'He will go out of one window and in at another.' I was alarmed and shocked at the idea of so dangerous an experiment. I told the company what I had heard and we then waited for Home's return."

After it is stated that Lord Crawford, not long before, had fancied he beheld an apparition of a man seated in a chair, it is easy to imagine the attitude of credulous expectancy with which he, at all events, would "wait for Home's return" via the open window. And the others were doubtless in the same expectant frame of mind. "Expectancy" and "suggestibility" will, indeed, work marvels. I shall never forget how the truth of this was borne home to me some years ago. A friend of mine - now a physician in Maryland, but at that time a medical student in Toronto occasionally amused himself by giving tabletipping séances, in which he enacted the rôle of medium. There was no suspicion on his sitters' part that he was a "fraud." One evening he invoked the "spirit" of a little - The Mysterious Mr. Home child, who had been dead a couple of years, and proceeded to "spell out" some highly edifying messages. Suddenly the séance was interrupted by a shriek and a lady present, not a relative of the dead child, fell to the floor in a faint. When revived, she declared that while the messages were being delivered she had seen the head of a child appear through the top of the table.

With such an instance before us, it can hardly be deemed surprising that Home should be able to play on the imagination of sitters so sympathetic and receptive as Lords Dunraven and Crawford unquestionably were. To tell the truth, Home's whole career, with its scintillating, melodramatic, and uniformly successful phases is altogether inexplicable unless it be assumed that he possessed the hypnotist's qualities in a superlative degree. -- It may well be, however, that in the last analysis he not only deceived others but also deceived himself that his charlatanry was the work of a man constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between reality and fiction in so far as related to the performance of feats contributing to the success of his "mission."

In other words, that he was, like other historic personages whom we have already encountered, a victim of dissociation. There is no gainsaying the fact that he was of a distinctly nervous temperament; and it is equally certain that he chose a vocation, and placed himself in an environment, which would tend to make a dissociated state habitual with him. But this is bringing us to the consideration of a psychological problem which would itself require a volume for adequate discussion.

Enough to add that, when all is said, and viewed from whatever angle, Daniel Dunglas Home, was, and remains, a fascinating human riddle.