Levitation

Daniel Dunglas Home was, by the account of his contemporaries, the most impressive physical medium of the Victorian era, reporting levitations of himself and of objects, accordion music played without visible hands, and the handling of hot coals without apparent injury, performed in the homes of aristocrats, writers, and scientists across Britain, France, and Russia. His most famous reported feat, described by multiple witnesses at an 1868 sitting in London, had Home apparently float out of one third-floor window and back in through another.

Chemist William Crookes conducted a formal multi-year investigation of Home beginning in 1871, devising instruments, including a spring-balance apparatus, intended to measure any physical force Home exerted, and reported being unable to explain the results by ordinary means; Crookes's own scientific reputation and his growing closeness to some of his mediumship subjects later drew separate criticism, discussed further under Ectoplasm and Materialization. What sets Home apart in the history of physical mediumship is that, unlike Florence Cook, the Fox sisters, Eusapia Palladino, or Mina Crandon, no investigator, however skeptical, ever caught him in a specific act of trickery or produced physical evidence of a concealed mechanism, a fact both his supporters and his critics have had to reckon with ever since.

The absence of proven fraud is not the same as proof of a genuine phenomenon, and levitation claims carry a particular evidentiary burden: unlike a statistical psi effect, a levitation either happened as described, unsupported, in a room whose exits and furnishings were fully controlled, or it did not, and no surviving account of Home's sittings meets that standard of control by modern experimental design. Home performed under conditions he substantially influenced, choosing the room, the lighting, and often the timing, and refused formal tests proposed by some skeptics; several later historians and psychical researchers have suggested plausible mundane explanations for the window-to-window account specifically, including doubts about the precision of witnesses' memory of the room's layout, though no single explanation has been proven either.

No twentieth or twenty-first century levitation claim, whether from spiritualist mediumship, contemporary meditation-based "yogic flying" demonstrations, or stage psychokinesis performers, has been recorded under laboratory conditions with instruments capable of ruling out concealed support, and levitation remains, uniquely among the claims in this atlas, a case where the best-documented historical instance was never disproven and also never confirmed by a method that would satisfy a modern controlled test.