Levitation By Mediums
Many mediums have claimed to have levitated during séances, especially in the 19th century in Britain and America. Many have been shown to be frauds, using wires and stage magic tricks.
Daniel Dunglas Home, the most prolific and well documented levitator of himself and other objects, was said to repeatedly defy gravity over a career of forty years. He was reputedly observed levitating out of a building through a third story window and back into the building via a different window. He could also cause tables and chairs to rise feet into the air, and was never demonstrated to be a fraud by hundreds of purportedly sceptical witnesses, except one. He remained in full consciousness throughout these feats, and attributed them to the action of some kind of magical energy. Home's fame grew, fuelled by his feats of levitation. Physicist William Crookes claimed to have observed more than 50 occasions in which Home levitated, many of these at least five to seven feet above the floor, "in good light." More common were feats recorded by Frank Podmore: "We all saw him rise from the ground slowly to a height of about six inches, remain there for about ten seconds, and then slowly descend." One of Home's levitations occurred in 1868. In front of three witnesses (Adare, Captain Wynne, and Lord Lindsay) Home was said to have levitated out of the third story window of one room, and in at the window of the adjoining room. "It was so dark I could not see clearly how he was supported" .
Elliott Coues had claimed to have witnessed levitation of objects and developed a theory to try and explain the phenomenon. His "telekinetic theory of levitation" claimed that luminiferous ether or a similar energy causes the moving of tables and other objects under given conditions, and that the motions which are set up in the ether are in some way connected with mental activities, which enable the mind to control the movement of objects through the hands and the spheres flowing forth through them.
Gambier Bolton reported a levitation that he had witnessed during a seance with the medium Cecil Husk in his book Psychic Force (1904). Bolton wrote:
| “ | At one of our experimental meetings, one of the observers (a man weighing quite 12 stones) was suddenly raised from the floor, with the chair in which he was sitting; and releasing the hands of those who were holding his hands, he was levitated in his chair, greatly to his surprise, until his feet were just above the heads of the other experimenters present. He remained stationary in the air for a few seconds and then slowly descended to the floor again. Fourteen observers were present. | ” |
Another early psychical researcher and engineer W. J. Crawford (1881–1920) developed the "Cantilever Theory of Levitation" due to his experiments with the medium Kathleen Goligher. His theory was that levitation of tables and objects by mediums occurred due to "psychic rods" of ectoplasm which comes out of the body of the medium to operate as an invisible cantilever. Crawford later after witnessing a number of seances claimed to of obtained flashlight photographs of the substance, he later described the substance as "plasma". He claimed the substance is not visible to the naked eye but can be felt by the body. William Fletcher Barrett had also claimed to of witnessed the levitation of a table by Goligher, he was also supportive of Crawford's theory as he believed it was evidence for "an unseen intelligence behind these manifestations".
Dr. Edmund Fournier d'Albe later investigated the medium Kathleen Goligher at many sittings and arrived at the opposite conclusions to Crawford, according to D'Albe no paranormal phenomena such as levitation had occurred with Goligher and stated he had found evidence of fraud. D'Albe had claimed that the substance in the photographs of Crawford was ordinary muslin. Another psychical researcher Hereward Carrington in his book Story of Psychic Science (1930) wrote that the photographs taken by Crawford look "dubious in appearance" and that "with rare exceptions, no other investigators had an opportunity to check-up his results, since outsiders were rarely admitted to the sittings" however Carrington also stated that some type of genuine phenomena may have been observed by Crawford. A later report written by the Society for Psychical Research in 1939 concluded that the photographs obtained by Crawford were of pieces of muslin and had supported the conclusions of D'Albe.
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