’I was sitting with Mr. Home and Lord Adare and a cousin of his.  During the sitting, Mr. Home went into a trance, and in that state was carried out of the window in the room next to where we were, and was brought in at our window.  The distance between the windows was about seven feet six inches, and there was not the slightest foothold between them, nor was there more than a twelve-inch projection to each window, which served as a ledge to put flowers on. We heard the window in the next room lifted up, and almost immediately after we saw Home floating in the air outside our window.  The moon was shining full into the room; my back was to the light, and I saw the shadow on the wall of the window sill, and Home’s feet about six inches above it.  He remained in this position for a few seconds, then raised the window and glided into the room feet foremost and sat down.

’Lord Adare then went into the next room to look at the window from which he had been carried.  It was raised about eighteen inches, and he expressed his wonder how Mr. Home had been taken through so narrow an aperture.  Home said, still entranced, “I will show you,” and then with his back to the window he leaned back and was shot out of the aperture, head first, with the body rigid, and then returned quite quietly.  The window is about seventy feet from the ground.’  The hypothesis of a mechanical arrangement of ropes or supports outside has been suggested, but does not cover the facts as described.

Mr. Podmore, who quotes this, offers the explanation that the witnesses were excited, and that Home ’thrust his head and shoulders out of the window.’  But, if he did, they could not see him do it, for he was in the next room.  A brick wall was between them and him.  Their first view of Home was ‘floating in the air outside our window.’  It is not very easy to hold that a belief to which the collective evidence is so large and universal, as the belief in levitation, was caused by a series of saints, sorcerers, and others thrusting their heads and, shoulders, out of windows where the observers could not see them.  Nor in Lord Crawford’s case is it easy to suppose that three educated men, if hallucinated, would all be hallucinated in the same way.

The argument of excited expectation and consequent hallucination does not apply to Mr. Hamilton Aide and M. Alphonse Karr, neither of whom was a man of science.  Both were extremely prejudiced against Home, and at Nice went to see, and, if possible, to expose him.  Home was a guest at a large villa in Nice, M. Karr and Mr. Aide were two of a party in a spacious brilliantly lighted salon, where Home received them.  A large heavy table, remote from their group, moved towards them.  M. Karr then got under a table which rose in air, and carefully examined the space beneath, while Mr. Aide observed it from above.  Neither of them could discover any explanation of the phenomenon, and they walked away together, disgusted, disappointed, and reviling Home.[7]