The séances of so-called physical mediums in the second half of the nineteenth and first thirty years of the twentieth centuries provide many scientifically well-studied cases in which dramatic effects were produced on demand repeatedly over many years. If a medium says he or she can levitate a table at your house and your time, or any house at any time, and, without knowing in advance which house or time, in the presence furthermore of knowledgeable observers determined to thwart any use of other than simply mental devices by the medium, and then does in fact cause such a table to levitate  and does it as advertised, repeatedly — then there is no need to employ statistics to confirm the claims that mediums can cause tables to levitate.

But such is the case. Lights on, cameras permitted and used (later in the century), observers’ hands on the medium whenever and wherever desired. Strip searches before the séance, including body cavities. Stenographers employed so the skeptical observers could report ad lib and without fear of conveniently faulty memory.

For instance:

The above information and screen shot are taken from Stephen E. Braude’s book The Goldleaf Lady and Other Parasychological Investigations. It contains many pages on this subject of the excellent quality of the evidence for levitating tables and the like. He also gives quite a lot of solid evidence in his lecture at the Kuhn Library Gallery of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, on February 3, 2011. Of special interest may be the photographs of table levitation as produced by D. D. Home, the era’s best-known and most-studied medium. Braude retired later in 2011 from the University of Maryland, where he was Professor in and Chair of the Philosophy Department.

The black screen shot from my Kindle edition of the Goldleaf Lady book gives us the verbatim report of an investigation of the also very well-known and much-studied Italian medium Eusapia Pallidino. She produced table levitation so easily and frequently that the investigators finally told her to stop it. (She did lots of other paranormal things as well.) The investigators conducted eleven separate sessions with her.

But the long career of D. D. Home provides the most persuasive case for the simple, hard science kind of proof people need for the reality of any claimed phenomenon’s existence. Braude’s book spends some time with the inevitable critics of Home, and all his material should be read, but likely will not be, by people who throw up the usual objections to such things. Braude says that critics who actually look at the evidence have concluded that Braude must have gotten his effects by mass hypnosis. That’s interesting because that degree of hypnotic talent would have to be a kind of paranormal ability in its own right. See Braude, The Limits of Influence for extensive similar supporting materials on Home, Pallidino and many others, but especially those two — because, he says, the best studies were done on them.

Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), a notable scientist of the last age of science before QM and Einstein, was among the most rigorous and persistent investigators of Home.