Adare, Lord

Adare, Lord (1841–1926)

Lord Adare, son of the Earl of Dunraven, was a close friend of Daniel Dunglas Home. Adare met the medium in 1867 at a hydropathic establishment run by a Dr. Gully. Hydropathy is the treatment of disease by water. As a formal system it came into vogue about 1829 and was popular both in Europe and America. The men, both “taking the water cure,” became firm friends and, by 1869, shared an apartment in London. Because of his close contact with the medium, Adare was in a position to ascertain that there was no trickery involved in Home’s performances. Home, as reported elsewhere in this volume, was possibly the world’s greatest physical medium. At his séances the sitters experienced strong winds, phantom hands, music produced without instruments, levitation, materializations, and more. Most, if not all of these, if produced theatrically, would have required considerable apparatus. Adare testified that this was not the case.

Adare’s father, the Earl of Dunraven, was a devout Roman Catholic but also a believer in Home and in spirit communication. In 1869, at his father’s urging, Lord Adare wrote and published a book, Experiences in Spiritualism with D. D. Home, which was a detailed and most remarkable record of the medium’s many phenomena. The book was first privately printed because of the Earl’s religious affiliation, but in 1925, after his father’s death, Adare agreed to its reprinting by the Society for Psychical Research. Much of the book is in the form of letters that Adare wrote to his father, reporting in detail on the séances he had attended. In his preface to the book, Lord Adare wrote:

“We have not, on a single occasion, during the whole series of séances, seen any indication of contrivance on the part of the medium for producing or facilitating the manifestations which have taken place.”

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