Free Ghosts & Gallows by Paul Adams

Richmond (1840-1923), who arrived in 1873 and spent several years in the country.
    However, the single most important influence in England was the mediumship of Daniel Dunglas Home (1833-1886) whose phenomena galvanised the entire spiritualistic scene in this country and his importance in the history of mediumship cannot be overstated. The New York scholar and theologian Professor George Bush was the first to investigate him, after which Home travelled to England, arriving in April 1855. Many Victorian Spiritualists were converted through experiencing his phenomena first hand and he impressed a number of notable persons of the day as to the genuineness of his abilities. These latter men included the Victorian scientist Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), noted for his work with optics and the inventor of the kaleidoscope, Vanity Fair novelist and journalist William Thackeray (1811-1863) and Lord Edward Robert Lytton (1831-1891), later Viceroy and Governor of India. The most famous aspect of Home’s mediumship was levitation but he also produced materialisations and the telekinetic movement of objects. His most famous feat of defying gravity was in December 1868 at Ashley House in London, where he is said to have levitated himself out of one first-floor room and entered another by floating in through the windows.
    Nearly a century after the psychic feats of Home, the unlikely scenario that the Victorian world of Spiritualism had in fact solved the mystery of Jack the Ripper and that his arrest and imprisonment had been brought about by paranormal means surprisingly refused to go away. In 1970, journalist Fred Archer, former Editor of the Spiritualist newspaper Psychic News , published a book entitled Ghost Detectives in which he confidently supported the posthumous testament of Robert James Lees nearly forty years before: that the Whitechapel murders, the ‘crime mystery of a century’, had been solved by Lees, the ‘human bloodhound’ who had tracked the sadistic killer. Archer knew members of the Lees family well and they were able to relate some of the ‘more sensational aspects of their father’s career’, events the medium himself had apparently been reluctant to discuss during his lifetime. Despite this close relationship with the source, it was the journalist’s belief, as a convinced Spiritualist, that gave the accounts of Robert Lees and Jack the Ripper such credibility. Was it possible then that Archer was right, that Robert Lees did know the identity of the Whitechapel killer, that he was caught and the truth behind his apprehension was and remains a conspiracy of silence?
    Robert Lees, born at Hinckley on the outskirts of Leicester on 12 August 1849, was in his late thirties during the ‘autumn of terror’. A former journalist on the Manchester Guardian , Lees had moved to London with his wife Sarah ten years before and was working on the staff of Tit-Bits magazine, a somewhat sensationalist weekly founded by Sir George Newnes in 1881. As with many of the mediums that were to flourish in the new era of Modern Spiritualism, Lees’ psychic powers were said to have manifested at an early age. His daughter Eva, one of fifteen children of whom three died in infancy, later claimed that her father was a deep trance medium by the age of twelve and while still a teenager had already given the grieving Queen Victoria a series of séances at Buckingham Palace, channelling for her the spirit of her beloved Prince Albert.
    According to Fred Archer, Lees’ involvement with the Ripper crimes took place early in September 1888. Alone in his study the medium was ‘seized by a clairvoyant vision’ which gave him a supernatural insight on a deadly tableau being played out somewhere close by in the Victorian capital. Lees saw remotely a man leading a heavily drunken woman down a dark street, the only illumination being the glare from a nearby gin palace window by which the medium noted the man’s dark tweed suit and the