A closer look
Long before Tinder swindlers, Victorian high society was getting rinsed by men who claimed they could speak to dead husbands. Daniel Dunglas Home was the ultimate 19th-century grifter, famous for allegedly levitating out of windows during seances. His masterpiece was convincing a wealthy widow, Jane Lyon, that her deceased husband's ghost desperately wanted her to adopt Home as her son and give him £60,000. It worked perfectly until Lyon realized the "ghost" was suspiciously greedy, resulting in a sensational 1868 London court case that publicly humiliated the entire upper-class spiritualist movement.
