Flying downstairs

When I read ‘Flying downstairs’ [ FT355:76], I felt sure that I had read something similar before. I have now found the source. In the first part of his autobiography,

Over the Bridge, first published in 1955, Richard Church describes how he levitated and flew down the stairs. The first time it happened, he was a child in a convalescent home in Broadstairs.

“I exerted that will, visualising my hands and feet pressing downwards upon the centre of the earth. It was no surprise to me that I left the ground, and glided about the room (which was empty) some twelve or eighteen inches above the parquet floor… I soared higher, half-way to the ceil- ing… I floated down the staircase without touching either tread or baluster.”

He refers to this apparent ability to levitate a number of times in the book, and again in the sequel, The Golden Sovereign. He could still fly down the stairs when he was an adult, working as a civil servant in the Custom House before WWI. At one point he says that it must have been an illusion, but at another he mentions the fact that another person, the girl in Folkestone with whom he was in love, had observed that he could apparently grow taller at will, the explanation for this being that his feet were not actually touching the floor. Janet Doolaege France