Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

by Daniel Stashower

  As a medical man with a predisposition toward the paranormal, Conan Doyle was naturally intrigued by Mesmer’s theories. For a time, mesmerists became a feature of his fiction. In a story called “John Barrington Cowles,” published in 1884, a character called “Dr. Messinger” sounded a cautionary note: “A strong will can, simply by virtue of its strength, take possession of a weaker one, even at a distance, and can regulate the impulses and the actions of the owner of it. If there was one man in the world who had a very much more highly developed will than any of the rest of the human family, there is no reason why he should not be able to rule over them all, and to reduce his fellow-creatures to the condition of automatons.” Needless to say, by the end of the tale such a creature did emerge, but in a characteristic Conan Doyle touch, the superior will was found in a woman rather than a man.

  It is hardly surprising, then, that Conan Doyle should have wanted to see the “eminent and renowned” Professor de Meyer. If he hoped for a sober discussion of mesmerism and its surgical applications, he was to be disappointed. As outlined in the Portsmouth Evening News, the demonstration unfolded more along the lines of a vaudeville act. Ten young men had been selected and hypnotized beforehand—“in order to save time”—as the professor had found that only one of every four people was susceptible to mesmerism on the first attempt. As these volunteers were brought out from the wings, Conan Doyle stepped forward to join them, “having volunteered to swell the number of would-be subjects.” Professor de Meyer put his subjects through several demonstrations of his “animal magnetism.” Some of the young volunteers, when asked to open their mouths, found they could not close them again. Others fell to their knees and could not rise, and another pair of volunteers were compelled to act out an “amusing scene” as a dentist and patient.

  “An attempt to magnetise Dr. Doyle in a similar manner failed,” the newspaper reported, “the Professor remarking, after making the attempt, that the process would take too long.” One can only speculate as to whether a longer program might have found Conan Doyle peeling off his clothes or quacking like a duck. He had approached the evening in the spirit of scientific inquiry. What he did not know was that it had become common practice to dress up routine entertainments as scientific lectures. In the eighteenth century, rudimentary displays of electricity and magnetism were passed off as “Philosophical Experiments” so as to attract an upper-class audience. Even Edgar Allan Poe had been baffled by the celebrated Kempelen Chess Player, said to be a miracle of the clockmaker’s art, but actually controlled by a concealed human player. In Conan Doyle’s day, hypnotism and flashy chemical stunts took the place of automatons and electrical tricks.

  One cannot say for certain if Professor de Meyer’s subjects were preselected confederates, as is often the case in displays of this sort. If he had time to locate and hypnotize a sufficient number of suggestible volunteers, the demonstration could well have been genuine. What is notable is that Conan Doyle himself did not submit to the hypnotist’s influence, and apparently did not feel constrained to “play along,” as many people in his situation would have done. In years to come Conan Doyle would develop a reputation for intense credulity. At this stage, at least, he was not so easily led.

  From his researches, Conan Doyle knew that people in the thrall of mesmerism occasionally produced random, disjointed snatches of conversation, believed by some observers to signify contact with the souls of the dead. For this reason, Conan Doyle’s early fascination with mesmerism may well have shaped his budding interest in spiritualism. In later life, however, when he had occasion to trace his early influences, Conan Doyle had little to say about Mesmer. Instead, he focused his attention on what he called “The Hydesville Episode,” the story of Margaretta and Katherine Fox, the weird sisters of the modern spiritualist movement.

  In 1848, eleven years before Conan Doyle’s birth, the Fox sisters lived with their parents in a two-room farmhouse in the town of Hydesville, in upstate New York. One night, strange and inexplicable noises roused the family from their beds. The sounds—described as “a shower of bumps and raps”—persisted over several nights, always in the vicinity of Maggie, age fourteen, and Katie, age eleven. Mrs. Fox, the girls’ mother, discovered that some sort of intelligence lay behind the disturbance. If she snapped her fingers once or twice, she received the same number of raps in reply. The unseen force even responded to simple questions—with one rap for a “no” answer and two for “yes.” On this evidence, Mrs. Fox attributed the phenomenon to spirit agencies.

  By 1850, the Fox sisters and their mother were giving public demonstrations of their abilities. Soon they came to the attention of Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who arranged to have them brought to New York City. In an open letter published in his newspaper, Greeley attested to the honesty of the girls and the wholly convincing nature of their spirit manifestations.

  By this time, the notoriety of the Fox sisters had inspired dozens of imitators. Most prominent of these were Ira and William Davenport, a pair of brothers from Buffalo, who took the Fox sisters’ simple effects and made them suitable for the stage. Their act began with an enormous wooden cabinet set on a raised platform at center stage. Inside was a long wooden bench. The brothers, tied hand and foot, were placed inside the cabinet, facing each other. Tambourines, trumpets, and other noisemakers were placed on the floor. Large doors at the front swung shut as the stage lights were extinguished. Instantly the air filled with the sound of jangling tambourines, strumming guitars, and other ghostly music. Ethereal hands appeared through openings in the cabinet and musical instruments were seen to float through space. At regular intervals during the demonstration, assistants threw open the doors. Inside, the brothers remained securely fastened, heads bowed, eyes closed in concentration. When the doors swung shut, the mysterious happenings resumed. Audiences were quick to credit the brothers with supernatural powers, an impression the Davenports did nothing to dispel. Not everyone was fooled. Occasionally a spectator would strike a match in the darkened theater. The brothers, their hands free, could plainly be seen ringing bells and waving instruments in the air. Still the crowds flocked to see them. One audience member, a thirteen-year-old named Ehrich Weiss, needed no match to illuminate their secrets. He realized at once that the brothers had discovered a means of slipping in and out of their bonds. Years later, as Harry Houdini, he would put the knowledge to good use.

  Some forty years after the first raps were heard in Hydesville, Maggie Fox would confess that the entire affair had been a childish hoax. She and her sister initiated the prank with an apple tied to a string, she admitted, and later refined their noise-making ability by snapping their toes against hard surfaces. “We were led on unintentionally by my good mother,” she explained. “She used to say when we were sitting in a dark circle at home: ‘Is this a disembodied spirit that has taken possession of my dear children?’ And then we would ‘rap’ just for the fun of the thing, you know, and mother would declare that it was the spirits that were speaking.”

  This confession, which Maggie Fox later withdrew, had no effect whatever on the spiritualist movement, which had long since passed beyond the influence of the Fox sisters. At the time of Conan Doyle’s birth in 1859, more than ten million Americans admitted to being spiritualists. Hundreds of spiritualist churches had sprung up across the country, and more than twenty-five thousand self-professed mediums worked their trade in darkened séance rooms. Here, the floating trumpets and ghostly music of the Davenport show were duplicated on a smaller scale, and chalk messages—often written in a wavering, spectral hand—appeared on blank slates. Mediums claimed that these messages were written by spirit visitors. If the spirits seemed unresponsive, however, other avenues were available. Specially gaffed chalk slates—featuring a hidden flap that popped open to reveal a message—could be had from mail-order novelty houses.

  As the craze spread through Europe and Asia, it found an especially fertile breeding ground in Britain. By 1869, London ha
d no fewer than four monthly spiritualist journals, all dedicated to “the progress of the science and ethics of spiritualism.” By this time Britain had produced a number of mediums to rival the Fox sisters, the most prominent of whom, Daniel Dunglas Home, won many converts. Home, who Conan Doyle was to describe as a “truly great man,” was said to have the ability to float in the air, travel vast distances in the blink of an eye, and raise heavy objects without touching them. This last talent sparked a note of wonder in the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, an avowed believer in Home’s powers. Writing to her sister on the occasion of Home’s marriage, Mrs. Browning remarked, “Think of the conjugal furniture floating about the room at night, Henrietta.”

  Against this background, Conan Doyle’s early flirtation with spiritualism cannot seem entirely surprising. As early as 1881, when he was only twenty-one years old, Conan Doyle attended a lecture in Birmingham entitled “Does Death End All?” He described his attitude as that of a “respectful materialist”; he felt willing to listen, but inclined toward disbelief. “I had at that time the usual contempt which the young educated man feels towards the whole subject which has been covered by the clumsy name of spiritualism,” he later wrote. “I had read of mediums being convicted of fraud, I had heard of phenomena which were opposed to every known scientific law, and I had deplored the simplicity and credulity which could deceive good, earnest people into believing that such bogus happenings were signs of intelligence outside our own existence.”

  He could not fail to be impressed, however, by the number of prominent scientists who admitted their belief publicly. Earlier, the views of Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s staunchest supporter, helped to shape Conan Doyle’s agnosticism. Now, the writings of Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s fellow theorist of natural selection, suggested that science and spiritualism could be reconciled. Wallace, author of the groundbreaking On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species, also produced a book called Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, in which he suggested that natural selection explained only the physical aspect of human development, while the “spiritual essence … can only find an explanation in the unseen universe of Spirit.” Conan Doyle was further impressed that William Crookes, inventor of the radiometer and the early “Crookes” evacuated tube, had personally tested and endorsed both Daniel Dunglas Home and Katie Fox, along with such up-and-coming mediums as Florrie Cook and Anna Eva Fay.

  Wallace and Crookes were the exceptions among men of science, as Conan Doyle well knew. On the other side of the spectrum was Oliver Wendell Holmes, the man Conan Doyle so passionately admired, who regarded spiritualism as nothing less than a “plague.” “While some,” Holmes wrote in 1859, “are crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are getting angry with it as a mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism is quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state which have been and are still accepted.”

  For Conan Doyle, those traditional ideas had already been sufficiently undermined, but he understood how a trained physician such as Holmes might recoil from psychic double-talk. “I saw, as a medical man, how a spicule of bone or a tumour pressing on the brain would cause what seemed an alteration of the soul,” Conan Doyle wrote. “I saw also how drugs or alcohol would turn on fleeting phases of virtue or vice.” He had also seen more of death than most young men of his time, and had little reason to believe that the souls of patients such as Jack Hawkins survived their bodily death. “When the candle burns out,” he wrote of his attitude at the time, “the light disappears.”

  Nonetheless, Conan Doyle remained fascinated by the uncharted potential of the mind. He read reports of a new phenomenon called mental telepathy, soon to be the subject of an influential book by F. W. H. Myers, and decided to see if he could duplicate some of the effects described. Working with a local architect named Henry Ball, Conan Doyle devised a simple test to see whether it might be possible to transmit unspoken thoughts. Both men sat with a pen and a notebook. Conan Doyle would then make a sketch while Ball, who faced in the opposite direction, attempted to duplicate the image. “Again and again,” Conan Doyle wrote, “sitting behind him, I have drawn diagrams, and he in turn has made approximately the same figure. I showed beyond any doubt whatever that I could convey my thoughts without words.”

  Conan Doyle’s account sounds intriguing as far as it goes, but he gives precious little detail—a problem that was to grow more pronounced over the years. Who initiated the experiments? What sort of person was Ball? Were the drawings complex designs or simple geometric shapes? Did Ball guess accurately every single time, or were a certain number of failures recorded? If so, what was the ratio of “hits” to “misses”? Without these particulars, it is difficult to distinguish a psychic event from a parlor trick. “Data! Data! Data!” as Sherlock Holmes was to say. “I can’t make bricks without clay.”

  In any case, the apparent success of these experiments convinced Conan Doyle that his earlier resistance to psychic phenomena had been too rigid. “I had compared the thought-excretion of the brain to the bile excretion of the liver,” he wrote. “Clearly this was untenable.” If it were possible to transmit thoughts independently of the human body, he reasoned, then perhaps some form of human consciousness could also survive bodily death.

  Up to this point, Conan Doyle had limited experience of the séance room, and his earliest results offered little in the way of encouragement. Soon after his marriage, a group of friends invited him to come and observe their attempts at “table-turning,” a rudimentary form of mediumship not unlike a Ouija board. The participants, Conan Doyle explained, “sat round a dining-room table which after a time, their hands being upon it, began to sway and finally got sufficient motion to tap with one leg. They then asked questions and received answers, more or less wise and more or less to the point. They were got by the tedious process of reciting the alphabet and writing down the letter which the tap indicated. It seemed to me that we were collectively pushing the table, and that our own wills were concerned in bringing down the leg at the right moment. I was interested but very skeptical.”

  In the wake of his mind-reading success, however, Conan Doyle decided to try table-turning in his own home. “It is to be remembered that I was working without a medium, which is like an astronomer working without a telescope,” he recounted. “Among us we could just muster enough of the magnetic force, or whatever you will call it, to get the table movements with their suspicious and often stupid messages.”

  On the whole, Conan Doyle remained unimpressed. One evening, after several inconclusive sessions, an event occurred that left him both “puzzled and disgusted.” “We had very good conditions,” he recalled, “and an amount of movement which seemed quite independent of our pressure. Long and detailed messages came through, which purported to be from a spirit who gave his name and said he was a commercial traveller who had lost his life in a recent fire at a theatre at Exeter.”

  This was exactly what Conan Doyle had wanted. Unlike the vague platitudes to which he had grown accustomed, this message contained verifiable information. He eagerly took notes as the unseen presence, communicating through the tapping of the table leg, gave precise details of his own death. The message continued with a request that Conan Doyle and his friends contact the traveler’s surviving family, who lived, he said, in a town called Slattenmere, in northwest England. “I did so,” Conan Doyle reported, “but my letter came back, appropriately enough, through the dead letter office.”

  Disenchanted, Conan Doyle might have dropped the subject of spiritualism altogether but for the influence of Major General Alfred Drayson, a fellow member of the Portsmouth Literary and Scientific Society. Drayson had retired to Southsea after a distinguished military career in India, South Africa, and North America. A prolific writer, he produced several volumes of memoirs, a handbook on The Art of Practical Whist, another on billiards, and dozens of contributions to magazines and newspapers. Drayson, who had also taught mathematics
for many years, achieved his greatest renown as a theoretical astronomer, having advanced a resolution concerning a “second rotation of the earth” that gradually gained acceptance in scientific circles. Conan Doyle once compared Drayson favorably to Copernicus, and when one recalls that Professor Moriarty, the arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, also taught mathematics and was the author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, it is clear that Drayson made a lasting impression.

  When Conan Doyle learned that Drayson also had an abiding interest in spiritualism, he could not fail to be impressed. Following his unhappy experience with the commercial traveler from Slattenmere, Conan Doyle came to the older man with his doubts. “You have not got the fundamental truth into your head,” Drayson told him. “That truth is, that every spirit in the flesh passes over to the next world exactly as it is, with no change whatever. This world is full of weak or foolish people. So is the next.”

  The problem, according to Drayson, was not one of deception or self-delusion, but rather that Conan Doyle had chosen his spirit companions unwisely. “But suppose,” Drayson continued, “a man in this world, who had lived in his house alone and never mixed with his fellows, was at last to put his head out of the window to see what sort of place it was, what would happen? Some naughty boy would probably say something rude. Anyhow, he would see nothing of the wisdom or greatness of the world. He would draw his head in thinking it was a very poor place. This is just what you have done.”