At First, He Agreed It Was a Hoax
Though it might be oxymoronic to say, I'm slightly obsessed with Arthur Conan Doyle's first ghost hunt. It happened around 1894, but Conan Doyle himself didn't formally write or speak about it until 1917, after he had become an evangelist for Spiritualism. Not surprisingly, by then, he recounted the investigation in a way that supports the prospect that spirits can and do interact with those left behind on the physical plane.
However, there are bits and pieces of evidence revealing that, at first, the creator of Sherlock Holmes had deduced that the haunting was a hoax. This week, I came across a tidbit that can be added to this small pile. It comes from a newspaper article titled "Was It a Ghost?," written by Luke Sharp, a pen named used by Robert Barr (1849-1912). The item was widely reprinted -- from Blackfoot, Idaho, to Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire -- but I believe its earliest appearance was in the April 12, 1896, issue of the Detroit Free Press. Here's what Barr has to say:
Barr had written for the Free Press for several years before moving from the Great Lakes region to England in 1881. Apparently, he retained a good relationship with his old publisher, since "What It a Ghost?" was published well after he had become a member of the London literati. It was in this later phase of his life when Barr hobnobbed with Conan Doyle. If he is to be trusted, in the mid-1890s, Conan Doyle spoke of having ended his ghost hunt as a skeptic.
Frank Podmore was part of the investigation, and -- if I correctly identified his 1897 chronicle of what happened (see Case IX) -- he judges it to be a hoax. In My Life and Times (1925), Jerome K. Jerome recalls Conan Doyle sharing the story with very different details, but again the outcome is a hoax. Jerome notes that, looking back, the investigation "led [Conan Doyle] to conclusions with which he may now disagree." Perhaps most tantalizing of all, Conan Doyle himself appears to have recorded his experience in a personal letter to James Payn shortly after the investigation. In The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2007), Andrew Lycett describes this document as providing an account that comes "as close to the truth as possible." While he doesn't offer any direct quotations. Lycett suggests that Conan Doyle treats the case as resulting from the prank of a young man. A hoax.
How the Author Formally Told It Years Later
Unless I've missed something, Conan Doyle didn't formally share his experience until addressing the London Spiritualist Alliance on October 25, 1917. (This, by the way, is very close to a year before his son Kingsley died, more proof that this tragedy wasn't what ignited the father's belief in Spiritualism.) Luckily, a detailed record of the lecture was published in Light: A Journal of Psychical, Occult, and Mystical Research, where the anecdote about his ghost hunt opens in this way:
[H]e was one of three delegates sent by the Psychical Research Society to sit up in a haunted house in Dorsetshire. It was one of these poltergeist cases, where noises and foolish tricks had gone on for some years. ... Nothing sensational came of their visit, and yet it was not entirely barren. On the first night nothing occurred. On the second, there were tremendous noises, sounds like someone beating a table with a stick. They had taken every precaution, and could not explain the noises, but at the same time they could not swear that some ingenious practical joke had not been played upon them. There the matter ended for the time.
But then Conan Doyle tosses in a twist. Years later, he met a resident of the house and was told that, since the investigation, a child's bones had been unearthed in the garden! There's no mention of his double-checking this new evidence. Nonetheless, Conan Doyle uses it to validate the claim that paranormal activity happened at the house. It is, he contends, "surely some argument for the truth of the phenomena."
Conan Doyle retells the anecdote in three books: The New Revelation (1918), Memories and Adventures (1924), and in The Edge of the Unknown (1930). Over time, he adds some details and alters others, which is probably to be expected. However, in each case, he repeats the "epilog" about the discovery of a child's skeleton to lend credence to the supernatural reality of the haunting.
Of course, the "hardness" of the child's skeleton is an issue. Were human remains actually found? This was certainly not the first time bones in the backyard or basement had been used to bolster a haunting's supernatural foundation (a topic I've written about before. I also expand on some of the above here.) Was Conan Doyle duped by someone who told him what he wanted to hear? Did the great author himself invent the story to please his Spiritualist-leaning audiences while nudging skeptics to rethink their positions? He went on to promote some fairly farfetched claims, from fairies caught on film to spirits communicating via radio. Did he really believe in the all of the phenomena he was publicizing?
In my quieter moods, I like to think that Dr. Conan Doyle had diagnosed the 20th century as suffering from chronic disillusionment. The physician knew the cure involved injecting as many people as he could with a dose of wonderment. Maybe it doesn't matter if he honestly believed in everything he espoused. Maybe his main goal, his prescription, was to prompt people to think bigger and to think beyond a world without miracles.
-- Tim
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