Everyone knows that Arthur Conan Doyle “killed” Sherlock Holmes. And everybody knows why. Tired of being associated with his detective and yearning to write more “important,” literary fiction, he arranged to have our hero tumble to his death over a waterfall, leaving him free to devote himself to historical epics.
This is true, of course, in a very simplistic fashion. However, what people often seem to forget is that the Sherlock Holmes stories were not the only short, slightly pulpy tales that Conan Doyle wrote. A quick look at his bibliography reveals a long list of offerings with titles like, “The Great Kleinplatz Experiment,” “The Brazilian Cat,” and “The Horror of the Heights,” all of them of a sensationalistic nature, and making their appearances in magazines from the very beginning of his career, in 1879, to the very end, in 1930.
The stories vary in content. Many are crime stories, some involve horrible creatures, some are examples of early science fiction, and in quite a few of them, one can find echoes of cases solved by the inhabitants of 221B. Not surprisingly for a man who both enjoyed scary yarns and joined England’s Society for Psychical Research, a significant handful of them are also ghost stories. Entertaining and frightening without being gruesome, they have, for the most part, held up well over the years. But taken as a whole, they reveal more than just whose reflection appears in the silver mirror, or why the first brown hand wasn’t good enough. It seems possible, using his tales of phantoms, to catch subtle glimpses of Conan Doyle’s evolution from fascinated skeptic to dedicated spiritualist. Every writer leaves traces of himself in his work; it’s inevitable. In Conan Doyle’s stories, we can get an idea of his personal experiences, as well as catch a shift in his view of ghosts themselves.
Conan Doyle submitted one of his first attempts at short fiction, “The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe,” to Blackwood’s in 1879, where it promptly disappeared, only to be discovered in the archives decades later. A brief, eerie story, it features two old school friends who decide to spend the night in a haunted house. Jack, on whose property the old manor house stands, is a physician who prides himself on his practicality and views the neighbors who tell stories about the Grange as having “untutored minds.” When Tom Hulton comes to visit, Jack is slightly disturbed by the “strange speculative way of thinking” his friend seems to have picked up during his time in Germany, and which is particularly evident when the topics of ghosts and spiritualism come up.
Hulton tells Jack that there are two kinds of people: “the men who profess not to believe in ghosts and are mortally afraid of them, and the men who admit at least the possibility of their existence and would go out of their way to see one.” Tom, who is definitely the latter, is eager to spend the night at the Grange, while Jack, the non-believer, has definite misgivings.
And so Conan Doyle sets up the situation: a skeptic and a believer, with at least one hoping to prove himself right. Biographer Andrew Lycett points out how neatly these characters reflect Conan Doyle’s own struggle at the time. Not content with his family’s Catholicism, yet unwilling to be a materialist, he was at his own spiritual crossroads, although he would arrive at his conclusions after years of thought and exploration, rather than with the horrible visions of one night.1
Of all the stories appearing in this essay, “The Haunted Grange of Gorsethorpe” is probably the most frightening. It is a traditional haunted house story, with a tragic, albeit ancient backstory, in which a previous tenant hacked his two children to death and strangled his wife. There is the requisite atmosphere of an abandoned house, the infectious excitement and anxiety of the ghost hunters, strange sounds and a creeping sense of menace before the horrible vision. After that, the story ends abruptly, with Jack and Tom, as per haunted house convention, never speaking of what they’ve seen. In this story, ghosts are scary, they have been cursed to relive their final terrible moments, and there is no real interaction with the observers. Tom and Jack are scared and disturbed, but don’t seem to achieve any greater enlightenment, other than the realization that ghosts exist. Despite the set up, it is a story meant purely for entertainment.
1883’s “Selecting a Ghost” has a different tone entirely. Where “Goresthorpe” is dark and atmospheric, this story is funny, as the reader comes to realize that “Argentine D’Odd,” as Silas Dodd prefers to be called, has pretensions to a feudal Norman heritage that is almost certainly not his. D’Odd has got his manor but, unfortunately, not the ghost he believes should come with it2. He just assumed one would be included, and now he is consumed with jealousy as his neighbor, Farmer Jorrocks, complains about his own ghost, a theatrical young woman whom D’Odd believes the man does not deserve. Eventually, he takes his wife’s advice and calls on her cousin. If the man discovered their coat of arms and series of family portraits, surely he can procure a ghost.
So it is that “Argentine” finds himself sitting in the middle of his soon-to-be-haunted dining hall in the company of one Mr. Abraham, a ‘ghost dealer.’ After drinking a potion to ensure he will be able to see into the spirit realm, he watches as specter after specter enters the room and describes his or her qualifications. Just as he makes his choice, however, he hears his wife cry out that they’ve been robbed. D’Odd then consults a medical doctor, who informs him that the potion contained chloral, and the ghostly visions were a product of his own dreams.
The phantoms in this story, therefore, are imaginary, and the “medium” a fraud and criminal. Everything has a logical explanation and D’Odd, by his own admission a true believer, is made out to be a fool. This story was written during the time Conan Doyle was working as a doctor in Southsea and experimenting with table rapping alongside other curious friends. While he obviously enjoyed his little psychic investigations and doubtless hoped to see or hear something unusual, he is not emotionally invested in their outcome and again, requires nothing of this story than it be entertaining enough for publication.
In 1899’s “The Brown Hand,” a physician’s well-meaning actions lead to his being haunted for years. The story’s narrator, Dr. Hardacre, an amateur psychic investigator, relates how his uncle, retired and ailing physician Sir Dominick Holden, asks him to sleep in his home laboratory so that he might see for himself the vision which has tormented him nightly since his days in India. Hardacre does, indeed, see the ghost—an Indian man in a gray gown who enters the lab, surveys the jars of pathology specimens, then throws up his hand (for he has only one) and vanishes. We learn the next morning that the performance begins by his shaking Sir Dominick’s shoulder, and that he is, as one might expect, searching for his missing hand, removed in a long-ago operation. The nameless Indian wished to keep the diseased hand, so that he could be buried with it, as his religion required the body to be intact. Ever helpful, Sir Dominick offered to preserve the hand and keep it safe in his lab; unfortunately, however, its jar was one of many lost in a massive fire. Look as he might, the ghost will never be able to find it. Hardacre comes up with a creative solution: why not bring in a similar hand from a morgue as a substitute? This works…eventually…with the end result being that Hardacre becomes his uncle’s most trusted advisor and inherits his considerable estate after his death.3
In the story, Dr. Hardacre states that he is a member of the Psychical Research Society—an obvious alteration of the SPR (Society for Psychical Research) of which Conan Doyle himself was a member. He also mentions that he had investigated a haunted house with two other members, and experienced nothing “exciting or convincing.” This again echoes Conan Doyle’s own experience: in June of 1894, he joined Frank Podmore and Dr. Sidney Scott on a similar venture. According to the official report, the “poltergeist” was actually a member of the household; in later years, however, Conan Doyle claimed otherwise during his spiritualist lectures, whether through actual belief or wishful thinking is anyone’s guess.
This is, at any rate, Hardacre’s first ghost, and it is an interactive one. Unlike the haunts of Goresthorpe Grange, who behave almost like paranormal recordings, this spirit has consciousness of itself, its mission, and others. It also can take solid form—at least enough to shake Sir Dominick and to grab hold of its new hand. It displays emotions other than anguish and terror; it can feel hope, frustration, anger, and happiness. It is, then, a very human spirit, and while Sir Dominick, likely tormented by his own guilt and helplessness, is worn down by its visits, Dr. Hardacre and the reader end up with a certain amount of affection for it—possibly as the author intended.
Not that all is rosy in human-spirit interactions. In 1900’s “Playing with Fire,” Conan Doyle addresses the potential dangers of the séance. In his spiritualist writings, he often discussed the ways in which skeptics could sabotage a session with a medium, thereby forcing him or her to resort to fraud in order to maintain some credibility. In this story, however, he takes the opposite tack: exploring what could happen when séances go wrong.
Or only slightly wrong, anyway. Conan Doyle’s characters in this story seem to be set up as common spiritualist “types.” There is the dogmatic believer, the open-minded friend, the dilettante always ready to hear “some new thing,” and the amateur medium. On this night, however, they have a guest—a true student of the occult who tells them that he wishes to take them a bit further, with an experiment. “Thoughts are things,” he admonishes them, and as such, can be materialized. A realistic séance sequence follows and, without revealing too much of the denouement, this is precisely what happens. Interestingly, however, Conan Doyle decides to pull his punch, and while the incident would likely be scary enough should it happen in real life, most readers could probably dream up better ways to make “Playing With Fire” truly frightening. This, of course, begs the question: did Conan Doyle the nascent spiritualist decide that making a séance actually dangerous would betray the faith he would soon claim as his own? Did he worry about painting the men and women he was coming to know personally as foolish or even wicked? “Fortunetelling” was illegal in England, after all, and he may have been concerned that in turning this story into a horror tale, he would bring more negative attention on mediums—particularly if readers began to wonder if “Playing With Fire” was based on a true story. This is, of course, conjecture, but it does not seem an unreasonable one.
Conan Doyle had a particular interest in psychometry—the ability to receive impressions from objects about the people who owned or touched them. He uses this phenomenon in at least three stories: “The Leather Funnel” (1902); “The Silver Mirror” (1908); and “Through the Veil” (1910). In each story, the main character is transported back in time to see, in varying degrees of detail, an event in history. For the narrator of the first, most disturbing, story, this is the torture of the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, forced to drink two gallons of water poured down her throat through the funnel in question. The overworked, sleep-deprived protagonist of the second story sees the murder of David Rizzio, the Italian-born personal secretary (and rumored lover) of Mary, Queen of Scots, reflected through the mirror that had once witnessed the actual event. “Through the Veil” goes even further. In this story, a man and woman touring an old Roman fort at Newstead on their first anniversary are transported back—first through the fort and its artifacts, and then through dreams—to the moment when, in their past lives, he, a native Scot, took her for his own, accidentally killing her Roman husband as the fort was overrun and burned.4
Although the incidents depicted are violent, the stories themselves suggest that psychic abilities can be used as a tool—a way to look into the past. This is in line with Conan Doyle’s own belief that, rather than arresting mediums, the police should employ them to solve crimes.5 When mystery author Agatha Christie disappeared for eleven days in December of 1926, Conan Doyle got a glove from her husband which he gave to psychometrist Horace Leaf. Leaf, who didn’t know the glove’s source, made several observations and predictions Conan Doyle enthusiastically claimed to be accurate. Again, through these later stories, we see his growing acceptance and portrayal of paranormal abilities as positive, even romantic, phenomena.
In the end, however, what are ghosts, really, but the spirits or (for the more materialist believer) impressions of people who have died? Most ghost stories, being written by the living, focus on that particular demographic and its experiences when exposed to the afterlife’s creepier aspects. The final tale in this discussion takes a slightly different tack.
“How It Happened” was first published in early 1918. Like many of Conan Doyle’s stories, it draws on some personal experience—this time, his car accident in March, 1904 when, with his brother Innes in the passenger seat, he managed to run into the gate outside Undershaw and flip the vehicle. Both men were pinned under the car, and Conan Doyle believed the only thing that saved him was the steering wheel, although it later snapped. Fortunately he and his brother emerged with only a few painful bruises and went golfing again the following day.
Such is not the case with our narrator. Arriving at the train station after a day’s trip into London, he finds his new car waiting for him—a 30 horsepower Robur. He has a chauffeur, and he’s never driven this car before, so it does cross his mind that he should perhaps wait until morning to get acquainted with it, but like any boy with a brand new plaything, he wants to try it out.
All goes well until his gearshift sticks as he starts to head down a steep hill. His brakes begin to fail and he loses control of the car. He hopes that, through steering, he’ll be able to take the car around three curves and through the gate of his home, but it’s all very dicey, and at one point, both he and his chauffeur, Perkins, take turns trying to persuade each other to jump out. They hit the stone pillar in an open car at 50 mph.
The narrator is thrown from the vehicle. When he comes to, his first concern is Perkins. The chauffeur seems to be all right; he is conscious and talking, asking after “master,” and while the car overturned, it has only pinned his leg. The rescuers’ attention is focused on him, and upon something in front of the car; they pay the narrator no mind, but “master” is not alone. His friend Stanley is there with him. It is only after a few minutes that he realizes how impossible this is.
“Stanley, you are dead.”
He looked at me with that same old, gentle wistful smile.
“So are you,” he said.
By 1918, Conan Doyle was a committed spiritualist. Two years before, he writes in the final chapter of his autobiography, “I began a campaign…which can only finish when all is finished.” He would boldly declare the truth of spiritualism in the face of those who believed it to be anti-religious, anti-scientific, or simple charlatanism.6 So it is that, although “How It Happened” is a moving tale, it is also, we are informed at the beginning, delivered through a medium during an automatic writing session. Just as his old friend Stanley appeared to usher the speaker into the afterlife, he in turn is reassuring the reader that he also has nothing to fear. Summaries of the story typically mention that it is about the dangers of male bravado, or a tale of loyalty, but it is neither. It is Conan Doyle telling us that there is life after death.
“How It Happened” has a poignant coda. Both Conan Doyle’s eldest son, Kingsley, and his brother, Innes, died of influenza within months of each other: Kingsley in October of 1918, and Innes the next February. In March, 1919, Conan Doyle had a session with one of his trusted mediums, Annie Brittain, who put him in touch with his son. According to biographer Andrew Lycett, Kingsley told his father that Innes, upon first seeing him, said “‘I thought you were dead,’ to which Kingsley had replied, ‘Just as dead as you are.’”7 Had Mrs. Brittain read her client’s story? One has to wonder.
The horror writer H.P. Lovecraft famously wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”8 For human beings, death and what comes after are, even with religious guidance, ultimately unknowable. This is why horror stories don’t deal with grocery shopping, or romantic picnics or conversations about football, because none of those are intrinsically frightening. Introduce a ghost into one of those scenarios, however, and it immediately becomes scary. Why? Because a ghost is dead. It is the unknown reaching into our lives and, if we are particularly unlucky, it might want to take us back with it.
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s ghost stories, there seems to be a clear progression between the scary, unknowable ghosts who haunted Goresthorpe Grange, and Stanley, the familiar, albeit dead, friend. Mediums evolve from thieves who dope up their victims to the automatic writer who helps “master” deliver a coherent account of his own passage into another life. Even when a séance goes wrong, it simply makes a mess, rather than unleashing a troop of demons on the world. It would be naïve to claim that Conan Doyle did not have a slight agenda as he wrote these stories—particularly the last. Of course he did. As a self-appointed spokesman for spiritualism, he wanted people to share and be comforted by his beliefs. But even if he weren’t of such an evangelical bent, it is likely that his ghost stories would have taken a similar turn. They no longer focus on fear because their creator is no longer afraid. They show a comprehensible afterlife because he was certain of one. He firmly believed that through the means provided by spiritualism, the dead he knew, loved, and trusted had told him so. As another of his creations once said, “There is nothing like first-hand evidence.”
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Leah Guinn is the co-author, with Jaime Mahoney, of A Curious Collection of Dates (Wessex Press). She reviews pastiche for “The Well-Read Sherlockian.” A member of the Illustrious Clients of Indianapolis, she lives in Indiana with her husband and three children.
1 Lycett, Andrew. The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Free Press, 2008, p. 66.
2 As the original Goresthorpe manuscript had vanished, as far as Conan Doyle knew, he happily re-uses the name for this house.
3 Although the story first appeared in the Strand Magazine in 1899, it was also published in Tales of Twilight and the Unseen, which was published in 1929. The story may have been revised somewhat at the time, accounting for Hardacre’s mention that his aunt and uncle died in the great flu epidemic.
4 At least for the purposes of the story. The fort existed, but the attack and fire seem to be purely fictional.
5 Imagine Sherlock Holmes hearing that!
6 Memories and Adventures, p. 396. It is probably worthwhile to note here that “Stanley” died in the hospital at Bloemfontein, of enteric fever. Was he based on one of Conan Doyle’s actual patients? We can’t know.
7 Lycett, p. 401.
8 Lovecraft, H.P. “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” available online here: hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx