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Sitting with Spiritualism in Doyle’s Time

by Lisa Morton

What’s perhaps most interesting about this line is that Arthur Conan Doyle doesn’t have his protagonist recall actually encountering a ghost; he notes only that the good doctor was braver in occupying a supposedly haunted house than his fellows.

When Doyle wrote this story, Spiritualism, an officially recognized religion that believes communication with the dead is possible through a medium, was waning in popularity. It had originated in 1848 when two teenagers, Kate and Maggie Fox, claimed to be able to translate disembodied rapping sounds in their upstate New York farmhouse into spirit messages. When news of this extraordinary happening spread, the girls swiftly found themselves celebrities; their older sister Leah, who taught music in Rochester, New York, brought them to her home and began to charge guests to sit in on these remarkable séances. (The word “séances,” by the way, had originally been a French term used to describe political meetings, but had then been applied to gatherings of Mesmerists and Spiritualists.) Within a short time, hundreds of mediums sprang up throughout the United States and Europe, with some becoming veritable superstars. Mediums like Daniel Dunglas Home, Florence Cook, and Agnes Guppy sat with royalty, writers, reporters, and ordinary folk anxious for a glimpse into the Great Beyond.

However, Spiritualism’s Achilles heel was its assertion that it was the only religion that could be proven scientifically, and scientists answered the call. In the late nineteenth century, science was booming as never before. Scientists like Michael Faraday, who defined what electromagnetism was, used those same principles to investigate the claims of Spiritualism. The early mediums were largely “physical mediums,” meaning they produced actual phenomena in the presence of sitters and didn’t simply convey messages. Spiritualists believed these mediums could levitate objects or themselves, cause “apports” (objects that instantaneously appeared seemingly out of nowhere), or create glowing orbs that floated overhead. Faraday tested mediums by using equipment to measure both the mediums and the environment around them. Unsurprisingly, no phenomena occurred when mediums were subjected to Faraday’s experiments.

By 1884, many of the mediums had been repeatedly debunked, and that year Spiritualism took a major hit when a group of American scientists known as the Seybert Commission investigated numerous mediums and ended up concluding that Spiritualism “presents the melancholy spectacle of gross fraud.” Spiritualism hobbled along for a few years, as groups like the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, investigated not just mediums but also haunted houses, precognitive visions, and telepathy. A common belief among members of the SPR was that mediums were not communicating with the dead but were in fact receiving information from the minds of the living near them.

Doyle joined the SPR in 1893, invited by Sir William F. Barrett, the organization’s principal founder. By 1910, though, when Doyle wrote this tale, Spiritualism had been so repeatedly debunked that it seemed destined to die out, which probably explains why Dr. Hardcastle doesn’t admit to encountering anything in his night spent in a haunted house. By having his hero use an evening in a haunted house as a measurement of fear, Doyle is really playing with the traditional fictitious ghost story more than the real parameters of a ghost-hunt (although the ghost story was also languishing by 1910, since such tales had over-saturated the nineteenth-century magazines and book collections).

It would take the advent of World War I, with its catastrophic losses (which often occurred in some faraway part of the world, providing grieving survivors with neither concrete evidence nor closure), to restore interest in Spiritualism. Physical mediums gave way to trance mediums, who offered at least the comfort of solace by providing messages supposedly from deceased sons, husbands, brothers and friends. It would also be after World War I that Doyle would devote the majority of his time to promoting Spiritualism in many ways including producing books such as his two-volume The History of Spiritualism in 1926.

WHO IS LISA?

Lisa Morton is a screenwriter, author, and editor whose work was described by the American Library Association’s Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror as “consistently dark, unsettling, and frightening.” She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award®, the author of four novels and over 200 short stories, and a world-class Halloween and paranormal expert who has appeared on CNN, NPR, The History Channel, Discovery +, and dozens of other sites and shows. Her books include Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances, Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween, and the Rondo Hatton Award-winning The Art of the Zombie Movie. She also hosts the popular weekly “Ghost Report” podcast and a newsletter about the paranormal (The Whole Haunted World). Lisa lives in Los Angeles and online at www.lisamorton.com.