On November 4, 1916, the spiritualist journal Light published a short but earnest essay by one A. Conan Doyle—his official “coming out” party as a spiritualist. He summed up his new convictions in a single sentence: “In spite of occasional fraud and wild imaginings, there remains a solid core in this whole spiritual movement which is infinitely nearer to positive proof than any other religious development with which I am acquainted.” For Doyle, the accumulation of evidence from multiple sources was so strong that it could now be considered proven. The phenomena had passed from the stage of being “a parlor game,” was just now emerging from being “a debatable scientific novelty,” and was beginning to take shape as the foundation of “a definite system of religious thought.”
From both sides of the “partition” that separates this world from the next one, he wrote, people of integrity and high intellect were trying to break through to the other side, while spirits on the other side were doing the same. Both were “beating down the partition, and [we can] hear the sound of each other’s picks.” Someday soon, spirit communication would be acknowledged as a breakthrough comparable to the birth of Christ but not in conflict with Christianity, a revelation that would provide believers with “an utter fearlessness of death, and an immense consolation when those who are dear to us pass behind the veil.”
The following year, in October 1917, Conan Doyle gave his first public lecture on spiritualism, to the London Spiritualist Alliance, sharing the podium with Sir Oliver Lodge. And by now, Conan Doyle was not alone: Though at first Lady Jean had been alarmed by her husband’s explorations into the shadowy world of the occult, considering it to be “uncanny and dangerous,” she had by now seen enough firsthand evidence that she, too, became convinced of the reality of spiritualism.
Now no longer would either one of them be a dabbler or a stander in the doorway of the great questions concerning human survival after bodily death.
They had become true believers.
* * *
FOR CONAN Doyle, the severest test of his newfound convictions would come only a few weeks before the end of the war. But it also led to the most exalted moment of his life.
In 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, Doyle’s beloved son Arthur Alleyne Kingsley (known as Kingsley), who was serving in the Army Medical Corps, took two bullets in the neck. In some ways, this serious but nonfatal wound was a lucky chance: In a single day during the bloodbath of the Somme, in an assault on the German trenches, 19,240 British soldiers were mowed down by machine-gun fire. (The worst day, by far, in British military history.) To Doyle’s great relief, Kingsley managed to recover in a military hospital. Later he returned to active service, but because doctors were in such short supply, he was recalled to the medical school at St. Mary’s Hospital. It was there that he became one of the millions of victims of the Spanish flu that swept across the world. He died on October 28, 1918, less than a month before the war ended. (Doyle’s brother Innes was also to die in the flu epidemic four months later.)
When Doyle got the news about Kingsley’s death, in a telegram from his older daughter, Mary, he was preparing to give a lecture on spiritualism. He decided not to cancel the talk but carried on as planned, later saying that he could never have done that without the inner serenity provided by his spiritualist convictions.
Still, Kingsley’s death was a staggering blow. He was such a gallant young man, so gentle, so principled, so reserved, a brave soldier, and a fine officer who would have made a splendid doctor. “He was a very perfect man—I have never met a more perfect one,” Doyle wrote to Lady Jean, after viewing his son’s gray body in the morgue.
It was almost a year later, on the evening of September 7, 1919, that Sir Arthur gave a spiritualist lecture in a guildhall in the town of Portsmouth, on the British seacoast about sixty miles south of London. Also on the platform that night was the somewhat improbable figure of a Welsh coal merchant from Merthyr Tydfil named Evan Powell. But Powell, with his unkempt hair and his ill-buttoned waistcoat stained with coal dust, was also, according to Doyle, an extraordinarily gifted medium, shuttling messages between the “land of mist” and the earthly world. Doyle was impressed with Powell because he did not accept any money for his mediumship, and because he only lent his psychic services to occasional clients, Doyle believed his powers were “free from that deterioration which comes from over-strain.” In The History of Spiritualism, Doyle opined that “on the whole, Evan Powell may be said to have the widest endowment of spiritual gifts of any medium at present in England.” He was also “a kindly, good person worthy of the wonderful gifts entrusted to him.” Those gifts included moving objects at a distance (psychokinesis), “psychic lights,” and direct voice phenomena, sometimes including the eerie ability to “channel” more than one voice at a time. He had given many sittings at the British College of Psychic Science.
After Doyle’s lecture that night, Powell offered to give a private sitting for Sir Arthur, Lady Doyle, three spiritualists, and a well-known film producer named Harry Engholm, who was “intellectually convinced” of the reality of spiritualism but had never seen it in person.
Before the sitting began, “Mr. Powell insisted upon being searched, and was then bound by me to a wooden armchair,” Doyle wrote later in an article called “A Wonderful Séance,” which appeared in the spiritualist journal Light at Christmas 1919. Then Doyle “cut six lengths of stout twine, and tied the medium in six places to the arms and legs of the chair. So thoroughly was this done, that at the end of the sitting it was quite impossible to loosen him, and we were compelled to cut him free.” Powell was bound hand and foot to prevent fraud, of course, but also “for his own protection,” Doyle explained, “since he cannot be responsible for his own movements when he is in a trance.”
Next a small megaphone, circled with luminous paint to make it visible in the dark, was placed on the floor beside the medium. The attendees arranged themselves in a semicircle, holding hands, surrounding Powell but not touching him. And then the lights were turned out and the room was in total darkness (a customary practice that always drew the scorn of skeptics). The séance sitters could hear Powell’s breathing grow loud and labored as he sank into a trance. Then a voice, quite unlike Powell’s normal voice, spoke up. (Powell, being Welsh, had a distinct accent, and his voice was “gentle and musical,” but the new voice—that of Powell’s “control,” named Black Hawk, was “deep, strong and virile,” Doyle reported.) Black Hawk greeted the company with good-natured kidding, calling Doyle “Great Chief” but also addressing each person by name. Then the medium slipped into silence and there was the sound of snoring.
A short while later, Doyle reported seeing the luminous band of the megaphone lift into the air and circle around the sitters’ heads, sometimes slowly, sometimes swiftly, but always as smoothly as if it were attached to the end of a string. Then it vanished. Shortly afterward, it returned, this time with a handful of flowers taken from the mantel and shoved into the narrow end of the megaphone. This was passed around the room so that everyone could smell the flowers, “with an accuracy which showed that whoever held them could see very plainly where we were.” Then, most surprising of all, a heavy wooden pedestal that Doyle estimated to weigh forty or fifty pounds was moved from the corner of the room to the center of the circle, lifted off the ground, and balanced gently on top of Doyle’s head, then rubbed lightly down the edge of his cheek. “An examination had shown us that the heavy crown of this pedestal was balanced upon a single loose screw in a wide socket, so that any careless handling would have sent it down with a terrific effect upon our skulls.…
“Then came what to me was the supreme moment of my spiritual experience. It is almost too sacred for full description, and yet I feel that God sends us such gifts that we may share them with others,” he wrote.
Suddenly there was a whispered voice in the darkness.
“Jean, it is I!”
Lady Doyle felt a hand on her head and cried, “It’s Kingsley!”<
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“Father!” the voice whispered earnestly.
“Dear boy, is that you?” Conan Doyle asked, scarcely able to believe it was true. He had the sense that there was a face very close to his own. He could hear someone breathing.
In a voice that sounded very much like Kingsley’s voice, the entity replied in a very intense whisper, “Forgive me!”
“There was never anything to forgive,” Conan Doyle replied. “You were the best son a man ever had.”
Then a large, strong hand rested on Sir Arthur’s head and gently bent it forward. Then he felt a soft kiss just above the brow.
“Tell me, dear, are you happy?” Sir Arthur asked.
There was a silence, and Doyle feared his son was gone. Then, softly, in a sort of sighing voice, came the words “Yes, I am so happy!”
While this remarkable conversation was in progress, Doyle was dimly conscious that the medium, across the room, seemed to be simultaneously channeling a second voice. Harry Engholm, the film producer, later wrote of this: “Whilst Sir Arthur and his boy were carrying on a conversation of a very private and sacred nature, I was suddenly addressed by a very dear old friend, a well-known newspaper correspondent, in terms and on a subject that left no doubt in my mind as to who the unseen personality was.”
Several times later in his life, Conan Doyle would have what he believed to be direct communications with Kingsley. But none of them compared with the unearthly thrill of this moment.
* * *
LATER IT was alleged that when Conan Doyle emerged from this séance, he declared, “Sherlock Holmes has died!”
Whether or not this actually happened, it was clear that from now on he was no longer an author of detective stories but a missionary for the cause of spiritualism. In those years of “universal sorrow and loss,” he wrote at the end of his autobiography, “it was borne in upon me that the knowledge which had come to me … was not for my own consolation alone, but that God had placed me in a very special position for conveying it to that world which needed it so badly.”
From now on, he pledged, he would share the good news of the soul’s eternal survival, no matter its personal cost to him and his family, no matter its financial cost, and no matter how much ridicule would be heaped upon him.
And in the years to come, there would be plenty.
Essentially, he would be seated in the public square wearing a dunce cap, pelted with rotten tomatoes, and scorned by many of the same people who once bought his books and considered him one of Britain’s leading literary lights.
But who could argue with the evidence he had seen with his own eyes? He summed it up, as a kind of personal confession and recitation of faith, in Memories and Adventures:
I have clasped materialized hands.
I have held long conversations with the direct voice.
I have smelt the peculiar ozone-like smell of ectoplasm.
I have listened to prophecies which were quickly fulfilled.
I have seen the “dead” glimmer up upon a photographic plate which no hand but mine had touched.
I have received through the hand of my own wife, notebooks full of information which was utterly beyond her ken.
I have seen heavy articles swimming in the air, untouched by human hand, and obeying directions given to unseen operators.
I have seen spirits walk round the room in fair light and join in the talk of the company.
I have known an untrained woman, possessed by an artist spirit, to produce rapidly a picture, now hanging in my drawing-room, which few living painters could have bettered.
If a man could see, feel and hear all this, and yet remain unconvinced of unseen intelligent forces around him, he would have a good cause to doubt his own sanity. Why should he heed the chatter of irresponsible journalists, or the head-shaking of inexperienced men of science, when he has himself had so many proofs?
For Doyle, the matter had been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. Now he wished only to discern the majestic mystery that lay around him and share its eternal reassurance with the world. Striking an achingly high note—and one that laid himself open to even more attack and ridicule—he concluded his little book The New Revelation with a beatific vision written by an English poet and spiritualist named Gerald Massey:
Spiritualism has been for me, in common with many others, such a lifting of the mental horizon and letting-in of the heavens—such a formation of faith into facts, that I can only compare life without it to sailing on board ship with hatches battened down and being kept a prisoner, living by the light of a candle, and then suddenly, on some splendid starry night, allowed to go on deck for the first time to see the stupendous mechanism of the heavens all aglow with the glory of God.
By the time he was sixty, Conan Doyle wrote almost exclusively about spiritualism, having spent a lifetime moving, as he said, “from the right of negation to the left of acceptance.” He wrote Sherlock Holmes stories and other fiction just to keep some money coming in.
SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Saint Paul of Spiritualism
The event would be nothing more than two men arguing for a couple of hours, but all twenty-four hundred tickets were sold out a month in advance. Surely there were better things to do on a Thursday night in London. Regardless, a crowd filed into Queen’s Hall on March 11, 1920, to attend a clash of opinions billed as “The Truth of Spiritualism.”
Arguing in its defense was, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He had been spiritualism’s defender in chief for three years now, bringing to it “a combative and aggressive spirit which it lacked before,” if he did say so himself. He’d written The New Revelation and The Vital Message and several dozen articles and letters. He and Lady Jean had been crisscrossing Britain, giving lectures to packed halls, often five nights a week, and addressing a total of 150,000 people, he estimated. And he was relishing the role: In January 1919, he had written to his mother, “Someone has called me ‘The Saint Paul of the New Dispensation.’ Where are we getting to!!”
Nonetheless, he was particularly anxious about this debate. He knew it wouldn’t be just another hall full of admiring souls in Hastings. It would be a confrontation. And he hated confrontation. “I go into battle in good heart,” was his rather melodramatic choice of words to his mother a few days beforehand. “This will in a way be the most important night of my life so I pray you to think of me.”
His adversary was Joseph McCabe, a Franciscan priest who’d left the Church Militant to become a militant atheist. Consider the irony: A former friar argues for a godless universe, while the creator of the supremely rational detective Sherlock Holmes claims that we can talk to the dead. It was a surreal scene befitting the new century. But more than that, McCabe’s appearance that night signaled a new opposition to spiritualism. This rising opponent wasn’t the stuffy Church of England or irate Nonconformists. It was loss of faith itself. World War I had brought on so much death and misery that millions of people now had no patience for blather about the hereafter and a loving God.
As Queen’s Hall filled that night, each man was backed up by his chosen supporters onstage with him: fifty spiritualists to Conan Doyle’s right, fifty atheists to McCabe’s left. They sat glaring at each other as the evening’s moderator, Sir Edward Marshall Hall, a famous defense attorney and former MP, quickly got down to business. “This is a serious debate,” he warned the audience in his brief opening remarks. “Both these gentlemen are in earnest.”
McCabe was up first, and he began his forty-minute segment with a theme sure to please his supporters: Religion was all well and good when humans believed the world was flat and the sun revolved around the earth, but with the advent of modern astronomy “man found himself living on one tiny speck in an illimitable material universe.” The result: “The old creeds began to grow dim.” We’ve grown up, he said. “Millions are fast falling from this dream of an eternal home.” But wouldn’t you know it: “Just
when men are beginning to wonder if at last religion is doomed, there comes this portentous phenomenon we are discussing in the shape of spiritualism. I do not wonder that my opponent takes it to be a new religion, a new revelation.”
But there’s one big problem with this new religion, said McCabe: “It was born of a fraud. It was cradled in fraud. It was nurtured in fraud. It is based to-day to an alarming extent all over the world on fraudulent performances.” And with that line, he got his first sympathetic laughter from the crowd. He spent the next half hour poking fun at D. D. Home, at Sir Oliver Lodge, and at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and he got lots more laughs.
After saying Doyle “has lived in clouds, in a mist,” McCabe ended his opening speech on a somewhat different note. To great cheers from the audience (or half of it, anyway) he said,
I submit to you in conclusion: let us be satisfied with this great broad earth which we do know and can control. Here is a world with mighty problems—a world with mighty resources. Here is a world which in its great tasks is fit to absorb the energy and devotion of every living man and woman on its surface. Let us leave that cloudy, misty, disputable, misleading world, and let us concentrate upon this earth upon which we live.
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