Conan Doyle’s Ghost Hunt.

Conan Doyle’s Ghost Hunt.

“This Agency stands flat footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply.“ So says Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Watson in The Sussex Vampire (The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes).

However, Holmes’ creator took an entirely different view of ghosts. In 1891, Arthur Conan Doyle joined the Society for Psychical Research. A few years later he accepted an invitation from the society. It was to investigate a supposedly haunted house at Charmouth in Dorset.

Conan Doyle’s co-investigators were a Dr. Scott and Frank Podmore, who was a leading light in the Society for Psychical Research.

Their aim was to investigate strange noises and other psychic phenomena. These had allegedly been experienced by the occupants of the house. The inhabitants consisted of a Mrs. B and her family, together with a widow - referred to as Mrs. D - and her two children; a young woman aged 20 years old, and a boy of 15.

Some 30 years later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (as he then was), wrote about the ghost hunt in his autobiography, Memories And Adventures (1924).

The investigation took place over two nights. Dr. Scott left after the first night when nothing happened. Conan Doyle and Frank Podmore, meanwhile, took precautions against any deception. These included putting worsted threads across the stairs in the house.

On the second night events took a more interesting turn, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle recalled: “ In the middle of the night a fearsome uproar broke out. It was like some one belabouring a resounding table with a heavy cudgel. It was not an accidental creaking of wood, or anything of that sort, but a deafening row. “

Frank Podmore and Conan Doyle rushed at once into the kitchen, “ …from which the sound had surely come. There was nothing there - the doors were all locked, windows barred, and threads unbroken. “

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote that, “ What occasioned it we never knew. “ However, Frank Podmore disagreed with Conan Doyle. He interviewed the children of Mrs. D at some length. Podmore concluded that the ‘ fearsome uproar, ‘ together with the other phenomena, had probably been caused by the boy - possibly aided by his sister.

The story does not end there though. Some years later the ‘ haunted house ‘ burned down. The skeleton of a child of about ten years old was also dug up in the garden.

In Memories And Adventures, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle concluded that: “ The suggestion was that the child had been done to death there long ago, and that the subsequent phenomena of which we had one small sample were a sequence to this tragedy…a young life cut short in sudden and unnatural fashion may leave, as it were, a store of unused vitality which may be put to strange uses. “

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Spiritualist beliefs grew considerably in the 30 years between the ghost hunt and the publication of Memories And Adventures. So much so that he wrote in that book; 

“ The unknown and the marvellous press upon us from all sides. They loom above us and around us in undefined and fluctuating shapes… “

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