| Synopsis: |
Sherlock Holmes is, of course, the arch rationalist, but his creator claimed to speak with the dead. Conan Doyle, a medical man steeped in empirical reasoning at Edinburgh University and the creator of the super-logical detective, was fascinated, from his mid-twenties on, by Spiritualism, early experiments in thought transference and healing through mesmerism. He spent the last years of his life writing and lecturing on those subjects. Doyle was first introduced to Spiritualism between 1885 and 1888 when he was invited to the home of one of his patients, General Drayson, a teacher at Greenwich Naval College. The medium was a railway signalman. Doyle was amazed by some of the paranormal activity he experienced, but he was no fool; he thought the other sitters at the seances naive and gullible. Nevertheless, he was intrigued, and he used his skills of deductive reasoning to investigate the possibility of communion with the dead.In these five novelettes, Holmes and Watson pit their wits against supposedly ghostly or ghoulish presences: the Ratcliffe Oracle, the Impulsive Vampire, The ghost of One Little Maid from School, the Skull of Kohada Koheiji and the ghostly apparition of Kit Marlowe. |