Timesuck with Dan Cummins - Short Suck #30 - Sherlock Holmes and Spiritualism

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

Today we take a peek at the interesting life of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the man who invented the world's most famous and influential literary detective, Sherlock Holmes. However, Doyle was never really that interested in the fictional creation that made him famous. He was very interested, though, in spiritualism, and took part in hundreds of seances and wrote dozens of books, pamphlets, and newspaper articles attesting to a belief he saw as indisputable fact: that the dead surround us and we can speak with them. For Merch and everything else Bad Magic related, head to: https://www.badmagicproductions.com 

Welcome to this edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. I'm Dan Cummins and today I will be sharing the story of the incredibly incredulous inventor of the world's most rational character, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The world mainly knows Doyle as the author of the Sherlock Holmes series, but the infamous author was far more than that. In fact, being the author of the Sherlock Holmes series was his least favorite thing to be. In addition to being the creator of Sherlock Holmes, whom he hated by the end, Doyle was also an

optometrist, a real-life detective, a knight, above all else a Victorian spiritualist and more. Today we're going to dive into some of these lesser known aspects of his life and get to know the man behind the famous literary detective. Words and ideas can change the world. I hated her, but I wanted to love my mother. I have a dream! I plead not guilty right now. Your only chance is to leave with us. Detective Sherlock Holmes, the very manifestation of logical reasoning,

master of the rational universe, and liege lord of deducing the straight facts. For 138 years, the looming pragmatic figure of Sherlock Holmes has maintained a steadfast position in popular culture. His legacy is so immense that he is, unequivocally, the godfather to all detective characters that have emerged in his wake. Everyone from Inspector Clouseau and Blake Edwards the Pink Panther to everyone's favorite tween sleuth Nancy Drew from Nathan Fillion's Rick Castle to Hercule Poirot from Veronica Mars to Batman. They all have their roots in

Arthur Conan Doyle's most infamous character. Side note on Batman. If you don't classify Batman as a detective, first and foremost, you'd be wrong. Second of all, Batman and the Joker are arguably the most accurate adaptation of the Sherlock and Moriarty rivalry to date. I mean, come on. Two unstoppable forces, locked in a perpetual battle of wills. Batman is nothing without the Joker. The Joker is nothing without Batman

They need each other they are in essence Sherlock and Moriarty inexorable good and relentless evil facing off for eternity, but I'm getting ahead of myself This is all to say the legacy of Sherlock Holmes is unparalleled I mean show me another literary character from over a hundred years ago that still has merchandise being sold in droves today outside of maybe Dracula and Frankenstein. This character was so impactful that 11 years after he introduced a detective to the public, Arthur Conan Doyle was awarded a knighthood. And almost any author would have been ecstatic to have created a character that left even a fraction of the impact on the world that Sherlock did, but not Arthur Conan Doyle.

Doyle was not really that proud of Sherlock. He wasn't even that fond of him. He actually came to hate the character he created, hated what he represented, how he behaved, hated how he thought. About a decade after first writing his first Sherlock Holmes story, Doyle started to resent every little word he was forced to write about Sherlock. He found the character insufferable. But he continued to write his stories because it made him more money than anything else

he was able to do. The unfortunate truth for Doyle, creatively at least, was that the world adored Sherlock Holmes and were willing to put good money towards seeing what zany adventure the detective went on to next even if he could care less. Pretty funny, right? That the artists could love their creation far less than their fans do? or the detective went on to next even if he could care less. Pretty funny, right? That the artist could love their creation far less than their fans do? I can actually relate on a much, much smaller level.

I won't say which joke because I don't want to take away from people who like it, but there was this one joke I told on a late night show, on a special, told at a bunch of live shows touring for years. And it was a joke that club managers, comedy comedy bookers other comics and fans have told me over the years is their favorite joke of mine I personally hate it I only wrote it to get a quick laugh to start off a late-night set I found it still find it very formulaic predictable and kind of boring I've also heard of a lot of bands who absolutely hate still playing the hit single that more than any other song made them famous. A song that was

never their favorite song. The relationship between artists and their art is so interesting to me. I find that a lot of professional artists, whatever their medium is, you know they do this thing where they'll create one thing because they know it'll work to pay the bills and then use the money they make on that one thing to create other things that they know won't be commercially viable but they find much more creatively fulfilling. For Sir Conan Doyle, he wrote Sherlock Holmes, you know, there's those stories to pay the bills and once the bills were paid he would focus creatively on other topics. He much

preferred to write about or explore creatively like ghost stories. In order to have the time to write about the things he loved, like any artist without a trust fund, benefactor of some kind, or financially well-to-do spouse, Doyle needed to make money. And in order to make that money he needed to write about the things, or rather the thing, that he didn't care for. Sherlock Holmes was everything Doyle despised, but as he wrote in the London Opinion newspaper in 1912, he didn't feel that anyone should be surprised by that. So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle. The doll and its maker are never identical.

By the end, Doyle was so fucking fed up with Sherlock that he threw him off a waterfall in the Swiss Alps in 1893, only to resurrect him eight years later because he needed to keep making some big bucks after an outcry from the public. But again I'm getting ahead of myself. The fact that Arthur Conan Doyle hated his creation is by far the least interesting of a long list of bizarre facts about him. So today let's unravel some of the strange tales of his life, get to know more about this enigmatic famous literary figure. We'll return to his love-hate, but mostly hate, relationship with Sherlock later in this bite-sized episode. Let's start off by talking about a lesser known aspect of Doyle's life, his religious beliefs. Despite being the creator of the single most rational character perhaps to exist in literary

history, in his personal life Doyle was arguably anything but that. Doyle worshipped the devil big time. Had a massive tattoo of a pentagram that covered his entire chest, a huge back piece that was an illustration of a goat-legged bullhorn Lucifer ravaging an innocent Christian maiden. He had a huge occult altar in his living room where he would officiate black masses and sacrifice small animals in front of friends and neighbors. Can you imagine? He didn't do that. Can you imagine to find out that the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes and all that? No, he wasn't satanic, at least not in my mind.

But some today would consider him to be satanic actually, because he really was heavily into what many today would view as the occult. Doyle was a spiritualist, very, very into spiritualism. And not the kind concerned with horoscopes or crystals or the power of manifestation like some New Age spiritualists are. No, Doyle was a Victorian spiritualist, which means that he communicated with ghosts. Or at least he thought he did. Many people during this period thought they did, in fact. Victorian spiritualism was a massively popular movement that swept across Or at least he thought he did. Many people during this period thought they did in fact. Victorian Spiritualism was a massively popular movement that swept across Britain, America, elsewhere in the Western world,

lasting from the late 1840s to the beginning of the First World War. The movement hinged on three core beliefs. One, the immortality of the soul. Two, that we can communicate with those who have passed on, and three, that there are certain people amongst us who are especially susceptible to spiritual communication. And these people are called mediums. An important thing to understand about Victorian spiritualism and subsequently Arthur Conan Doyle is that it was a response to Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in which he essentially gave a big fuck you to the whole Adam and Eve creationist theory of how life on earth began. The public becoming aware of the theory of evolution in 1842 led directly to the Victorian crisis of faith,

which is exactly what it sounds like. The crisis of faith was a period of time in Britain when people were of faith was a period of time in Britain when people were existentially freaking the fuck out. Questioning the church, questioning God, questioning the very nature of their own existence. Which, that's not to say people haven't been doing all those things for centuries, or had not been doing those things for centuries prior to this, it was just that during this period doubt was on a scale perhaps never before experienced by the West. Darwin was suddenly out there telling people, uh-uh, nope, whole Adam and Eve story,

that's some fable bullshit. We are most definitely not the incest babies of two naked hippies in a garden, you dipshits. We come from apes, motherfuckers, apes. I know, because of those birds and lizards in the Galapagos, see, do you see? Look at me when I'm screaming at you. Denounce your God. Bow before my truth and beg for mercy." I'm paraphrasing. That's not what he really said.

At the same time that Darwin was telling that to everybody, or some lesser version of that, Britain was experiencing a cultural overhaul. It was during the late 19th century that electricity, radioactivity, telephones, typewriters, cars, internal combustion engines, anesthesia, antiseptic, multiple vaccines, toilets, x-rays that I mentioned, cars, and more were, you know, being invented. It was in its own right a golden age of scientific discovery and the cultural and social value placed on science and scientists was immense. Enter into this era Victorian spiritualism. Millions across Britain and the U.S. wanted more than science. They were open to evolution, but

also not able to or ready to abandon a belief in a spiritual realm. They still wanted to believe in some type of life after death, and moreover, they wanted to know what life was like after death. And what better way to find out than to ask the dead themselves? They began gathering at seances and calling out to the great beyond. And the great beyond, at least according to them, was calling back. At seances, spirits of departed loved ones were shaking tables and making furniture levitate, caressing sitters' faces and holding babies, singing songs and bestowing gifts upon their living friends and families, and all of that was seen as scientific, objective, tangible proof of the afterlife.

As one source put it, spiritualism was the perfect movement for a population wanting scientific authorization for its faith and the blessing of religion upon scientific discoveries. And one of the most outspoken believers in this spiritual phenomena was our man of the hour, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. But it would take some time for him to come out publicly as a spiritualist. Backing up, Doyle was born into a devout Irish Catholic family on May 22, 1859. After a brief stint at a high school in Feldkirch, Austria, at 17 years old he left his home in England to attend the University of Edinburgh Medical School in Scotland. In 1881 he was awarded a Bachelor of Medicine and a

Master of Surgery and in 1882 he established his own ophthalmology practice in Portsmouth, England. Yeah, dude was an eye doctor before he became a wildly successful author. Clearly, smart guy. However, his eye business didn't do so well. If it had, he may have never become an author. He would have been too busy making those eyeball bucks. As he claimed in his biography, during the roughly 10-year period he operated his medical practice, not a single patient ever stepped foot into his office.

Clearly, he was exaggerating, but business was not good. But that ended up being a good thing because it gave him more time to focus on his writing. Around this same period he declared himself in personal correspondence with friends as distinctly agnostic, shedding what he considered to be his Catholic shackles. He also in 1885 married a woman named Louisa Hawkins. Two years later in 1887, his first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was printed by Wardlock and Co. Publishing in London, New York, and Melbourne, Australia.

Its name comes from a speech Watson gave about the murder he and Holmes were investigating in which he says, there's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colorless skin of life. And our duty is to unravel it and isolate it and expose every inch of it." This story was met with mediocre interest, but still enough interest to encourage Conan Doyle to write more about the detective. It was also, interestingly, the first time in literature that a magnifying glass was used as an investigative

tool by a detective. Shortly after he publishes his second installment of the Holmes saga, the sign of the four in 1890, the novel sells well enough that he decides to quit his medical practice and pivot careers from optometrist to full-time author. Two years later in 1892, Louisa gives birth to their first child, Arthur Allen Kingsley. The same year,

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is published. It was a collection of a dozen short stories previously published in The Strand Magazine in monthly installments, and the magazine's reader base loved it. These stories also caught the eye of several critics who praised Doyle, and it boosted his popularity tremendously. The following year, 1893, another big one for Doyle and his family, but in a bad way. His wife, Louisa, is diagnosed with tuberculosis. Around that same time, his father, Charles, dies. He will later write of his beloved wife,

We were married on August 6, 1885, and no man could have had a more gentle and amiable life's companion. Our union was marred by the sad ailment which came after a very few years to cast its shadow over our lives. But it comforts me to think that during the time when we were together there was no single occasion when our affection was disturbed by any serious breach or division. The credit of which lies entirely with her own quiet philosophy which enabled her to bear with smiling patience not only her own sad illness which lasted so long, but all other vicissitudes which life brings with it.

I rejoice to think that though she married a penniless doctor, she was spared long enough to fully appreciate the pleasure and the material comforts which worldly success was able to bring us. Also in 1893, Doyle grew discontent with his star creation and decided to rid himself of Sherlock Holmes when he published The Adventure of the Final Problem, again in the Strand magazine in December of 1893. In the short story, Holmes and his nemesis, the criminal mastermind, Professor Moriarty, fall to their deaths while battling it out on a cliffside in the Swiss Alps. Prior to his death, Sherlock writes a letter to his beloved sidekick, Dr. Watson,

part of which reads, I am pleased to think that I shall be able to free society from any further effects of Moriarty's presence, though I fear that it is at a cost which will give pain to my friends and especially my dear Watson to you. I've already explained to you, however, that my career had in any case reached its crisis, and that no possible conclusion to it could be more congenial to me than this. I made every disposition of my property before leaving England and handed it to my brother Mycroft. Pray give my greetings to Mrs. Watson and believe me to be, my dear fellow, very sincerely yours, Sherlock Holmes."

When Conan Doyle killed off Holmes, the public was fucking pissed. Like, to an insane degree. More than 20,000 people cancelled their subscriptions to The Strand Magazine in protest. Hordes of angry letters were sent in, and the magazine almost folded, almost went under, thanks to a plummet in readership. One writer from the BBC wrote that, "'The public reaction to the death was unlike anything previously seen for fictional events.'" It's crazy. Also super cool. How awesome for him to have created a character

so meaningful to so many people. Doyle personally received thousands of letters from fans, either fuming at him or begging him to revive the character, but he refused. At least for a little while he did. In private, as I mentioned earlier, Doyle despised Holmes and was delighted to have killed him off. In his diary he wrote, killed Holmes. I've had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day. In another correspondence with his mother, the author wrote that he must bury the detective,

quote, even if it means I must bury my pocketbook with him. Yeah, creatively, he was very over writing detective stories, got burn out. And he recently found something new that he wanted to pour a lot more of his energy into. That same year Doyle had begun to publicly take part in something that he had been interested in since the late 1880s. Spiritualism. And before we dive into Doyle's exploration of the occult, time for today's mid-show sponsor break. And I'm back. And now let's learn about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's exploration of life after death in the realm of the supernatural. In 1893

Arthur Conan Doyle joins the Society for Psychical Research. The Society for Psychical Research was, although not the first, by far the most infamous professional society dedicated to investigating spiritual phenomena during the Victorian era. At its onset the society was comprised of noted philosophers, journalists, physicists, academics, mediums, public intellectuals who were very interested in proving or disproving the literal thousands of reports of spiritual phenomena that were sweeping the nation. The society which is in fact still around today had six separate committees dedicated to investigating different

types of reported supernatural phenomena. These were the committees for mesmerism, apparitions and haunted houses, Reichenbach phenomena, thought reading, physical phenomena, and literature. Love it. It's one of the few areas where I can get a little woo-woo myself. In one of their early bi-weekly publications, the president of the SPR wrote, We shall not, of course, thus prove that our own attempt has been successful, but we shall prove that it was justified, that if the problems with which we set ourselves to solve around found to be insoluble, the gaps thus left in the system of thought on which man's normal life is based will be such as can neither be ignoredoluble, the gaps thus left in the system of thought on which man's normal life is based

will be such as can neither be ignored or supplied, but will become increasingly palpable and dangerous. Although the majority of the members at the beginning were non-spiritualists, seeking a rational explanation for insane reports, insane to them, of paranormal activity, there were a few spiritualists among them, And one of the believers, of course, was Conan Doyle. I wonder if his father's death and his wife's death sentence pushed him toward seeking clarity on what happens to us, where we go when we die. At first, he was psyched to join this group. However, his excitement soon faded when he realized the rest of the group was more prone to attributing phenomena to fraudulent mediums or mass hysteria.

Then they were to accepting what he considered now to be the truth, that the dead really could communicate with us from beyond the grave and do. His main beef with the group was that when SPR investigators sat in on a seance in order to observe it, they didn't realize how their bad vibes and aggressive skepticism made it impossible for the ghost to visit. And that may sound like I'm being facetious, but I'm very much not kidding there. He was frustrated with what he considered to be their poor attitudes, felt they were bringing a bad juju to the ghost party. In his book, The History of Spiritualism, which we'll talk about a bit later,

the author turned spiritualist wrote that his fellow SPR members, quote, failed to understand that they are themselves part of the experiment, and that it is possible for them to create such intolerable vibrations, and to surround themselves with so negative an atmosphere, that these outside forces which are governed by very definite laws, are unable to penetrate it. If a small piece of metal may upset the whole magnetic installation, so strong an adverse psychic current may ruin a psychic circle.

It is for this reason, and not on account of any superior credulity, that practicing spiritualists get such results as are never attained by mere researchers. Ah, fascinating. He also wrote that scientific men may be divided into three classes. Those who have not examined the matter at all, which does not in the least prevent them from giving very violent opinions. Those who know that it is true but are afraid to say so. And finally, the gallant minority who know it is true and who dare all in saying so. Love how he expresses his beliefs here.

Also love the phrase very violent opinions. Would love to start throwing that out in conversations. My god man, we could all really do without your very violent opinions. Eegad! Despite his distaste for the more credulous members of the group, Conan Doyle would stay on as a member for 36 years until he resigned in 1930. For a little less than 10 years after first joining the group, Doyle kept a relatively quiet life, taking care of his sick wife, writing occasionally, investigating reports of seances, attending seances, and making sure that Sherlock Holmes stayed dead. Then he ran out of money.

In 1901, a lack of finances led the author to resurrect Sherlock and he began publishing The Hound of the Baskervilles, again in monthly installments in the Strand Magazine. The full book would be published in March of 1902, just seven months before Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted by King Edward VII on October 24, 1902. Although it's not explicitly a paranormal story, it is the first Sherlock Holmes narrative to include allusions to the paranormal, which was clearly a reflection of his ever-growing spiritualist beliefs. The public was elated by the detective's return. They had not forgot about him, and three years later in 1904, he granted their wishes for still more Sherlock by publishing The Return of Sherlock Holmes,

a collection of 13 stories, all again released individually ahead of the book, in the Strand. Also in 1904, Doyle was made a member of the Crimes Club. The Crimes Club was founded in 1903 and, like the Society for Psychical Research, still around today. According to their website, In December of 1903, a small group of men who shared an interest in murder met in London to discuss the formation of a private dining of men who shared an interest in murder met in London to discuss the formation of a private dining club dedicated to their mutual interest in discussing crime

in general. So the crimes club was born treating the subject not with morbid or purient curiosity in the macabre, but with inquiry and learning in an activity then largely owned by newspapers with sensational headlines and little enlightenment. And I have to think that had the internet existed back then, perhaps Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have become a wildly popular true crime podcaster. Doyle has now added discussing murder to his weekly schedule of begrudgingly writing about a detective he despises, communicating with ghosts, vouching for ghosts at his other club

meetings, taking care of his sick wife, and also visiting his spiritual paramour, Gene Leckie. By the time that Louisa dies of tuberculosis in 1906, he and Gene had been engaging in a spiritual union for roughly 10 years. What the hell does a spiritual union mean here, you ask? Fair question. Well, according to Doyle and his close friends, who all knew of the emotional affair, including his mom who confronted him about it, he and Jean were soulmates and their relationship was predetermined by a higher power. Okay? But

despite being soulmates for the first ten years while they engage in a spiritual union, they never had a sexual or physical union on any level because of Doyle's marriage. According to multiple sources, while he loved Jean passionately and was only fond of Louisa, Doyle's honor obliged him to remain physically faithful, at least to her. Keep in mind during these 10 years, Louisa is literally dying a painful death of tuberculosis. It's brutal. Louisa will die in July of 1906, the age of 49. Doyle is now 47. And to no one's surprise, 14 months later, in September of 1907, he remarries Jean. And then interestingly, during his period of mourning his first wife and

continuing past the point of going on his honeymoon with his second, Doyle takes on the persona of the man he hated most and starts investigating the real-life case of an imprisoned man he believed to be innocent. In 1903, people living in the small farming village of Great Wirely, England, which is just northwest of Birmingham, were tormented by a crazed maniac slaughtering and mutilating almost a hundred horses, sheep, and cows, all in the dead of night, and the butcher had been sending letters about the crimes to the police taunting them. What disturbed villagers the most about the murders is that on every animal's belly allegedly there was a shallow slice, just one across it, which would have caused them to die slowly,

painfully from bleeding out. Immediately villagers took their proverbial pitchforks, or maybe completely real pitchforks, I mean it was 1903, to the home of the only non-white person in the area, George Adalji. George was the son of a Parsi Indian man and a white British woman and he had suffered immense discrimination throughout his entire life. This was not the first time he had been accused of a crime by law enforcement with no evidence, but it was the first time that the 26 year old would actually be convicted. Convicted again with zero evidence. In 1903 he was sentenced to

seven years in prison and hard labor. But then in 1906 he was released after only three years after a petition to free him had been signed by over 10,000 people nationwide. Unfortunately for George, when he was released the courts did not revoke his guilty verdict or offer him any compensation for his wrongful imprisonment, making it virtually impossible for him to now get a job, and he was broke. On the brink of homelessness, George turned to the press to attempt to clear his name. And then in December of 1906, Conan Doyle read George's account of the entire debacle, decided he would like to investigate the situation himself,

find out who really committed the crimes George had been convicted of, and clear the poor bastard's name. In the spring of 1907 Doyle released a series of articles in the Daily Telegraph, this newspaper, that elucidated all the evidence he had gathered over the last nine months and that it proved George was definitively innocent. And he clearly outfied the court's gross mishandling of the case. The first piece of evidence that Doyle presented in a very Sherlock Holmes manner, I might add, was about the murder weapon. When police had investigated George in 1903 about the animal slaughters, they found a couple of what they stated were bloody razors in his quarters,

and deduced they had been used to make the shallow cuts in the animals. In the Daily Telegraph, however, Doyle wrote, a hunt was made for weapons and a set of razors belonging to George was seized. Some were said to be wet, a not uncommon condition for razors in the morning. Dark spots were perceived upon the back of one, but they proved upon chemical examination to be rust stains. So the razors were not coated in fresh blood, they were coated in morning dew and rust. Other evidence Doyle found was that the type of soil on George's boots that had been taken into police custody, it was a different type of soil than the soil found in the fields where the animals had actually been slaughtered. Also the handwriting expert who had matched George's handwriting to one

suspected to have been written to letters, you know, suspected to have been written by the culprit, had made multiple serious errors in judging such a thing in other cases and thus their word cannot be trusted. In his letters Doyle also simply tore the police department a new one with his scathing remarks about their incompetence writing now once again the police are trying to make the point which in itself would help them but which is incompatible with their other points. Their original theory was that the crime was done before 930.

There was heavy rain on and off all night. It is perfectly clear that any well-marked footsteps must have been left after the rain stopped or when it had nearly stopped. Even granting that the earth was soft enough, as it was, to take footprints before them, this heavy rain would blur them to a point that would make identification by a worn-down heel absurd. What becomes, then, of all this elaborate business of the footmarks? Every point in this case simply crumbles to pieces as you touch it. How formidable it all sounds!

Wet razor, blood on razor, blood and saliva on, hair on coat, wet boots, footmark corresponding to boot, and yet how absolutely futile it all is when examined. There is not one single item which will bear serious criticism. Doyle's investigation in the printing of his scathing critiques led to Adalgie being granted a pardon for his conviction in May of 1907, and a few months later, he was hired as a solicitor, a job he had worked for decades. Even though he wasn't able to figure out who the real culprit was, the fictional crime author did save a guy from having his life ruined by a false

conviction. Very impressive. As it turns out, Doyle was almost as good at solving crime as the character he despised. In 1925, so years later, he helped exonerate another innocent man who had been convicted of murder. This time the victim was a actual human, not a farm animal. In the winter of 1908, an exorbitantly wealthy 82 year old Scotswoman named Marion Gilchrist had been violently murdered in her Glasgow Scotland apartment. On the night of December 21st, she had sent her servant Helen Lambie to go fetch the evening paper for her. Then just ten minutes later when Helen was opening the door to the apartment she said a man shoved past her and escaped

down the stairs and out onto the street. Inside the apartment Helen now found Miss Gilchrist lying face down in the dining room, a pool of fresh blood encircling her. Her face and head had been brutally bashed in. Later the doctor that examined the dead woman's body hypothesized that she had been hit repeatedly with a broken chair leg. Although police initially assumed robbery had been the objective of the murder, as she had thousands of pounds worth of jewelry in her home, there was puzzlingly only one thing missing from the old woman's apartment. A single diamond crescent brooch. A few days later

a local Jewish dealer of precious stones named Oscar Slater was reported to have been pawning off a diamond crescent brooch to a fellow dealer. The police immediately honed in on Slater as their primary suspect but as Conan Doyle would later point out there were some major discrepancies in their case against a Jewish immigrant. The first was that the broach Slater was selling had three rows of diamonds where Miss Gilchrist had only two. So obviously not the same piece of jewelry. The case should have ended right there. The case against him. Second was that Slate looked absolutely nothing like the

man Helen Lambie and another servant had seen running out of the apartment who had gotten good looks at the night of the murder. Despite this, one researcher wrote, Police and prosecutors unashamedly built a case against Slater through witness tampering, the subordination of perjury, and the suppression of exculpatory evidence. Those crooked fucks. In a later newspaper article, Doyle commented on the police that worked on this case, saying that it was a, quote, disgraceful frame up in which stupidity

and dishonesty played an equal part. Love how he didn't hold back. They were crooked and they were dumb. In the spring of 1909, Slater stood trial for the murder of Marion Gilchrist and after just an hour of deliberation despite no evidence at all pointing to Slater being the murderer, an ignorant and probably wildly anti-semitic jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. Luckily for Slater, a petition quickly signed by over 20,000 people who didn't actually suck convinced the court to change their sentencing. Just 48 hours before he was scheduled to hang in the gallows, how nervous was that dude? Can you imagine?

Slater's life was spared. However, he was not set free. His sentence was commuted to a life of hard labor at a place called Her Majesty's Prison Peterhead, a place that would later garner the nickname of Scotland's Gulag. And for the next 20 fucking years, Slater, this definitely innocent man, rotted in this hell on earth. But then he managed to sneak a letter out to his favorite author and the man he thought might be able to save him, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Doyle had actually been outspoken about the mistreatment of Slater going all the way back to 1912. But it wasn't until 1925 when he received the smuggled message that he put all of his efforts into clearing the innocent man's name. In one article, a researcher who was able to work directly with the massive archive of Doyle's unpublished writings on this case, described the author's approach to the case as follows. Conan Doyle brought to the case an investigative process that can truly be called homsian, isolating the authentically meaningful clues from the wash of evidentiary noise, honing in on telling negative evidence, why did Lambie behave so strangely on finding her mistress murdered, and illuminating the slipshod reasoning, overt prejudices, and outright fabrications of police and prosecutors.

In the end, after years of investigation, agitation, and publication, he won Slater's freedom. Slater was released from Peterhead in 1927. His conviction was quashed the next year. Also, as a result of the controversy around the Slater case and its aftermath, Scotland created the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal. Sadly, the murderer of Mary and Gilchrist never caught. So her killer, who knows who they are. Or were. I mean, long dead now. Between Slater's conviction in 1909 and his release in 1927, Doyle was

a busy man. In addition to the two children he had with his first wife, Mary and Arthur, he and Jean had three more kids, Dennis, Adrian, and Jean. None of his children will have children of their own and today he has no living descendants though. In 1916, after years of keeping his ever-growing spiritualist convictions under wraps, Doyle publicly now declares his paranormal beliefs in the infamous Victorian spiritualist magazine called Light. In a letter to the editor titled Where is the Soul During Unconsciousness, Doyle describes two personal experiences with spiritual communication in his family that had

initially convinced him of his belief as well as his thoughts on the public's reactions to the surplus of paranormal phenomena seemingly taking place across the world. He wrote, the matter is of profound religious significance. There is, as it seems to me, something very surprising in the limited interest which the churches take in psychical research. It is a subject which cuts at the very root of their existence. It is the one way of demonstrating the independent action of soul, and therefore to put it at the lowest the possibility of its existence apart from bodily organs. If the balloon can really drift forth upon a filament and reach its own individuality, then it is no great further step to say that when the filament snaps the balloon is still

self-sufficient. A fresh unfolding of knowledge and each such unfolding is in truth a renewed divine revelation has given us reassurances. The messages of spiritualists have fallen on many ears and strengthened many spirits, but it has never, as it seems to me, had the direct religious effect which one might have expected. Personally, I know no single argument which is not in favor of the extinction of our individuality at death, save only the facts of psychic research. But there are, but these are so strong that they must outweigh all others as the positive must always outweigh the negative. A hundred who have examined and tested and seen must always be more convincing than a million who disagree without investigation.

Yours faithfully, Arthur Conan Doyle. God, what a persuasive writer. A hundred who have examined and tested and seen must always be more convincing than a million who disagree without investigation. Makes an interesting argument. The spiritualist community was overjoyed to have the famous author who also had a background in medicine and science join their ranks, you know, publicly. Going forward Doyle would publish over 200 newspaper articles and multiple books and pamphlets

on the truth, supposed truth of spiritualism. In 1918 Doyle doubled down in his spiritualist convictions when his eldest son Arthur, also known as Kingsley, died of pneumonia. The loss absolutely tore Doyle apart and according to many, including himself, his only solace as he grieved his son's death was spiritualism. He also had a brother past that he very much wanted to contact. Through seances he was able to continue communicating with his dead son who according to spiritualist logic was continuing to learn and grow in the spirit world. Very very comforting

thought. You know and at least he thought he was communicating with his dead son. I hope he really was. How amazing if true. Reflecting his borderline fanatical spiritualist beliefs Doyle wrote three incredibly convoluted but beautifully written books. The Coming of the Fairies published in 1922, The History of Spiritualism which I mentioned earlier published in 1926, and Phineas Speaks published in 1927. The first of these, The Coming of the Fairies was arguably less directly about his spiritual beliefs and more like a symptom of them. He wrote the book in response to a nationwide sensation known today as the Cottingly

Fairies' hoax. Essentially in 1917, 10-year-old Frances Griffiths and her 16-year-old cousin Elsie Wright returned home one day after playing near a narrow brook called Cottingly Beck and they told their parents that they had seen fairies. Naturally, their parents did not believe them. So the next day, Frances and Elsie borrow Elsie's father's camera and they return to the brook. And then when they come home, they develop the plates in the Wright's home darkroom and Elsie is heard shouting, the fairies are on the plate! The fairies are on the plate!

The developed photo shows Frances laying on the grass surrounded by five fantastical dancing fairies. Then a second photo will show Elsie sitting jovially next to a mischievous little gnome. What the hell, right? Images are discarded by most as being nothing more than a clever prank pulled off by some very clever kids, but not everyone thought they were faked. For Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world's

most rational character, these images were absolute, undeniable proof of a world beyond our own. And if you were to look up these photos, you might think, how the hell was this supposedly smart dude fooled by this nonsense? Well, keep in mind, it's not like photo editing was very common back then. This happened long before the advent of digital photography, you know, before things like Photoshop existed. Also, when he first learned of the Cottingly fairy images,

he had just lost his son, and he desperately wanted to find more proof of the paranormal. He was in a profoundly emotional and vulnerable state, and for him, these photos, like seances, were further proof that there was something more to this life, which meant that, you know, his son might still be out there somewhere.

After getting his hands on a copy of the prints, Doyle set off on riding the coming of the fairies to defend their legitimacy. Unfortunately for Doyle, as old women in the late 1980s, both Francis and Elsie will admit they did fake the whole thing. They used homemade watercolor fairy cutouts. Very clever. However, they both still, interestingly, maintained that they really had seen fairies. They just weren't able to take photos of them, and they just wanted other people to believe them. They maintained that statement into their, you know, senior years. Around the same time Doyle publishes his book on fairies, he meets the one and only Harry Houdini.

The wildly famous, you know, esteemed American illusionist and escape artist. Interestingly enough, where Doyle was one of the Spiritualist Movement's most outspoken supporters, Houdini, as I recall from an early episode about him here on Time Suck, one of its greatest opponents, this disagreement will eventually lead to the end of their mutual admiration. However, before it all came crashing down, the two enjoyed a short period of friendship and spent a significant amount of time visiting each other and each other's families. Once, Houdini even performed an illusion akin to something you might see a spiritualist medium do

in Doyle's own home. Then after he revealed it was all an illusion to his author friend, Houdini hoped Doyle would stop going about publicly endorsing all the fantastical phenomena he witnessed. Houdini felt it was a disgrace to Doyle's literary reputation. Houdini was a strong believer that all mediums were fraudulent and would later devote many of his shows to exposing them, to revealing how they performed the seemingly miraculous things they did. As one source put it, Houdini the magician who debunked magic could not bear to see the great rationalist Arthur Conan Doyle enchanted by ghosts and frauds and so he did what any friend would. He set out to prove spiritualism false and rob his friend Doyle of the only comforting fiction that was keeping him sane. It was the least he

could do. It's pretty funny. The least he could do was rob his friend Doyle of the only comfort that was keeping him sane. However, Houdini's home performance backfired. Instead of realizing that all mediums were tricksters, Doyle instead now was convinced that Houdini himself indeed had true supernatural powers but was using them to discredit the spiritualist movement. Oh boy. That led to a massive public falling out between the two celebrities. The final two books Doyle wrote about spiritualism were The History of Spiritualism in 1926 and Phineas Speaks in 1927. The former covered the rise of the spiritualist movement in England from Doyle's own perspective

and was rife with some exceptionally incredulous statements. For example, throughout the book Doyle frequently asserts that the people who do not believe in spiritualism, they're the ridiculous ones. As the evidence can be laid out before them by way of seance and yet they still choose to doubt it. He wrote, one may say that scientific men may be divided into three classes. Those who have not examined spiritual phenomena at all, which does not in the least prevent them from giving very violent opinions. Love that phrasing again. Those who know that it is true but are afraid to say so. And finally the gallant minority who know it is true and who dare all in saying so.

This book really demonstrates just how severely Doyle believed in spiritualism. In it he's constantly asserting that the fact that spirits communicate with us from the other side is exactly that, a fact, an unassailable, undeniable, completely legitimate fact. He wrote, the possibility of spirit communication is simply a fact in nature and we do not approve of exalting any fact in nature into a religion. And then his final book, Phineas Speaks, is a compilation of spiritual communications he and his wife supposedly had with a spirit named Phineas, as well as departed family

members and friends. As he describes in the introduction, five years prior his wife discovered herself to have mediumistic abilities and the power of automatic writing, which was this process of a spirit taking over one's body and supposedly using their hand to write their message, at least according to spiritualists. The spirit's genes supposedly interacted with revealed great truths about the universe and prophecies of world events yet to come, many of which Doyle claimed would inevitably come true. In the book, he also makes the bold claim that Jesus Christ was actually a spiritualist medium, and he describes how his spirit guide Phineas acted as a mentor to his own children.

He wrote, On December 10, 1922, Phineas, my guide, came through for the first time, and from then onwards he took chief control, though by no means to the total exclusion of the others. In April 1924, the riding mediumship changed to semi-trans-inspirational talking. The medium never completely lost consciousness, but her hold upon her own organism was slight. The eyes were tightly closed and never opened until the power had left her. This has been the usual method of communication up to the present day, and careful readers will observe how the messages increased in power as fuller control was gained. I repeat that the sentiments expressed by no means represent those of the medium or

of myself. Speaking for both of us, I may say that though we share the admiration which the whole world feels for the life and teachings of Jesus, neither of us realized him in the vivid overwhelming fashion which was characteristic of some of these messages. I have personally often felt strangely unworthy of the role allotted to me of broadcasting things which seemed to come from so high a source and were worthy of a far more spiritual messenger. I have found it impossible for this reason to transcribe many of these communications, but their general tenor is not affected by the omission.

I would stress the fact, however, that much of the teaching is absolutely foreign to my wife's conscious convictions or to my own, and has pleased our guide not only to give glimpses of the life in the other world but to touch upon the conditions which we may personally hope to find. I hesitated to include any of this, but I reflected that there was nothing to show that such conditions were not common to many others and thus there was no special merit claimed by their attainment. They are interesting as very closely corroborating other descriptions of the other world which my wife has, I am sure, never read of, so that they could not have lingered in her subconscious memory. Our three children, Dennis, Malcolm, and Little Gene, were respectively 13, 11, and 9 when the mediumship began, the messages which the

control has sent them sometimes are sometimes playful, sometimes practical, always loving, like a wise and tender elder brother. To all of them he has been a guiding star in their young lives. Shortly after publishing his final book on July 7th, 1930, Arthur Conan Doyle died of a heart attack. He was found keeled over and check this out clutching a flower in the hall of Wendellshire Manor his home in Sussex and how beautiful is this the last words he ever spoke were to his wife to whom he said you are wonderful. Man how sad but also how incredible for her. Following his death, the seance was held at Royal Albert Hall in London. Thousands attended in hopes of seeing or speaking with the famous author, even if he was dead. Unfortunately, the writer must have been too busy catching up with his son,

maybe catching up with his brother, to hop back over to our side of the Vale, and he did not attend. Which is a bummer! I was really hoping something magical happened at the big gathering held in his honor. Maybe somebody attending was too critical and skeptical, too scientific and they killed the vibe. In his words again, If a small piece of metal may upset the whole magnetic installation, so strong and adverse psychic current may ruin a psychic circle. It is for this reason, and not on account of any superior credulity,

that practicing spiritualists get such results as are never attained by mere researchers. And that is it for this edition of Time Suck Short Sucks. If you enjoyed that story, and I certainly hope you did, check out the rest of the Bad Magic Catalog. Beefier, weirder rest of the Bad Magic catalog. Beefier, weirder episodes of Time Suck. Generally way more fucked up. Every Monday at noon Pacific time and new episode to the now long running paranormal

podcast Scared to Death every Tuesday at midnight. Big thank you to Molly Jean Box for her awesome initial research. Also thank you to Logan Keith, recording, uploading today's episode. Please go to badmagicproductions.com for all your bad magic needs and have yourself a great weekend. Add Magic Productions