A case study in credulity

by R. Dean Brock

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, born May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, is most-remembered for his popular works of fiction detailing the adventures of that intrepid detective Sherlock Holmes, and his assistant, Watson. Throughout Doyle’s various works, Holmes was depicted as a sort of “Renaissance man,” learned and well-spoken, a bastion of “right reason.” By coupling his acute powers of observation with his critical thinking skills, Holmes always solved the crime and nabbed the culprit. Generations of readers were enthralled by such novels as The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four, among Doyle’s two other novels and numerous short stories featuring Holmes and Watson. Doyle’s fictional detective continues to enjoy a degree of popularity among readers in the new Millennium, and remains the subject of both television dramas and live theater.

Ironically, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, himself, proved to be anything but a tower of rationality. By saying this, we refer not to his avowed interest in the spiritualist movement which flourished in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, of which the séance and the medium were hallmarks; neither do we refer to his belief in certain varieties of elemental spirits; in essence, such beliefs are fundamentally no more “bizarre” than many religious beliefs that countless millions still adhere to, today. Rather, we refer to his willingness to abandon his critical faculties and publicly endorse what are now known to be crude hoaxes, simply out of his need to believe.

Among the hoaxes which Doyle embraced was the phenomenon popularly dubbed the “Fox rappings,” so-named after two sisters from Hydesville, New York, Kate and Margaret Fox, who claimed, in 1848, to be in communication with the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered many years before, in the basement of the house where they lived. The story of the Fox rappings was a sensation in the press when it first came out, and the two sisters became immediate celebrities. Indeed, the Fox rappings are considered by many to be the event which gave rise to “modern spiritualism” (a term employed here to distinguish 19th century spiritualism from ideas about the afterlife arising from earlier times).

Quite simply, the Fox sisters claimed that they had heard rapping noises in their house during the night, and over a period of time had developed a sort of language that allowed them to communicate, through various codified knocks, with the spirit of the deceased peddler. Eventually, their communication with the deceased soul became more sophisticated, progressing to automatic writing, and finally to voice communication.

Predictably, for a period when traveling medicine shows and “snake oil” were practically ubiquitous, self-styled mediums began to spring up across the frontier American landscape, conducting séances and purporting to be in contact with the “other side.” Some did this merely for donations; others charged, outright, for their services. Either way, money was surely the motive with a sizeable percentage of these “praciticioners.” Perfecting their “art” over time, each medium devised an array of “signs” to indicate to external observers that they were in contact with the departed, thus ensuring the receipt of their fee: the table might rise, objects might mysteriously appear upon the table, or the medium would simply take on a glassy-eyed appearance and begin to intone the words of the spirit communicating with him or her. Some mediums simply stuck with the time-honored tradition of “spirit-rapping.”

Skeptics were around, then as now, and they suspected – rightly so – that much of this mediumship constituted parlour tricks and cheap theatrics, perpetrated upon gullible individuals eager to communicate with their deceased loved ones. However, regardless of whatever warnings or admonitions the skepticsl offered to the general public, uncritical belief in spiritualism, séances, and mediums continued to rise, giving birth to a range of metaphysical traditions, among them the “Theosophy” of Madame Helena Blavatasky. Theosophical ideas have since been incorporated into many of the “New Age” philosophies of the present day, including the UFO “contactee cults” of the 1950s.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, despite his fame-status as a prolific writer, was one of those who “wished to believe.” Consequently, when Margaret Fox confessed, in 1888, in front of an audience of 2000 persons, that she and her sister had faked the “rapping” noises by cracking their toe joints, and even went so far as to demonstrate the technique in her stocking feet, Doyle simply refused to believe. He wrote, “Nothing that she could say in that regard would in the least change my opinion…that there is an occult influence connecting us with an invisible world….”

This, however, was not to be the greatest of Doyle’s follies. In 1917, two young ladies living in Cottingley, Yorkshire – Elsie Wright (16) and Francis Griffith (10) – produced photographs that they had taken with a simple box camera, showing each of them interacting with various species of fairies that lived in their English country garden. The photos, which look horribly fraudulent to the modern eye accustomed to television, movie, and advertising special effects, apparently did not look so fraudulent to many individuals in the early 20th century, when photography was still a relatively new innovation. Many people accepted the girls’ story at face value, and lauded the photographs as incontrovertible proof that elemental nature spirits exist.

Foremost among these “believers” was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote a book about the Cottingley photographs, The Coming of the Fairies, a book which is still in print, to the best of this author’s knowledge, and which some still undoubtedly accept as at least partially factual. After this volume was published, Doyle went on to argue at length in various public venues for the authenticity of the Cottingley photographs, and the existence of fairies in general, even as he was lampooned in the press for being of lesser mind than his fictional invention, Sherlock Holmes.

The fact of matter, in regard to the Cottingley photographs, is that the “fairies” not only look like two-dimensional paper cutouts, but their manner of dress and and hair arrangements look curiously like the standards of the period, rather than what one might expect of bonafide elementals. The photographs, likewise, fall to pieces when examined by an expert: the lighting is all wrong, the fairy-wings are stationary and not blurred, even when the fairies appear to be hovering in the air about Elsie’s sweet face.

Elsie and Francis were still alive in 1982, and admitted in an interview that they had faked the first four of their fairy pictures. Presumably, their failure to admit that all the photographs were fakes is to be taken as an unspoken claim that the remaining photograph is genuine, despite the fact that Fred Gettings, in his 1978 book Ghosts in Photographs, had revealed the source of the fairy cutouts – a 1915 child’s book illustrated by Claude Shepperson.