Spiritualism in the Sherlockian Era

My Sherlockian series, An Irregular Detective Mystery, features a former Baker Street Irregular Tim Badger who, as an adult, opens his own detective-for-hire agency with his friend and colleague Ben Watson, a Black man who has a scientific mind and won’t play second fiddle. They attempt to solve cases by using Sherlock Holmes’ method with various levels of success.

Spiritualism, séances, Ouija boards were all part of the Victorian era, an era that seemed to embrace its cult of death—widow’s weeds, mourning jewelry (including some intricate designs made from the deceased’s hair, rings with images of skeletons, and jet jewelry), post-mortem photography of dead family members posed with the living, and the mystic realm itself.

Spiritualism got its start in America just after the Civil War, where families were desperate to communicate with their sons and fathers who perished in battle. It swiftly made its way across the pond, and soon séances and mediums who claimed to commune with the dead sprouted up.

Talking boards, or as we know them, Ouija boards, were first used in Maryland in 1886 and then manufactured in 1890 as their popularity spread. They were a parlor game, described as entertainment for the whole family, and could, when employed, “communicate with the dead, predict catastrophes, solve mysteries, even commit crimes,” according to the Library of Congress. That’s some parlor game! And once again, it traveled across the ocean to England and became just as popular there, enticing the unwary to be duped from their money. (A typical Ouija board has numbers and letters and a pointer called a planchette to spell out messages. Either the medium does it or everyone places their hands on the planchette to find the message, presumably given to the participants by spirits. People using the board may be unaware that it works, not by spirits directing your hand, but by something called the Ideomotor Reflex. That is, when one is unconsciously aware of moving the planchette to spell out words. The effect can easily be cancelled by blindfolding the participants, and then, strangely enough, the messages become gibberish.)

Séances became popular, and indeed, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a big believer in them. Of course, he was also a big believer in fairies and wrote the book THE COMING OF THE FAIRIES along with the photographs of said fairies by those British cousins who often visited together in the village of Cottingley, took the many photos of fairies at the bottom of their garden by the beck (stream), and managed to fool all the “experts” for decades until the 1980s when the girls, now octogenarian women, confessed how they faked it.

To be fair, Doyle assumed they were the manifestation of the girls’ thoughts into reality, not real fairies. I’m not sure if that’s better.

Doyle appreciated spiritualism and became an avid believer in spiritualism and psychic phenomenon in 1887, attending séances and experiments in telepathy. In the early days of Penny Dreadfuls and penny fiction—usually serialized magazine stories of lurid adventures, often with a supernatural element to them such as ghosts and vampires—Doyle was likely influenced by these and his own ventures into the supernatural to influence some of his Sherlock stories, like the glowing maw of the supernatural HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, for instance. But Holmes, being a logical and scientific man, saw through all that to reveal the true real world culprits. Personally, I have to hand it to Doyle for keeping his character true to himself and not making him into a foil for supernatural stories, despite the fact that Doyle believed in them.

And so I, too, have used supposed supernatural happenings as a backdrop to my Sherlockian pastiches. In THE ISOLATED SÉANCE, it’s a locked room mystery, and the seance is just the background to a logical explanation. So too, in the second entry in the series, THE MUMMY OF MAYFAIR, it might appear at first to be a mummy’s curse, but that is soon dispelled for a more logical and down-to-earth conclusion by my intrepid duo of Tim Badger and Ben Watson. And in the fourth outing, THE VAMPYRE CLIENT, well, it’s all in the title (the third title, THE MISPLACED PHYSICIAN skips the supernatural).

I suppose it’s fun to imagine another world intervening in heinous murder. But thanks to the careful mentoring that Holmes metes out to his proteges Badger and Watson, they keep their heads in the midst of vampyres, mummies, and other superstitious happenings.