Introduction
While Arthur Conan Doyle is largely remembered for his gothic dective stories about Sherlock Holmes, few seem to know about his serious and rigourous study of ghosts that was prevelant both in his life and the Victorian period more generally. It was during this time that serveral well known academics, including Doyle, tried to prove the existence of ghosts using many of the same techniques we still use today such as photographs, mediums, and temperature readings. Perhaps most famously was a test that attempted to weigh the soul of a person. Performed by Duncan MacDougal in 1907, the experiement weighed a person immediately before and after death. MacDougal concluded that there was a 21 gram difference between a dead and near-dead patient and thus the soul must logically weight aproximately 21 grams.
Through a modern lens, our dimissal of such studies derrive largely from our attempts to dimiss the occult more generally. There are clearly other expalantions for why someone would weight less immediately after death such as the expulsion of gases from the body or the releasing of one's bowels (just like there are 'other explanations for why someone thought they saw a ghost). Doyle's book and his work in this field more generally is a demand to take these stories seriously.
For him, this work is both academic and personal. Pheneas Speaks is a documentation between a medium, the Doyle family, and their dead sibling/child Pheneas. The book is a 200 page transcript of what they discussed and a list of reasons the Doyle family was speaking Pheneas through a medium rather than just a medium pretending to speak to the dead.
In an examination of his other works, we see this same trend of academic study as a means of giving validity to these experiences. While the book does a good job of summarizing where the field is and some of the important figures who helped adance the study of ghosts, the book also takes great pains to maintain the academic and professional credability of the professors and researchers who performed these studies. Doyle describes many of the researchers as objective and mentally sound professionals who have emperically and scienftically proven the existence of ghosts.
The images contained in both works reflects the personal and professional manner with which Doyle undertook this project. In Pheneas Speaks' opening pages we see a photo of the Doyle family minutes before sitting down with a medium. This documenation lends credence of Doyle's claims that this is an event that actually took place and something that him and his family not only took very seriously. Even in a personal account of what is very clearly an intimate moment for a family that had just lost one of its members, Doyle still insists on using it as an oppertunity to further advance his study of the field.
This archiving is also at play in The History of Spiritualism as the book provides several pictures and drawings of events that played a key role in proving (in Doyle's eyes) the exitence of spirits in the every day. As we'll see from the other exhibits, this type of archival work is not free from the ideologies of those who document it and how that information is kept and documented tell a much larger story of how a society establishes a relationship to the supernatural and what it means in a wider cultural context.