my long journey, turning across the busy dual carriageway to absorb the atmosphere of the forest around the monument, wondering if this was also where Dad and Chris happened upon their infamous serpent. If so, perhaps another less grand marker would now be appropriate?
That the spot where an event so memorable might not hereafter be forgotten – close to here a man and his son watched a grass snake devour a fully grown frog.
Philip Hoare’s book England’s Lost Eden relates the strange events and portents surrounding the death of William Rufus in wonderful detail, before going on to catalogue the hypnotic attraction that the mysterious, superstition-filled Arcadia offered towards the end of the Victorian age to those who came here seeking a higher plane. He tells of how the forest became host to Mary Ann Girling, a farm labourer’s daughter from Suffolk who claimed to be the stigmata-scarred Messiah, but ended up encamped in increasing squalor with her rag-tag band of followers outside the village of Hordle; their Rapture never did arrive, just starvation and disappointment and, for Mary Ann, the cancer of the womb that would kill her.
At the same time as Mary Ann’s New Forest Shakers were attracting day-tripping tourists to gawk at their sorry spectacle, an eccentric Spiritualist barrister, Andrew Peterson, channelled the ghost of Sir Christopher Wren at séances and built a monument to the lure of the esoteric at nearby Sway. Today, as I walk along the narrow lane at its base, the 218ft folly – believed still to be the tallest non-reinforced concrete structure in the world – seems somewhat forlorn, squeezed in among houses and bungalows and crying out for a grander backdrop. Glimpsed, however, from a distance, jutting above the breeze-blown trees, its incantatory effect remains undiminished.
A mile and a half south-east of the Rufus Stone is Minstead. At the back of the village’s delightfully ramshackle, red-brick All Saints’ Church lies the grave of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, another who found comfort in the forest, drawn to Spiritualism after the death of his eldest son Kingsley, who was wounded at the Somme and died in 1918 from the resulting complications. The originator of Sherlock Holmes had famously been taken in by the fairies photographed by two girls, sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright and her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths, at Cottingley near Bradford. The images came to Doyle’s attention via the Theosophical Society, and he broke the sensational story in a December 1920 article in The Strand magazine; the women finally confessed to the fakery more than sixty years later, long after Doyle had printed his full investigation of the pictures in his book The Coming of the Fairies. Doyle maintained that ‘there is enough already available to convince any reasonable man that the matter is not one which can be readily dismissed’, albeit adding that: ‘I do not myself contend that the proof is as overwhelming as in the case of spiritualistic phenomena.’
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By this late point in his life Doyle’s faith in Spiritualism was seemingly without scepticism. He was by no means alone in his beliefs, as the unprecedented slaughter of European youth that had taken place during the First World War had led to an upsurge of interest from those of the bereaved who wished to attempt communication with their dead loved ones. In 1927 Doyle published Pheneas Speaks, a catalogue of comforting messages received from the other realm at private family séances by his second wife Jean, who acted as medium. Pheneas was their third-century BC Mesopotamian spirit guide, who directed first Jean’s automatic writing (referred to as ‘inspired writing’ by Doyle) and later ‘semi-trance inspirational talking’. Many of these séances were held at their mock-Tudor New Forest retreat, Bignell House, a couple of miles east of the Rufus Stone; Pheneas even requested a room of his own in the cottage, decorated in mauve, which would psychically lend itself to ‘clearer vibrations’. The family conferred with departed relatives including their late, war-wounded son Kingsley, and Doyle’s brother-in-law – the novelist E. W. Hornung (husband of Doyle’s sister Connie), author of the Raffles ‘gentleman thief’ stories and a renowned non-believer in Spiritualism while alive. John Thadeus Delane, a former editor of The Times who had died in 1879 – a person and name, according to Doyle, apparently ‘quite unknown to my wife’ – also appeared in the ether for a chat. When asked whether he still edited a paper in the next world, Delane replied: ‘There is no need here. We know everything. It is like wireless in the air, and all so much bigger and larger and so splendid. It is great, this life.’
Later, at the same June 1922 séance, Doyle’s thirteen-year-old son Denis, ‘a great lover of snakes’, asked Kingsley: ‘Where are the snakes with you?’ To which his ghost brother replied: ‘In their own place, old chap. We are so proud of you, Denis, and the way you are developing in every way.’ Reading these transcripts now it’s difficult to imagine how the man responsible for the creation of the arch-rationalist Sherlock Holmes could accept these banal messages so unquestioningly as solid evidence of an afterlife, and not as the understandable attempts (either consciously or subconsciously) of his wife – who had also lost her brother during the Great War – to bring comfort to a grieving old man and his family.
At the beginning of the 1920s Doyle struck up an unlikely rapport with Harry Houdini, the American magician and escapologist who was starting to engage in a mission to expose fraudulent mediums, hoping in the process to find a genuine means of communicating with his dead mother.* In the same month that Denis asked his vanished brother about the snakes, Jean engaged in automatic writing in the presence of Houdini, producing seven paragraphs purporting to be from the showman’s mother. Houdini was unimpressed – the deceased woman’s English was poor for one thing, and Jean’s transcript failed to capture her way of talking. The two men’s friendship began to fracture thereafter, their disagreement later magnifying into a high-profile spat. Reading them now, the words alleged to have come through to Jean from the late Mrs Houdini bear a striking resemblance to those received from John Thadeus Delane: ‘It is so different over here, so much larger and bigger and more beautiful …’
In a 1927 magazine article Doyle argued the case that various Victorian writers – notably Oscar Wilde and Jack London – continued to produce works from the other side. Doyle also conducted a conversation himself, through another medium, Florizel von Reuter, with a figure he reckoned could well have been Charles Dickens, and who went on to provide him with the solution to the mystery of Edwin Drood: ‘Edwin is alive and Chris is hiding him’ (‘Chris’, according to Doyle, being the Reverend Crisparkle).
‘Every year spring throws her green veil over the world and anon the red autumn glory comes to mock the yellow moon.’ Purported communications from Wilde like the preceding sentence (part of a larger tranche of writing said to emanate from the dead aesthete) were, however, Doyle’s favoured evidence of posthumous literary work. They were transmitted to the hand of a medium, Mrs Dowden, which was in turn laid upon their transcriber, a Mr Soal. Doyle seizes on their florid language and use of colourful adjectives as proof of their famous sender’s identity: ‘This is not merely adequate Wilde. It is exquisite Wilde. It is so beautiful that it might be chosen for special inclusion in any anthology of his writings.’ Doyle does not seem able to countenance the possibility that he is being duped:
What then is the alternative explanation? I confess that I can see none. Can anyone contend that both Mr Soal and Mrs Dowden have a hidden strand in their own personality which enables them on occasion to write like a great deceased writer, and at the same time a want of conscience which permits that subconscious strand to actually claim that it is the deceased author? Such an explanation would seem infinitely more unlikely than any transcendental one can do.
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It would not be long before the 71-year-old author joined his fellow literary giants London, Wilde and Dickens, as well as his eldest son, Kingsley, and his former friend Harry Houdini.† At eight thirty on the morning of 7 July 1930 – seated in a basket chair