Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country. Edward Parnell

held at the Royal Albert Hall six days later, at which a vacant chair was left for him on the stage beside his wife – numerous mediums asserted that they had received beyond-the-grave communiqués from Spiritualism’s grand flag-bearer. With reports of these alleged messages threatening to become overwhelming, his widow pushed back, stating: ‘When he has got anything for the world he will communicate with us first.’ And it was not long before the family resumed their contact. Jean continued to hear Arthur’s voice at the sittings she conducted right up to her own passing in 1940, even claiming that her husband’s spirit had diagnosed her own cancer before her doctors; whether Pheneas was at this point still her otherworldly guide, I could not say.

      We do, however, have irrefutable proof of at least one last earthly trip Doyle was to make, a quarter of a century after his body had departed this life: a hundred-mile hearse ride. In 1955, after the Windlesham estate had been sold, his remains were exhumed, moved and reinterred, along with those of his spouse, beneath a mature oak in the southern corner of Minstead churchyard, close to their beloved New Forest retreat. It is a pleasant, peaceful final spot of rest; when I visit, ponies are galloping after each other in the adjacent paddock. Someone has placed a bent smoking pipe on top of his headstone too, which seems an appropriate touch.

Since the Doyles’ purchase of nearby Bignell House in 1925 it had acquired a reputation for being haunted – locals knew the family held their séances there, with the 1929 fire that gutted the property adding to its aura. Doyle put the blaze down to psychic forces, though sparks from the kitchen that ignited the thatched roof are the rational explanation. And, although he brought in builders to restore his house in the woods (today a private home set back from the busy main road), Doyle did not live to see the work completed. In 1961 Bignell’s new owners – both doctors trained at the University of Edinburgh, the same institution at which Doyle had also studied medicine – had the place exorcised. No more unexplainable noises were reported, and there were no further sightings of the tall, moustachioed, slipper-wearing figure of Conan Doyle’s ghost, said to search the attic for a missing red leather diary the late author required for his spectral memoirs.

Something of the new beginning that the Girlingites hoped for, as well as hints towards the answers to the existential questions that those others drawn to the forest longed to find, are also present in the work of Algernon Blackwood, a prolific Edwardian writer of ghost stories and what is often classified as ‘weird fiction’. (H. P. Lovecraft defined the ‘true weird tale’ as one that possesses a ‘certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces’.)

      On the suggestion of his publisher, Blackwood also penned a number of crossover tales intended to cash in on the success of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, successfully introducing, in 1908, the psychic investigator John Silence, who used his detective skills and other more esoteric abilities to bring about a resolution to various occult mysteries. The brilliantly named Silence is a figure similar to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr Hesselius (from the tale ‘Green Tea’ some forty years earlier) and was followed two years later by William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki ‘the Ghost Finder’, and several lesser imitators right up to The X-Files