"The Very Happiest Tiding": Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Correspondence with Arkansas Spiritualists

Abstract

THE SPIRITUALIST MOVEMENT BEGAN DURING the wee hours of April 1, 1848, in the village of Hydesville, New York. On that April Fools' Day morning, two teenaged sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, had what to observers appeared to be communications with a ghost who claimed to have been murdered at the house years before their family moved in. Mysterious knocks emanated from the walls of the Fox's house. A neighbor-not the girls-suggested they might be spelling out a message: one knock for a, two knocks for b, and so forth. Laboriously rendering each word in knocks, the spirit provided details about the manner of its murder and subsequent burial in the cellar of the Fox home. News of this event was picked up first by the New York Tribune and subsequently by other newspapers. Margaret and Kate Fox promptly became famous. On the heels of this story, thousands of men and women across the United States discovered their own ability to function as mediums, and spiritualism suddenly was all the rage. Everyone, it seemed, was either experimenting with it or sharply criticizing it. For some of its participants, spiritualism was no more than a pleasant group diversion for long, dreary afternoons spent in the parlor. For people grieving the loss of a loved one, however, it offered solace and a feeling of re-connection with the departed. Others, including prominent intellectuals and reformers, were drawn to the movement by a desire to discover truth or to understand better the mysteries of the universe. Spiritualism quickly established itself on the American and European continents. It has been estimated that within seven years of the April Fools' Day incident at the Fox house there were two million spiritualists in the United States.1 Arkansas was not left out of the phenomenon. In April 1872, Claire Robertson advertised her demonstrations of psychic manifestations in the Arkansas Gazette. On February 16, 1877, the newspaper stated there were one hundred and fifty members of the Spiritualist sect living in the city of Little Rock. During 1879, numerous reports of spirit apparitions appeared in the Gazette.2 Through the following century, a number of prominent Arkansans professed their belief in spiritualism. William Grant Still, a composer of orchestral music, and his wife, Verna Arvey, a concert pianist and journalist, consulted spiritualist mediums for years.3 Well-known Arkansas author Bernie Babcock was also a spiritualist.4 Mrs. Babcock founded and was the first curator of the Arkansas Museum of Science and History in Little Rock. Housed in the old Tower Building, the museum's quarters were originally a Civil War arsenal where many soldiers suffered and died. Since its inception there have been reports by its staff of a variety of apparitions. A 1995 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article identified this MacArthur Park building as one of the most haunted structures in the South.5 Perhaps the most prominent spiritualist in Arkansas history was the author, editor, journalist, and clubwoman, Lessie Stringfellow Read. Read moved to Fayetteville with her adoptive parents in 1911. Her adoptive father, Henry Martyn Stringfellow, was an internationally acclaimed horticulturist whose biography and own spiritualist affiliations were noted in Who's Who in America.7 Miss Lessie, as she came to be known around Fayetteville, was active in the Red Cross, the women's suffrage movement, the establishment of Fayetteville's first public library, and many other civic affairs. Beginning her career as a journalist, Lessie Read rose to the editorship of the local newspaper, the Fayetteville Democrat, after her boss resigned from the post to volunteer during World War I. In addition to editing the Fayetteville newspaper for twenty-eight years, Lessie handled all publicity and edited the monthly news bulletin for the General Federation of Women's Clubs, which was at that time the largest women's organization in the world. …