Message #4085

[Morrison]

Doyle offered seven lectures in New York, all of which were well received. He spoke of his own experiences with mediums and at séances and showed lantern slides of spirit photographs, mediums exuding ectoplasm and even photographs of Katie King, smiling sweetly at one of Florence Cook's séances. Some of the happenings at the lectures were on the unsettling side though. Women fainted when the strange, spectral faces glowed on the screen, accompanied by the eerie strains of music from a Victrola. Others called out, begging for word from their dead loved ones. Every new slide brought a chorus of screams, moans and fainting spells. Distracted people wandered up and down the aisles, some sobbing uncontrollably. When the lecture ended though, Doyle's dressing room would be packed with well-wishers.



One of the massive crowds that turned out to hear Conan Doyle during his 1922 lecture tour in America
 It must have made for an weird and chilling series of talks -- and things were going to get worse. Newspaper reports of Doyle's New York lectures caused an extraordinary rush of suicides by people who wanted to see the "next world" immediately. Several of them made front page news. One woman, Maude Fancher, heard Doyle giving a speech on the radio and then murdered her son and consumed the contents of a bottle of Lysol cleaner. Before she swallowed the poison, which took a week to kill her, she wrote a letter to Conan Doyle and told him that Spiritualism inspired her to the act. Then, she left a detailed letter for her husband explaining that she wanted her baby to placed in her arms when she was placed in the tomb.
 

A Brooklyn potter, Frank Alexi, stabbed his wife in the head with an ice pick, claiming that he had seen a evil spirit sitting there that had followed him home from Carnegie Hall. A young man killed himself and his room mate because, he explained, "there were no gas bills in the afterlife."

Conan Doyle, when confronted with these and several other peculiar incidents, stated without hesitation that they were the result of "a misunderstanding of what Spiritualism is meant to be."