Conan Doyle's Sceptical Reader: Ghost Stories, Science, and Spiritualism

This chapter explores the neglected supernatural fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle. It argues that there is a tension between Doyle's well-documented commitment to spiritualism and his creation of fictions that traffic in Gothic and sensational fictive tropes. But his ghost stories often represent their implied reader as a sceptic, in ways that suggest both his own will to investigate the paranormal, and his mission to convince doubters of the reality of mediumistic encounters.