ABSTRACT
Apart from his famous tales of detection, Arthur Conan Doyle was repeatedly drawn to the paranormal in his fiction, writing tales of time travel and evolutionary fantasy, among other subjects. As early as 1881, he attended a lecture on spiritualism; between 1885 and 1888, he attended a number of ‘table-rapping’ seances, and subsequently read F.W.H. Myers’ Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. Body transfer is dealt with in Robert Macnish’s story ‘The Metempsychosis’ and also formed the subject of the 1882 novel Vice Versa by Conan Doyle’s friend F. Anstey. Of all the sciences which have puzzled the sons of men, none had such an attraction for the learned Professor von Baumgarten as those which relate to psychology and the ill-defined relations between mind and matter. Professor von Baumgarten was tall and thin, with a hatchet face and steel-grey eyes, which were singularly bright and penetrating.
