Roger Straughan’s dog died from a malignant sarcoma. Upset, and wondering if it had suffered, he reached for a book on his bedside table. It happened to be a volume of short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Opening it at random, he read: “His exit was as speedy and painless as could be desired.” Startled, he checked the context and discovered that it referred to the death of a dog. On the preceding page he found a reference to “a frightful sarcoma”. A couple of pages later, at the start of a different story, he read the words “a lucky dog”, an epithet often used about his own deceased canine (though not about a dog in the story).
This cluster of seemingly appropriate references was the beginning of Straughan’s conviction that Conan Doyle was communicating via books by or about him. He would read something – a few words, a sentence, sometimes more – that seemed applicable to an event in his life or in the wider world. Much of what he received was fairly trivial, but struck him as pertinent to his own situation, and all the more credible for it.
Though convinced that some intelligence was involved, Straughan had to consider the possibility that it was not Conan Doyle. It could be another spirit, impersonating Sir Arthur for its own gratification, or even some kind of demon. The best way to decide was to see how the responses he obtained mapped onto what he knew about Conan Doyle’s personality and interests.
From an analysis of the communications, he concluded that many did map, and much of the book is taken up with their categorisation based on Conan Doyle’s activities.
These include medicine, sports, military matters, current affairs, puzzles and, of course, spiritual and religious views. They seemed to Straughan to be consistent with Conan Doyle’s opinions when he was alive, and convinced him that the man himself, and not an imposter, was ‘talking’ to him.
What are we to make of Straughan’s remarkable story?
Many of the passages reproduced seem to reflect on the questions asked with uncanny accuracy. This does not seem to be a hoax, and Straughan’s sincerity is not in doubt. The other possibility is coincidence, which Straughan dismisses as unlikely, given the number of hits, particularly when they occur in clusters.
That is a fair point, but takes insufficient account of our ability to find patterns in the random. Straughan considered fewer than half of the readings he accumulated during this project to be significant, and has omitted some of the most startling but most personal ones. Ploughing through the entire corpus from beginning to end might give an outsider a different perspective.
Straughan found that he could tell when a result would be strong because he had a feeling of confidence, but this feeling cannot be conveyed in print. Also, the messages not only commented on affairs: they were able to predict them. This takes them to a different level and increases the possibility that Straughan was selecting passages rather than being directed to them, and was then imposing meaning on them post hoc.
It would be good to think that Sir Arthur is looking down benignly and intervening in earthly affairs to prove the survival of his personality after death, and he may well have been doing so via the medium of Roger Straughan’s library.
Straughan is convinced he was provided over a long period with such a personal assurance, but the case is not as compelling to someone who did not go through the process but only hears about it second-hand – a general problem in psychical research.
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