Steppenwolf Theatre Presents Fake

Followers of Spiritism believed that trained mediums communicate with the dead, and they gathered for séances and spectacular demonstrations of hypnotism, automatic writing and poltergeist visitations. Spiritism spread widely across Europe and the United States during the later half of the nineteenth century; by 1897, it had attracted over eight million followers. Many of Spiritism’s most ardent supporters had lost a loved one; Mary Todd Lincoln held séances in the White House to contact her deceased son. Indeed, interest in Spiritism spiked after the Civil War and World War I, both periods of great loss.

Spiritist philosophers appropriated from Darwin’s theories, postulating that spirits evolve in the afterlife by ascending through a series of purifying spheres before joining God. They used Darwin’s model of natural selection to describe this purgatory-like journey. Darwin himself attended a séance in 1874, but he was unimpressed by the spectacle of sparks and levitating furniture. Later he wrote, “The Lord have mercy on us if we have to believe such rubbish.” While Darwin remained skeptical of Spiritism, other men of intellect, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were among its greatest champions; Doyle went so far as to launch an American lecture tour in which he shared documentation of séances and spirit photography. These convincing slides inspired screams, fainting and even suicide.

Fantastical creatures, such as the Cottingley Fairies, also fascinated Doyle. These fairies were photographed by two young girls, who took turns posing with the elegant winged creatures in their backwoods. Doyle published the photographs and defended their validity.

Fifty years after his death, the women admitted to fabricating the images with paper cutouts, but they insisted they had seen real fairies; they only created the fakes to get back at the adults who had disbelieved their genuine discovery.

Doyle also touted his friend Harry Houdini as evidence of the superna-tural. Although Houdini explained that his magic tricks were merely physical feats, Doyle insisted the magician possessed otherworldly powers. Their friendship ended when Doyle arranged a séance to contact Houdini’s recently deceased mother. After a medium generated a heartfelt letter in English from his mother’s ghost, Houdini revealed that she had only spoken Hungarian and Yiddish, and he denounced the séance as a sham. Doyle and Houdini stopped speaking, and their enmity manifested itself in a battle of hostile letters waged through the press.

Defying criticism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remained a resolute believer until his death in 1929. While the death of his child hastened Darwin’s rejection of Christianity, Doyle’s loss inspired a lasting faith in spiritism and the afterlife. Wounded by personal loss, both men sought to reinvestigate fundamental questions of faith—“Who are we?” and “Why do we exist?”