Arthur and Me

Book excerpt: As a high achiever in the financial sector Ann Treherne seems amongst the least likely to believe in paranormal phenomena. But then as she describes frankly in this book, she was confronted by a profound personal experience - a traumatic premonition of a national tragedy.Her struggle to make sense of that experience and her sense of guilt for not having attempted to act on the information received, leads her on a journey of investigation and exploration into the strange world of the paranormal.Ann had the good fortune to meet an academic with a sympathetic interest in parapsychology and this gave her space to take her experiences seriously and to acquire skills in research and investigation methods. Part of her education involved participating in vigils in haunted locations, evaluating mental mediumship and sitting for physical phenomena. Even under these controlled conditions, she had some remarkable experiences.Some of the phenomena that Ann describes are truly incredible, such that even direct witnesses may come to doubt their own senses. For those of us who were not there, we may be faced with the dilemma of accepting at face value reports of occurrences that go well beyond our personal boggle threshold (as Mairi says in Chapter 14. 'You wouldn't believe it if you hadn't seen it yourself') or doubting the testimony of someone whose acumen and integrity we trust implicitly. In such cases the wise claimant would do well to follow Professor Archie Roy's advice to make immediate records and compare accounts from independent witnesses. These are exactly the steps followed by Ann in documenting the experiences of members of her circle. Nevertheless, the reported effects seem comparable to the most striking claims made during the heyday of the Victorian seance era.Ultimately, the reader must make sense of them for themselves, since despite academic interest in Spiritualism over the last 150 years, we seem no further forward in constructing a scientific understanding of people's experiences. Ann describes events in such a matter of fact way that we may need to remind ourselves that they may be construed as evidence of survival of bodily death - a question which seems to fall outside the scope of science, but surely nothing could be more important than exploring the full nature of what it is to be human and to recognise the fundamental properties of consciousness.It was during these sessions with her group that Ann recorded the first intervention of a communicator that would reveal himself to be none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These communications took place over a six year period during which Sir Arthur directed Ann to find a building that was to become The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre, in Edinburgh. As her Editor states, "Many people have claimed to be in communication with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle since his death, but few of them have documented their claims as carefully as Ann Treherne, and there are none whose communications have resulted in the establishment of a large Centre in his name (in Edinburgh)."