Spooks Who Wear Clothes (article 26 october 1917)
Spooks Who Wear Clothes is an article published in the Daily Express on 26 october 1917.
Spooks Who Wear Clothes
SIR A. CONAN DOYLE'S ASTRAL HOSPITAL.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described with interesting detail the life of the spirit after death, in the course of an address on "The New Revelation" before the London Spiritualist Alliance, Ltd., in Suffolk-street, Pall Mall, yesterday evening.
He said that he took into account only those revelations of spirits whose detailed evidence about fact in this life had proved after investigation to be true. "Thus the veracity of a spirit named Dorothy Postlethwaite has been tested,"
said Sir Arthur, "and she described, at a seance I attended, the life in a sphere around the world into which she had passed after death.
"She possessed a body exactly the counterpart of her earthly body in health, but of an ethereal nature. It wore clothes. She communicated the information that in her state there was no such thing as physical pain, but there could be mental anxiety.
"These beings take nourishment,"
added Sir Arthur, "and have pleasures, such as music and other arts, but their life is shorter than the earthly life, and they know that they leave one life to pass on to other spheres."
Miss Postlethwaite was in this world a Roman Catholic, and remained of the same faith in the next, but she communicated the information that there were Protestants. Mohametans, and even atheists in her spirit sphere, and these last suffered no more than the others.
From communications which Sir Arthur said had been received during the last six months be gathered that the passing through death is almost always easy and painless, that the character of the individual is not altered by that change, so that fools and knaves exist in the spirit world as they do here.
After introduction into the new sphere, where the spirit meets those it had loved and lost, it undergoes a shorter or longer period of sleep "before entering on new duties."
"Not one of those who has passed wants to come back,"
said Sir Arthur, who added his belief that the evidence of the spirits proved the non-existence of Hell. Some of the spirits, however, seem to pass through a probationary period, which he described as "rather a hospital for weakly souls than a penal community."
