How Arthur Conan Doyle invented the killer mummy

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote several horribly chilling tales of the supernatural – Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Thanks to Mark Gatiss’s yuletide adaptations of the terrifying Edwardian ghost stories of MR James, sleepless nights spent cowering at the prospect of a much less benign visitant than Father Christmas have become a festive tradition in recent years. For this year’s Ghost Story for Christmas, however, Gatiss has dramatised a tale by a contemporary of James’s less well-known for his ability to make the flesh creep: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Conan Doyle (1859-1930) wrote several horribly chilling tales of the supernatural, although this might come as a surprise to readers who know only his Sherlock Holmes stories. When there are eerie goings-on in the Holmes yarns, a rational explanation is inevitably vouchsafed at the end of the story, à la Scooby-Doo: The Hound of the Baskervilles turning out to be an ordinary pooch daubed with phosphorus, and so on.

“[This] world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply,” declares Holmes in “The Sussex Vampire”, a story in which he proves that there are no vampires in Sussex. And yet this world was not big enough for Conan Doyle.

He was a spiritualist and a believer in psychic phenomena. Indeed, Doyle became the Danny Robins of his day, collecting other people’s ghostly encounters for The Uncharted Shore, a series of articles in the Strand magazine.

With such interests, it is unsurprising that Doyle became an outstanding writer of what he called “twilight tales”; and in one sense an unjustly neglected pioneer. In his 1892 story Lot No 249 – the one that Gatiss has chosen to dramatise this year – he was the first writer to come up with the idea of a centuries-old Egyptian mummy as a malevolent force.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Ring of Thoth inspired the 1932 film The Mummy – Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

Along with another mummy story by Doyle, The Ring of Thoth, this yarn inspired the 1932 film The Mummy, in which Boris Karloff’s bandaged baddie secured a place in the horror pantheon alongside Dracula and Frankenstein’s Monster.

The villain of Lot No 249 is Bellingham, an effete Egyptology student at “Old College” in Oxford, who buys a 4,000-year-old mummy at auction. There is no overheated Gothic prose here: setting and style are low-key, and there is an almost Wodehousian tone initially as medical student Smith, who has the room below Bellingham’s in college, deduces that weird noises coming from Bellingham’s room mean that he has secreted a girlfriend in there.

The truth is all the more horrible for being arrived at slowly: Bellingham has found a means of reviving the mummy and is sending it out to attack his enemies. Smith – basically Dr Watson in all but name – is a British bulldog type who can face any everyday peril without a qualm, but confesses to being “unmanned” by an encounter with the mummy.

Boris Karloff in the 1932 motion picture The Mummy – Bettmann

“You’ll find that your filthy Egyptian tricks won’t answer in England,” Smith yells at Bellingham, and there is a strong sense, at a time when the cracks were showing in the Imperial project, of the British having been unwise to meddle with cultures they do not understand.

As in many of Doyle’s stories, a rational explanation is offered at the end: poor overworked Smith has been imagining things. But, unlike in the Holmes stories, the emotional reality of Doyle’s horror tales lies in the supernatural. And some of his stories offer no sop to sceptics.

In the goosebump-inducing The Leather Funnel (1902), a man goes to sleep with the eponymous battered funnel at his bedside and has an appalling vision of the judicial torture of the real-life murderess Madame de Brinvilliers in 1676, in which the funnel played a gruesome part. On waking, he discovers that the history books prove his vision to be accurate in every particular.

Deadly vision: illustration of The Leather Funnel in The Strand (1903)

It’s a fiction that complements the statement Doyle made in one of his Strand articles: “There is nothing … more certain, than that past events may leave a record upon our surroundings which is capable of making itself felt, heard, or seen for a long time after-wards.”

In later life, Doyle was much taken with claims made by his friend, the explorer Percy Fawcett Wilson, that prehistoric creatures – Monsters from the dawn of Man’s existence – were still at large in remote parts of South America. Wilson’s theories inspired The Terror of Blue John Gap (1910), which posits the more alarming idea of a prehistoric monster terrorising a sleepy Derbyshire village.

A young doctor staying in the village to convalesce from TB hears rumours of a horrible creature snatching the local farmers’ sheep. His investigations lead to a climactic battle with the monster – “such a creature as no nightmare had ever brought to my imagination … bear-like – if one could conceive a bear which was ten-fold the bulk of any bear seen upon earth” – but the local paper dismisses his experiences as hallucinations induced by “cerebral lesions of tubercular origin”.

A man whose encounters with the supernatural are met with disbelief was a recurring trope in Doyle’s later horror stories; it is hard not to see this as a reflection of the derision he endured as an increasingly vehement propagandist for spiritualism (he would eventually resign from the Society for Psychical Research, finding it excessively sceptical, and in the 1920s famously fell for the Cottingley Fairies hoax).

Perhaps Doyle’s finest expression of this theme was in The Horror of the Heights (1913), a futuristic tale in which “aeronauts” who attempt to break the altitude record of 30,000 ft come to mysterious sticky ends. An aviator called Joyce-Armstrong is convinced that the upper atmosphere is home to “jungles of the air” in which dangerous creatures live; when his theories are pooh-poohed he determines to prove them.

Taking his monoplane to 40,000 ft, he relishes his encounters with “air-snakes” and beautiful giant jellyfish – each “far larger, I should judge, than the dome of St Paul’s” – but also meets a horrible squid-like creature “so elastic and gelatinous … that never for two successive minutes was it the same shape”. The “vague, goggling eyes which were turned always upon me were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred.”

A Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No. 249 is on BBC Two and BBC i-Player at 10pm on Christmas Eve – Colin Hutton

Joyce-Armstrong manages to escape its clutches but is determined to return to the “air-jungle” to secure some proof of his discoveries. Only readers with strong stomachs should follow him on that second mission.

One can read the story as a warning against hubris – “There is surely something divine in man himself that he should rise so superior to the limitations which Creation seemed to impose”, Joyce-Armstrong declares as he ascends to the heavens – or as a celebration of the courage of pioneering explorers and airmen. Perhaps, as less and less of the globe remained unexplored, it was something of that spirit that inspired Doyle to attempt to transcend the borders that separate the natural and supernatural.

It is hard not to deduce, in any case, that the power of Doyle’s uncanny stories derives from his being able to believe that the eldritch creatures he devised might possibly exist: if fairies can be real, why not zombie mummies and giant flying jellyfish? As Doyle put it in Lot No 249, “the wisdom of men is small, and the ways of nature are strange, and who shall put a bound to the dark things which may be found by those who seek for them?”

A Ghost Story for Christmas: Lot No. 249 is on BBC Two and BBC i-Player at 10pm on Christmas Eve

%n

Discover Telegraph Wine Cellar’s new wine club. Enjoy expertly chosen bottles at exclusive member prices. Plus, free delivery on every order.