Lot No. 249

Influential Gothic horror story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Lot №249 refers to an item bought at an auction. We will learn that it is owned by Edward Bellingham, a student of Egyptology at an Oxford college. Bellingham shares accommodation with the narrator and a third student.

This extract is from the opening of the original text, first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1892. It has been condensed but no words have been changed. The complete original text is novella length (13000 words) but an illustrated two-part audio adaptation can be accessed below.

In what we will call Old College in Oxford there is a corner turret of an exceeding great age…..From the door a stone stair curves upwards spirally, passing two landings, and terminating in a third one…..

In May 1884, three young men occupied the sets of rooms on separate landings of the old stair. Each set consisted simply of a sitting-room and a bedroom.

The two corresponding rooms upon the ground-floor were also used. One was a coal-cellar, and the other as the living-room of the servant, Thomas Styles, whose duty it was to wait upon the three men above him.

The dwellers in the rooms in the old turret enjoyed a certain seclusion. Three occupied them now — Abercrombie Smith above, Edward Bellingham beneath him, and William Monkhouse Lee upon the lowest story.

We learn that Edward Bellingham, an Egyptologist, owns many ancient Egyptian artefacts, including a mummy. Smith is first curious about and then unsettled by a strange series of events concerning Bellingham.

The full original text Lot №249 is in the public domain. It is free to access here.

This two part version has been adapted by a British theater company.

About Lot No 249

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an energetic man, with many interests. These included the supernatural, the new science of forensics and Egyptology, very much in vogue during the Egyptomania craze of the 1890s. This was also a time of anxiety about British Empire — like Doctor Watson Bellingham is linked with overseas conflict (Sudan in this case).

Lot №249 was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1892.

Immediately popular Lot №249 has been influential ever since. Widely anthologized, has been praised by H. P. Lovecraft and Anne Rice.

The 1890s were a key decade for ‘shockers’ — as horror stories were then described. Bram Stoker brought literary respectability to vampires. Here Conan Doyle introduces the first animated malevolent mummies.

More on the various versions of Lot №249 (and the artwork it has inspired) here