Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini: Their Friendship (and Debates) Continue? Part Two - New Evidence.

In Part One - The History, the authors highlighted Doyle's and Houdini's beliefs and attitudes about spiritualism as well as noting their well documented friendship (Stek and Schwartz, 2011). We discussed some claimed communications from the deceased Doyle and the complete failure of the Halloween night Houdini seances, now ongoing for over eighty years. We outlined a brief history of scientific approaches to the survival hypothesis, and noted some of the controls used to rule out an alternate hypothesis of a 'cheating' medium. We ended by asking the question, "Could a well-designed experiment with a proponent of spiritualism and either of two great skeptics of the afterlife provide some incremental evidence for the survival hypothesis?" In Part Two - New Evidence, we offer here: a) New carefully documented anecdotal evidence which led us to propose b) A sophisticated experimental design to provide confirmatory evidence. Upon the eventual completion of the experiment we hope to present the results in Part Three. Even if neither time nor funding becomes available to complete the experiment, it nonetheless stands as an accurate description of how a scientific approach can begin to unravel details about the survival hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]