Reviewed by Ciaran Farrell
Ann Treherne is a truly remarkable woman who has written two equally remarkable volumes about how she came to make the transition from a high-powered business career as the CEO of a subsidiary company of a large international bank to running and managing the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre. The Centre is constituted as a charity and was opened in October 2011 with a mission to make spirituality accessible to everyone. This includes the training and development of mediums through courses, talks, and demonstrations which has enabled the Centre to take on the spiritualist mantel of Sir Arthur who was a great spiritualist, and become a national and international leader in the spiritualist field.
Ann is a paranormal investigator and long-standing member of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research (SSPR). She specialises in research into ‘the biofield’ of human and other auras. Ann is also a sought-after, engaging speaker, giving talks and running training courses on psychic and mediumistic development as well as investigations.
Ann left school at 16 with a handful of Ordinary Grade Certificates and worked her way up through the ranks of the banking profession, breaking through glass ceilings as she climbed the career ladder. However, by the turn of the millennium, she experienced a series of traumatic premonitions which she took as a ‘wake-up call’ that warned her that she was on the wrong personal path which led her to begin her quest for knowledge of the psychic world. This led her to ‘open up’ her latent psychic faculties and through connections within her hometown of Edinburgh, the birthplace of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, she was contacted by his spirit. He had sought Ann out to give her a special mission to set up the Centre. She used her business acumen and the contacts she had developed in order to set up what became known as the ‘Thursday group’. This was a spiritual and mediumistic development group dedicated to channel Sir Arthur and other spirits so they could accomplish the mission he had given her.
In 2006 the group was informed by spirit that the group would produce physical phenomena, and that they would be taught various about basic concepts before they should be disseminated to the world at large. During the five-year period covered by Ann’s first book (reviewed by Steve Hume), Sir Arthur guides Ann and her group to a very special building with a history that would become the Centre.
In her second book, The Vortex, Ann continues the story of how she and her husband, Iain, put into practice the business plan that she had developed for the Centre and the refurbishment of the derelict building that had been previously identified by the spirit of Sir Arthur to become what it is today. In order to do so, they faced many challenges including setting up the charity which would run the centre of which Ann was a founder member and chair of the Board of Trustees.
Ann and Iain faced many challenges along the way, but were able to use their network of contacts including the Spiritualist National Union to find mediums and other holistic, alternative and complementary healthcare practitioners to use the Sir Arthur’s Centre to make it financially viable. In order to achieve this, they first needed to put the Centre on the map which Ann skilfully organised through the Edinburgh Fringe festival giving talks on the life and times of Sir Arthur (as well as organising the Centre’s impressive opening evening featuring a very special piece of music conducted by a very special musician on a unique set of violins).
One of the challenges that they did not expect was that there was a considerable amount of psychic energy associated with the very impressive central staircase of the building which took the form of a vertical vortex of energy from the ground floor up to just below the very impressive architectural domed roof. A photograph of this vortex phenomena is on the cover of Ann’s book, and this together with her mission to write her books under the guidance of Sir Arthur’s spirit was the inspiration for the book title.
Workmen carrying out refurbishment works on the building heard voices and saw apparitions. They also found their tools and ladders mysteriously disappearing only to be found in unaccountable locations within the building. In addition, both Ann and Iain were very forcibly shoved by ghostly type spiritual presences who did not want them in their building. Then there were the disturbances which occurred in some of the rooms within the Centre and also the bedrooms used by guest speakers staying overnight in the building which caused further difficulties.
Initially, Ann and her colleagues did not know what to do about this problem and it led to something of a crisis of faith about their mission for the Centre, and how and why Sir Arthur and the spirit team would have pitched them into this sort of situation in which they faced such adversity and antagonism from the spirits within the building. Ann recruited a number of her colleagues through the SSPR and further afield to come and investigate what was going on.
There are a number of longer chapters within The Vortex that deal with the experiences that various people had within the Centre which include witness statements detailing the experiences they had, as well as reports from various investigators who also experienced phenomena. This means that parts of the book reads more like a detailed investigation into a haunted building than a straightforward account of the setting up of a spiritual and holistic centre.
Ann has very helpfully provided background information on some of the people referred to within the text as well as some relevant reports and press coverage of events which are contained within a series of 12 appendices to the book. These are interesting and informative and provide a depth and breadth to Ann’s main narrative themes within the text.
Some of the paranormal activity was related to the refurbishment of the building and one of the apparitions that was seen by a number of different witnesses was the ghost of William McEwan the famous Scottish brewer who originally built the building. Then there was the ghost of a little girl, poltergeist activity, and something very disturbing in the basement.
Once Ann and her colleagues had found means of managing and mitigating these problems, Ann was given a second mission. This was to found a second more residential centre which would complement the work of the first, and then a third mission which was to write her two books. She describes how these missions were given to her by contact with Sir Arthur’s spirit as well as a certain amount of synchronicity and dynamism around her which helped her to make progress towards these very challenging goals. These themes together with a search for scientific explanations of what was happening within the Centre and a drive to involve scientists within the work of the Centre are set out in the later chapters of her book.
Ann’s book is written in a modern, open, informal and engaging way and the main narrative of the book incorporates emails and recollections of telephone conversations. Ann uses these to show the reader what she is doing and with whom she is interacting with along the way which illustrate her journey with Iain from the acquisition of a dilapidated building which had been used as a backpacker’s hostel to the flourishing new age spiritualist Centre it is today. The Vortex it is in my view a modern reworking of the traditional style used by Bram Stoker and Thomas Hardy both of whom included letters and press type reports within the narrative of their novels.
I would recommend Ann’s book as a thoroughly absorbing, interesting and good read in which one can follow in her footsteps as she takes the reader on a unique personal journey in which she describes her relationships not only with those around her, but also with spirit, and her personal spirit guide, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I think this compelling book will be of interest not only to psychical researchers of all levels and persuasions, one way or another, but also to paranormal investigators, psychics and mediums, as well as a wide general readership.