The Story

Dr. James Mortimer arrives at Baker Street, deeply troubled. He reads Holmes an old family manuscript that tells of the Baskerville curse: how the wicked Hugo once seized and hunted a farm girl across the moonlit moor, and therefore was found with his throat torn out by a giant spectral hound.

But Mortimer cares less for the legend than for a fresh fact. His friend Sir Charles Baskerville was lately found dead upon the grounds, his face twisted in unspeakable terror. One detail the doctor withheld from the inquest still haunts him: near the corpse lay the footprints of a gigantic hound.

The last of the line, young Sir Henry Baskerville, is sailing from Canada to claim the lonely estate. Therefore Holmes must answer one question before the heir sets foot on the moor: is an ancient curse killing this family, or a flesh-and-blood murderer? He summons Sir Henry to his hotel.

At the hotel, unsettling things multiply. Sir Henry receives an anonymous note, its words snipped from a newspaper, warning him to keep away from the moor. Then a brand-new boot vanishes from his room, and soon an old one disappears too. Holmes quietly senses a hound being handed a scent to follow.

Holmes spots a black-bearded stranger shadowing Sir Henry through the London streets, but the man escapes in a cab before he can be seized. Holmes cannot leave the city, therefore he sends the one friend he trusts completely. Watson will guard Sir Henry and report every clue back from the moor.

Watson and Sir Henry journey down to Devonshire. The moor rises around them, vast and desolate, a grey sea of bog and jagged stone under a brooding sky. At Baskerville Hall grave news awaits: a convict named Selden, a savage murderer, has broken free and now roams that very wilderness.

On the first night Watson hears a woman weeping somewhere in the sleeping house. Then he catches the butler, Barrymore, holding a candle to a window and signaling out into the black moor. Barrymore refuses to explain himself, but his terrified wife at last confesses the secret hidden behind that light.

Mrs. Barrymore, it turns out, is the escaped convict Selden's own sister. She has been secretly feeding her wretched brother out on the moor, and the candle in the window guides him in to collect his food. The household pities her, yet resolves to end the danger stalking them.

Out on the moor Watson meets a neighbor named Stapleton, a mild-mannered naturalist who chases butterflies with a net. Stapleton warns him gravely of the great Grimpen Mire, a bog that sucks ponies and men down to their deaths. Beneath the friendly manner, Watson senses something watchful and cold.

Soon Stapleton's beautiful sister, Beryl, mistakes Watson for Sir Henry and urgently implores him to leave the moor before it is too late. But the instant she learns his true name, fear seizes her, and she hastily takes back the warning, as though unseen ears were listening close by.

Sir Henry, meanwhile, falls swiftly and deeply in love with Beryl, and she seems to return it. But each time he draws near her, Stapleton erupts into a strange, violent fury and drives them apart. Watson cannot fathom why a brother would guard his sister so fiercely against an honorable suitor.

Night after night the moor gives up a long, wailing cry that the country folk swear is the demon hound. Then, against the rising moon, Watson glimpses a lone figure standing motionless upon a rocky tor, watching the hall. A second stranger is hiding out there, and Watson vows to unmask him.

One dark night Sir Henry and Watson chase the fleeing convict across the moor. Suddenly a dreadful scream splits the night, and moments later they find a man's body broken at the foot of a cliff. It is dressed in Sir Henry's own cast-off clothes, therefore the hound struck down the wrong prey.

The dead man proves to be Selden the convict, wearing Sir Henry's discarded clothing that the Barrymores had given him. But this grim accident reveals the truth: the danger is precise and real, for the beast tracked those garments by their scent. Someone wanted Sir Henry himself dead upon the moor tonight.

Then a calm, familiar voice speaks out of the darkness beside them. The hidden watcher upon the tor is Sherlock Holmes himself, who has been secretly living rough among the ancient stone huts all this time, gathering evidence unseen. He never abandoned the case, and now he knows the murderer's name.

The killer, Holmes reveals, is the mild naturalist Stapleton. He is secretly a Baskerville himself, a concealed heir scheming to murder his own kin and inherit the vast family fortune. He had already frightened old Sir Charles into a fatal heart attack, and now he means to finish Sir Henry the same way.

And Beryl, Holmes explains, is no sister at all, but Stapleton's own frightened wife, forced to help lure the men her husband marks for death. It was Beryl who clipped that warning note and begged Watson to flee. Love and terror have warred inside her from the very beginning of this dark scheme.

The demon hound is horribly real: a monstrous, half-starved dog Stapleton hides in the mire and smears with glowing phosphorus so it seems a creature from hell. But Holmes must catch the beast in the very act of attacking, therefore he lays a bold trap using Sir Henry himself as the bait.

Holmes has Sir Henry dine with Stapleton, then walk home alone across the black moor at night. Watson, Holmes, and Inspector Lestrade crouch hidden among the rocks, revolvers ready, waiting. But a thick fog comes rolling in off the mire, therefore they may not glimpse the beast until it is upon them.

Then out of the swirling fog it explodes: an enormous hound, its gaping jaws and burning eyes blazing with unearthly fire, hurtling silently after the fleeing Sir Henry. For one frozen instant even Holmes stands paralyzed with horror. But he steadies his hand, and the three men open fire upon the monster.

Holmes empties his revolver into the giant hound, and with a last howl it collapses dead at Sir Henry's very feet. Watson kneels and touches the still-glowing hide, finding only phosphorus paint, no devil at all. The dread curse of the Baskervilles was nothing but flesh, bone, and cruel human design.

Realizing all is lost, Stapleton flees alone into the Grimpen Mire under the cover of the fog. But the treacherous bog that he knew better than any man now turns against him. The murderer is swallowed alive by the very moor he weaponized, and no trace of him is ever found.

Racing to Stapleton's lonely house, they find Beryl bound and gagged in an upper room, bruised for refusing to aid her husband's final murder. Freed at last, she pours out the whole terrible story. Sir Henry, badly shaken, survives to inherit his family's hall and, in time, to heal upon a long voyage.

What it means

And so the ancient curse dissolves entirely under the cold, clear light of Holmes's reason. Doyle's enduring lesson is this: what we cannot yet explain, we clothe in demons, ghosts, and fate, but patient observation strips that terror bare. The true monsters are never spectral hounds; they are the greed hidden within men.

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