Among my favorites to be found here are:
"The Brazilian Cat," featuring a strange crytozoological felid, which appears to be neither puma nor jaguar, cats both native to the region;
"Lot 249," about a student of Egyptology who is able to bring a mummy to life to do his evil bidding (Note: Tales of the Darkside: the Movie did an updated version of this, which took many liberties, which I've been familiar with for years. It's pretty much standard horror; they should have at least set the story in Victorian London to preserve the original gaslit feel of the story. I was also surprised to read in the original that Bellingham, the student, is actually obese in Doyle's version, while the actor who played him in the movie was thin); "The Parasite," the tale of a woman with terrifying powers of mind control; "The Brown Hand," one of Doyle's few actual ghost stories; and Horror of the Heights, the title story, and a science fiction tale that speculates. on the weird lifeforms that might actually thrive in the upper atmosphere of our won planet.
That might actually have seemed rather credible back when Doyle was writing, as aeronautics was still a new field, and planes themselves were rare. The field of bulbous, jellyfish-like ariel floaters the size of buildings, which the narrator encounters, somewhat reminded me of an old episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos I watched as a child. That episode featured possible lifeforms that could theoretically inhabit the dense atmosphere of Jupiter: massive "floaters," --"creatures the size of cities" in Sagan's words. he explained that there might also be hunters-winged predators that prey on the floaters.
Doyle's floaters also have their predator ---a creature that remains aloft be means of a natural gasbag, and propells itself after prey by means of an extensible pseudopod. I didn't have a really vivid mind-picture of this creature, which is capable of turning itself "an angry purple," though I have in mind something like an amalocaris, a prehistoric invertebrate that preyed upon trilobites. Doyle, however, described it as possessing an octopus -like beak. Here is an example of an artist's treatment of Doyle's fanciful creature:
The are also a number of tales about the medium of Spiritualism, which Conan Doyle enthusiastically championed, the most fantastic of which is probably "The Silver Mirror."
Then there is may favorite of the whole bunch, "The Terror of Blue John Gap." This tale may have been a precursor to The Lost World; in fact, both it, and "The Horror of the Heights" could both be expanded into Challenger novels. It's "Terror" though, the carries a definite prehistoric theme. The tale concerns a gigantic monster that emerged after dark from an underground cavern (called "Blue John Gap" after the abundance of this vivid blue amethyst-like stone found therein) to roam the moors, killing and devouring sheep. The protagonist only glimpses the best clearly near the tale's end, and speculates that it might be a descendant of the ancient cave bears, only much larger, even, than the greatest of those. But the most startling and uncanny aspect of the beast is that its eyes are covered over, making it only able to roam the countryside in near pitch, such as the moonless nights. The narrator further speculates that other creatures thus adapted might thrive far below the surface, and that a whole subterranean wold might exist in a hollowed out realm within our planet. This sounds very like Doyle was edging into Jules Verne territory, and its a bit of a mystery why he didn't write his own "hollow earth" adventure in the vein of Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, or Edgar Rice Burrough's Pellucidar series. He certainly seemed inclined in that direction, and one wonders what he'd have come up with if he'd carried the concept further.
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