Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: Sherlock Holmes, Spiritualism, and the World Beyond Death

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1858–1930) is remembered above all as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant fictional detective of logic, observation, and scepticism. Yet Doyle himself became one of the most ardent defenders of Spiritualism in the early twentieth century. Unlike Holmes, who questioned everything, Doyle came to believe deeply in the survival of the soul, the reality of mediums, and the existence of life on the Other Side.

Born in 1858, Doyle grew up in the confidence of the British Empire. He was tall, opinionated, self-assured, and deeply attached to England, his home, his family, and the ordered world of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He became a physician, first as a general practitioner and later as a specialist in eye diseases. He was also involved in causes related to political and legal injustices, and he possessed the gift that would make him famous: storytelling.

Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887. By this time, the Spiritualist movement had already taken hold in London, and Doyle, as a popular guest at social gatherings, had opportunities to observe mediums at work. His first direct exposure to the paranormal came while he was practising as a physician at Southsea between 1885 and 1888. There he participated in table-tilting séances at the home of his patient General Drayson, a mathematician. Doyle was intrigued but not yet convinced. The subject interested him enough, however, to lead him into further study and membership in the Society for Psychical Research.

Although Doyle believed deeply in a spirit world later in life, he did not enter Spiritualism suddenly. As a boy, he had attended a religious school, but by the time he graduated in 1875, he had become an agnostic. Over time, through sittings, study, and contact with mediums, he came to believe that at least some mediums possessed genuine ability to communicate with the dead.

After thirty years of study, Doyle wholeheartedly embraced Spiritualism in 1916. That year, his second wife Jean lost her brother Malcolm at the World War I battle of Mons, and soon afterwards she began automatic writing. The Doyles came to feel that they had a mission. They began lecturing on Spiritualism, and the grief of thousands who had lost fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands in the war created an audience eager for hope and comfort.

In 1918, Doyle’s eldest son, Kingsley, died after the battle of the Somme. Doyle was devastated, but he sincerely believed that Kingsley continued to live beyond death. He reported that Kingsley communicated with him and encouraged his spiritual work.

Doyle’s lectures in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, America, South Africa, and northern Europe followed the publication of his books The New Revelation (1918) and The Vital Message (1919). For the next twelve years, the Doyles travelled constantly, speaking to large crowds who came to see the famous novelist and to hear his message of survival after death. Doyle never failed to entertain as well as instruct. His descriptions of the Other Side were detailed, comforting, and orderly, almost like a spiritual version of Sussex: happy, busy, structured, and purposeful.

Doyle also wrote extensively on paranormal subjects. His works include The Coming of the Fairies and The History of Spiritualism. In The Coming of the Fairies, he defended the Cottingley fairy photographs, which he believed to be genuine. He argued that fairies existed on Earth in large numbers and offered theories about their nature and habits. In the early 1920s, this belief publicly embarrassed him when the photographs were widely judged to be badly faked.

Doyle also believed that spiritual mediums could bring ectoplasm, matter from the spirit world, into the physical world. He accepted claims that inhabitants of the spirit world could smoke cigars and drink whiskey. He publicly defended spirit photography, physical mediumship, and the legitimacy of mediums, including the American medium Mina Stinson Crandon, known as Margery.

This is where Doyle becomes essential to the study of occult history. He stands at the crossroads of Spiritualism, mediumship, séances, psychical research, spirit photography, fairies, grief, and the human hunger to know whether the dead truly survive. If these subjects call to you, the Occult World Skool Community is the place to go deeper. Inside the community, you can explore ghosts, mediumship, spirit contact, haunted places, necromancy, paranormal investigation, occult history, demonology, and the wider hidden world together with fellow occultists and serious seekers. Do not only read about the unseen from a distance. Step into a community where these mysteries are studied, questioned, and explored with depth.

One of Doyle’s most famous conflicts involved Harry Houdini. Houdini met the Doyle family after a performance at the Hippodrome in Brighton in 1920, and the two families became friends. Both men were fascinated by Spiritualism, but from opposite directions. Doyle was a passionate believer. Houdini, though he desperately wanted to contact his dead mother, became one of the most famous exposers of fraudulent mediums.

In 1922, during a holiday in Atlantic City, Doyle told Houdini that his wife Jean, who practised automatic writing, felt she could help him contact his beloved mother. Lady Doyle entered a trance and began writing furiously. The message was filled with love for Houdini, addressing him as “her boy” and thanking the Doyles for helping her reach him.

Houdini wanted to believe, but he was unconvinced. He had several reasons. Lady Doyle began the manuscript with a cross, while Houdini’s mother was Jewish. The message was written in good English, while his Hungarian mother had spoken broken English. Most importantly, the séance took place on 17 June, his mother’s birthday, and the message made no mention of it. Houdini denied that he had received genuine communication. The Doyles never forgave him, and the friendship broke under the strain.

By 1924, Doyle and Houdini were openly opposed over the mediumship of Mina Crandon, alias Margery. Crandon was investigated by a Scientific American committee seeking evidence of genuine paranormal phenomena. Houdini was outraged that other committee members had examined Margery without him and were ready to endorse her. He proposed tests to expose fraud, but was criticised for ungentlemanly behaviour. Doyle supported Margery without hesitation and called Houdini a bounder and a cad.

The matter was made even stranger by Doyle’s belief that Houdini himself might be the greatest medium of modern times. Doyle could not believe that Houdini performed his escape feats by ordinary physical skill and stagecraft alone. He suspected that Houdini may have dematerialised and then rematerialised his body during his performances.

This contradiction has long fascinated readers. The creator of Sherlock Holmes, the fictional symbol of logic and deduction, became a man who believed readily in mediums, spirit photography, fairies, ectoplasm, and messages from beyond. Part of this came from Doyle’s supreme self-confidence; part came from his need to believe regardless of opposing evidence. Over time, Doyle came to see himself as a kind of messenger for Spiritualism, even earning the nickname “the movement’s St. Paul.” Those who questioned him were often dismissed as ignorant or blind.

Not long after Lady Doyle began automatic writing, she claimed contact with an Arabian spirit control named Pheneas. Pheneas warned the Doyles about the evil nature of the world. In 1923, he told them that the world was sinking into evil and materialism and that God would intervene to save it. According to Pheneas, spiritual scientists were connecting vibrating lines of seismic power that would trigger earthquakes and tidal waves, signalling Armageddon. Doyle’s task was to prepare human minds for the revelation.

By 1925, Pheneas gave more detailed predictions. Central Europe would be engulfed by earthquakes and storms, followed by a great celestial light. Russia would be destroyed, Africa flooded, Brazil razed by eruption, and America torn by another civil war. The Vatican would be swept away. England would become the beacon of the world, strengthened by a power station of cosmic energy surrounding the Doyle home. Christ would appear there before planning the Second Coming.

Doyle kept a notebook of these prophecies and believed he would pass over with his family after the great upheaval. But 1925 passed without the predicted events. Shortly before his death, Doyle began to wonder whether he and his family had been the victims of a great joke played on humanity by members of the Other Side.

Doyle died on 7 July 1930. On 13 July, his family and friends held a reception at the Albert Hall in London and left an empty chair for him. Medium Estelle Roberts claimed she could see him and passed on a message that the family felt was evidential. Others also claimed communications from Doyle after death, including the medium Eileen J. Garrett later that same year.

In 1929, Russia banned all Sherlock Holmes stories because the Russian government, hostile to supernatural beliefs, considered Doyle an occultist. By then, Doyle had become almost as famous for Spiritualism as for his detective fiction.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle remains one of the most fascinating figures in the history of Spiritualism. He was a physician, novelist, reformer, believer, lecturer, and defender of mediums. He gave the world Sherlock Holmes, the master of rational detection, yet spent the final phase of his life proclaiming the reality of spirits, fairies, psychic forces, and survival after death. His life reveals the strange and powerful tension between evidence and belief, intellect and grief, logic and the longing for the unseen.