Sherlock, Doyle, Mediums and Fairies
Every serious examination of Conan Doyle eventually has to confront the uncomfortable, fascinating, and frankly wacky truth.
The man who gave the world Sherlock Holmes – the supreme apostle of reason, evidence, and rational deduction – ended his life convinced that fairies had been photographed in an English garden, and that the dead were speaking to the living through séances, mediums, and spirit guides.
This is not a footnote.
It is not a quirky aside.
And it is certainly not an embarrassment to be quietly brushed under the carpet by literary critics who would rather keep Doyle neat and respectable.
It is central to understanding who Doyle was, what drove him, and why Sherlock Holmes ultimately became a burden rather than a triumph.
To understand Doyle properly, we have to follow him to the places where logic failed him – and where grief stepped in to fill the gap.
The Seeds Were Always There
The popular myth is that Conan Doyle suddenly “lost his mind” late in life.
That isn’t true.
What’s true is more subtle, and far more human.
Doyle was always torn between reason and belief. From the very beginning of his career, he lived in that tension.
As a trained doctor, educated in medicine and science, he believed deeply in empirical observation. Evidence mattered. Proof mattered. Causes produced effects. That mindset produced Sherlock Holmes almost effortlessly.
But as a man – as a husband, a father, and a moral thinker – Doyle believed just as deeply that the universe must contain meaning beyond the physical. He could not accept that love, sacrifice, and suffering simply vanished at death.
Even in the Holmes stories, this conflict is quietly present.
Holmes insists on logic, but Doyle repeatedly frames cases around superstition, folklore, fear, spiritualism, and the human hunger for belief. Ghosts, curses, family legends, mysterious forces – they are everywhere.
Holmes may debunk them.
But Doyle never mocks the need behind them.
That need was personal long before it became ideological.
The Crushing Weight of Loss
What changed Doyle was not foolishness.
It was grief.
And not a single grief, but a cumulative, relentless avalanche of loss.
Between 1916 and 1920, Doyle lost:
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His son Kingsley, who died from complications following wounds sustained during World War I
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His brother Innes
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Two brothers-in-law
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A nephew
Years earlier, in 1906, his first wife, Louisa (“Touie”) Doyle, had died after a long, exhausting battle with tuberculosis. Doyle adored her. Their marriage was tender, loyal, and deeply affectionate.
Her slow decline hollowed him out emotionally long before she actually died.
The Great War finished what illness began.
This was not abstract loss. This was not philosophical sorrow. This was Doyle watching the people he loved most disappear, one by one, into a silence he could not accept.
He was not coping.
He was drowning.
And grief creates a hunger that reason alone cannot satisfy.
Spiritualism as Consolation, Not Curiosity
This is where modern readers often misunderstand Doyle.
He did not turn to spiritualism as an eccentric hobby or an intellectual experiment.
He turned to it as a lifeline.
Spiritualism offered Doyle something logic never could: continuity. It promised that death was not an ending, but a transition. That separation was temporary. That love endured.
He attended séances. He wrote extensively about psychic phenomena. He toured internationally, passionately defending spiritualism as a serious belief system, not a parlour trick.
To Doyle, this was not irrational.
It was compassionate.
He believed humanity needed proof that loved ones were not lost forever. He believed science had not yet caught up with spiritual truth, but eventually would. And he believed, with absolute sincerity, that he had a moral duty to spread this message.
This wasn’t gullibility.
It was desperation wrapped in moral purpose.
And Sherlock Holmes, with his cold scepticism and ruthless insistence on proof, no longer fit that worldview.
The Cottingley Fairies – The Breaking Point
Nothing symbolises Doyle’s transformation more starkly than the Cottingley Fairies affair.
In 1917, two young girls – Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright – produced photographs claiming to show real fairies in a garden in Cottingley, England. The images were crude by modern standards, but convincing enough at the time to ignite public fascination.
Doyle didn’t merely entertain the possibility.
He believed it completely.
He published the photographs. He wrote articles defending their authenticity. He dismissed critics as narrow-minded materialists who refused to accept a richer, more enchanted reality.
When photographic experts raised doubts, Doyle waved them away.
Why?
Because the fairies were never the point.
To Doyle, those photographs symbolised a world where wonder still existed. A world untouched by trenches, gas attacks, mass graves, and telegrams announcing yet another death.
If fairies were real, then the universe was kinder than it appeared.
And Doyle needed that to be true.
The Tragic Irony of Holmes
This is where the story becomes almost unbearably ironic.
Sherlock Holmes would have dismantled every spiritualist claim Doyle defended. He would have exposed fraudulent mediums. He would have debunked the fairy photographs in minutes.
Doyle knew this.
And he resented it.
Holmes had become an obstacle to the beliefs Doyle now held most dear. The detective embodied the very scepticism Doyle felt had failed humanity in its darkest hour.
This is why Holmes fades from prominence in Doyle’s later years, while spiritualist writings take centre stage instead.
Doyle was not abandoning reason.
He was rejecting a version of reason that offered no comfort, no continuity, and no hope.
Was Doyle a Fool?
This is the question critics always ask.
The honest answer is harder, sadder, and far more uncomfortable.
Doyle was not unintelligent. He was not naïve. He was emotionally overwhelmed, morally earnest, and desperate to believe that the universe still made sense after unimaginable loss.
He chose belief over doubt because doubt had become unbearable.
That choice does not make him right.
But it makes him human.
Why This Matters for Writers
Doyle’s so-called “wacky” phase is not a curiosity. It is a warning. And it is a lesson.
Intellect does not protect us from grief.
Brilliance does not immunise us against belief.
Logic, no matter how elegant, cannot always meet emotional needs.
Doyle spent his entire life trying to reconcile reason with meaning. In the end, meaning won.
And perhaps the final irony is this:
Sherlock Holmes survived because readers needed order.
Conan Doyle turned to spiritualism because he needed hope.
Both impulses come from the same place.
A refusal to accept a meaningless world.
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