Arthur Conan Doyle, the brilliant literary mind behind the supremely rational Sherlock Holmes, astonished the world when, in the latter part of his life, he fervently embraced spiritualism, mediums, and even the existence of fairies. For many, this seemed a baffling contradiction: how could the man who created the ultimate symbol of logic fall headlong into belief in the supernatural?
But Doyle’s journey into mysticism is not easily dismissed as eccentricity. His life was marked by a profound search for truth and consolation, particularly in the face of personal loss. From a Latter-day Saint perspective, one might see Doyle not simply as a man away with the fairies, but as someone grasping for eternal truths using the limited spiritual tools available to him in his time and place.
Doyle was born in 1859 into a devout Catholic family but later drifted toward agnosticism and then into the realm of scientific inquiry. He trained as a physician and credited much of Holmes’ methodical brilliance to Dr. Joseph Bell, a real-life professor who taught diagnosis through observation. For decades, Doyle’s literary output seemed to champion empirical reasoning and skepticism.
Yet beneath this surface ran a deeper current. Doyle harbored a lifelong fascination with the mystical. He explored the occult, wrote stories with supernatural overtones, and was always intrigued by what lay beyond the veil of human experience. From a Latter-day Saint lens, this reflects the spiritual yearning inherent in all of God’s children—the light of Christ which inspires even the unbaptized and unreached to seek divine things (Moroni 7:16).
The seismic event that shifted Doyle from curiosity to conviction was the devastation of World War I. The loss of his son Kingsley, along with his brother, two nephews, and a brother-in-law, tore at Doyle’s soul. He could not accept that such vibrant lives had vanished into nothingness. His grief became the catalyst for his full embrace of spiritualism, which offered him the hope of communication beyond the grave.
In Latter-day Saint doctrine, we understand the spirit world not as a place of mystery and guesswork, but as a realm of ordered waiting and learning. Doctrine and Covenants 138 teaches us of the vast congregation of the righteous dead and the redemptive work occurring there. But lacking this restored knowledge, Doyle turned to the only hope he could find—séances, mediums, and psychic inquiry.
In a tragic way, Doyle’s spiritualism was an attempt to fill a void that only revealed truth could satisfy. His hunger for contact with the dead speaks to a real and righteous desire—but one that, without the priesthood and prophetic revelation, led him into error and deception. As President Joseph F. Smith warned, many people are drawn to false spiritual practices because they recognize, rightly, that death is not the end—but they lack the full truth.
Perhaps the most peculiar moment in Doyle’s spiritualist journey came with the Cottingley Fairies incident. Two young girls in Yorkshire produced photographs of themselves with paper cutouts of fairies. Though crude by modern standards, the images captured the public imagination—and Doyle’s heart. He declared them genuine, defended them in his book The Coming of the Fairies, and held them up as evidence that unseen worlds were all around us.
To Latter-day Saints, this episode is both instructive and cautionary. Our theology affirms the existence of angels, miracles, and ministering spirits. But we are also warned about false spirits and deception. Doctrine and Covenants 129 gives direct counsel on discerning true from false spiritual manifestations. While Doyle had a genuine desire to believe in a more magical, spiritually alive world, he lacked the priesthood keys or prophetic guidance to discern truth from fraud.
Doyle’s obsession with mediums, séances, and psychic phenomena brought him into both global prominence and ridicule. He ardently supported individuals later revealed to be frauds. He argued passionately with skeptics, including his one-time friend Harry Houdini, insisting that spiritualism was not only real but a scientific truth unfairly suppressed by closed-minded materialists.
Here again, Latter-day Saint doctrine draws a bright line. The Lord’s house is a house of order. Communication with the dead is possible, but it is under God’s direction—not through table-rapping or mysterious ectoplasm. Joseph Smith taught that there are no angels who minister to this earth but those who do belong or have belonged to it. We are commanded to seek knowledge, but also to seek it by study and also by faith (D&C 88:118). Without the gospel, Doyle sought truth through darkened glass.
As Doyle’s spiritualism grew more vocal, his literary reputation suffered. Readers were confused. How could the man who gave the world Sherlock Holmes—a paragon of reason—believe in garden fairies and ectoplasmic manifestations? Some labeled him gullible, others called him mad. His spiritualist writings have largely faded into obscurity, remembered mostly for the oddity of their claims.
And yet, from a Latter-day Saint viewpoint, Doyle’s quest was not so strange. The Restoration began with a boy praying in a grove, seeking answers from the unseen. Joseph Smith, too, faced accusations of delusion and charlatanism. The difference is not in the desire to know—but in the source of the answer.
If Doyle had encountered the gospel, one wonders what he might have made of it. He might have recognized in its doctrines the very truths he had chased all his life—that the soul survives death, that unseen beings minister among us, and that revelation continues. His love of stories, of order in chaos, and of life beyond this one might have found its truest fulfillment.
Arthur Conan Doyle was a man divided: a scientific mind searching for spiritual answers, a storyteller longing for eternal truths, and a grieving father reaching across the veil. While his spiritualism led him astray at times, his deeper desire was noble—a longing to know that life has meaning, that death is not the end, and that the heart’s hopes are not in vain.
As member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we honor that yearning. We affirm that the veil is thin, that truth exists beyond the senses, and that God has revealed the proper means to receive that truth. Doyle, in his own imperfect way, was chasing what prophets have taught all along—that mortality is not the whole story.
In the end, perhaps Doyle and Sherlock Holmes were not so different after all. Each pursued the mystery behind the obvious. But while Holmes solved crimes through cold deduction, Doyle sought comfort through faith in things unseen. One might say, Holmes searched for footprints on the carpet while Doyle searched for footprints on the other side of the veil.
