But he was intrigued enough to continue researching the phenomenon by joining the Society for Psychical Research, an organization committed to experimenting with claims of medium-ship and psychic phenomenon.
It was his experiments with a Mrs. Bell through that society that convinced him that there might be some truth to the matter of Spiritualism. At the very least he was convinced that her telepathy was genuine. But it wasn’t until the Great War (what history would remember as WW I) that Doyle truly embraced spiritualism. He denied that it was simply the deaths of his son Kingsley, his brothers, his two brothers-in-law, and his two nephews in the war that led him to place his faith in the movement, although the war did play a part.
“The sight of the world which was distraught with sorrow and which was eagerly asking for help and knowledge, did certainly affect my mind and cause me to understand that these psychic studies, which I had so long pursued, were of immense practical importance and could no longer be regarded as a mere intellectual hobby or fascinating pursuit of a novel research.”
Doyle decided that the message of Spiritualism was too important for the world to ignore. He believed those who drew the new theories of Darwinism into the realms of the spirit, and thought that the spirits of the dead had important knowledge to impart to the living, knowledge that could help us take the next step in the evolution of homo sapiens.
So Doyle took to the lecture circuit, touring around the world with his wife and using his pen as a soapbox for the movement. He didn’t change his Holmes stories any, perhaps even Doyle thought his famous creation would look askance at his beliefs, but his other work shows the influence of his beliefs. His Professor Challenger books, notable for the well-known title The Lost World, start to become obviously more and more entwined with his beliefs, especially the last book in the series The Land of Mist. In addition to his fiction stories he wrote quite a few books purely on the topic including The History of Spiritualism (I and II).
Strangely enough it was around this time in his life that Doyle became friends with Harry Houdini. As a master of the art of illusion Houdini spent much of his free time exposing those fraudulent mediums that he encountered, which just so happened to be all of the ones that he had seen. He started his quest after the death of his mother, when his hopes of contacting her were dashed by the obvious charlatans who made up the mediums he had met.
But despite the fact that Doyle was a believer and Houdini a skeptic the two of them did strike up a friendship. They kept their debate civil, although part of that was simply because Houdini at least hid his skepticism well. Doyle even provided him with introductions to several mediums that he might not have met on his own, although none of them particularly impressed Houdini.
Of course, this wasn’t an arrangement that had legs. Eventually the two quarreled and the friendship broke up. Part of the reason was that Doyle continued to insist, despite Houdini’s arguments to the contrary, that the magician must have actual psychic powers. But the last straw came at a seance in which Doyle’s second wife claimed to make contact with Houdini’s dead mother. Houdini knew from the start that it couldn’t possibly be his mother. For one thing, the wife of a rabbi would never have made the sign of the cross as a greeting. For another, the woman had barely spoken a word of English while alive, yet here she was completely fluent in it. She also didn’t mention that the seance had happened on her birthday. But, more importantly perhaps, it simply didn’t sound like her. Much like the mediums he had seen before, Lady Doyle failed to connect with the spirit of his mother.
He was able to keep his concerns to himself until after the seance, but when he eventually confronted Doyle the argument wasn’t a happy one. Doyle argued that things like birthdays don’t matter as much after death, and that the dead are easily able to speak any language, not only the ones that they spoke in life. Their argument eventually made it into print with a series of letters published in the New York Times and the two were never friends again.
Now history might not remember Doyle so badly if this was all there was all. After all many people have seemingly strange beliefs and Houdini did undertake feats of telepathy and illusion that could allow the uninitiated to believe that he had psychic powers. But Doyle seemed to plunge headlong into credulous belief, defending things like the Piltdown Man or the Cottingley Fairies, things that would later be revealed as blatant frauds. Even the Fox Sisters themselves would eventually admit to fraud.
But despite these seeming failures Doyle went to his grave believing that Spiritualism was real. He wrote a few days before his death that:
“The reader will judge that I have had many adventures. The greatest and most glorious of all awaits me now.”
He died promising to send messages to his family after his death. Sure enough a couple of months after his death he was seen at a party by a psychic. He was sitting in a chair that had been left empty for him and transmitted a message that was accepted as true and evidential by his family.
Interestingly, Doyle wasn’t the only one to send a message to his family after his death. Ever the skeptic Houdini had left a secret message with his wife that he promised to try to communicate to the mortal realm after his passing on October 31st, 1922. It took several years, but in 1929 medium Arthur Ford sent Houdini’s widow Beth the following sequence: “Rosabelle, answer, tell, pray, answer, look, tell, answer, answer, tell.”
It was a secret code that the two of them had used in telepathic illusions on stage, known only to the two of them. It was also the precise message that Houdini had left his wife.