It came up in our most recent Young Writers Group Meeting that Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859-1930), the creator of the legendary Sherlock Holmes, was, in stark contrast to his creation, a spiritualist. You many dismiss this idea as being utterly irrational, for he surely would not have made Sherlock the character he was and still is today, if those were his views. And you’re probably right.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as you may have guessed, did not have these views for his entire life, including the period in which he was writing about Sherlock Holmes, which was from about 1880 until 1914. During this time, Arthur was not fixated on either spiritualism or rationalism, but wavered somewhere in between.
The turning point came just after World War One. Arthur had lost his wife a few years prior, but after the death of a son and two brothers during the war and then two nephews just after, he sank into depression. Arthur found solace supporting spiritualism and its attempts to find proof of existence beyond the grave. Over the following years, his beliefs became firmer, and the physician wrote multiple books on the subject.