British Spiritualism and psychical research

Arthur Conan Doyle

1859 – 1930

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, became the world's most prominent public advocate for Spiritualism, formally announcing his conversion in 1916 and devoting the last fourteen years of his life and considerable personal fortune to the cause. He toured Britain, Australia, and the United States lecturing on what he considered a proven science of communication with the dead, and produced a substantial corpus of Spiritualist writing including The History of Spiritualism (1926). His international celebrity gave Spiritualism an unprecedented degree of mainstream visibility in the post-World War I era.