The Spiritualism Hoax

 

It is long been the subject of speculation how Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the famously rational detective Sherlock Holmes, (whose famous quote "no ghosts need apply" has become a ground rule for deductive reasoning) not only believed in ghosts, spooks, and all manner of paranormal stuff, but was a passionate advocate for the spiritualism craze, even going so far as to write a famous article prophesizing that fairies were soon to be scientifically varified. 

The well-known Cottingly Fairie Hoax is infamous for having completely taken in the famous author. In case you haven't heard of it, two or three little girls presented pictures of themselves in the nearby woods, surrounded by dancing fairies. In one, a winged sprite looks about to land on a girl's face. Experts were unable to decupher how they were faked, so many people concluded they must be real. They weren't of course. They were merely cut-outs from a Victorian children's book of fairies. Conan Doyle, sadly, became a laughing stock over this. All the girls eventually confessed to the hoax, but one, at least maintained that one picture showing a small gnome-like figures was in fact real. The gnome, though, looks just as much a cut out as the fairies do. No surprise there.

There was another incident in which the famous author was infamously fooled by young children that I was mostly unaware of. This was the incident which is beleived to have kicked off the entire spiritualist craze in the first place. Two young sisters (different ones) had a mother who was dreadfully afraid of spooks. They played a prank involving dropping a stone (or something) on the floor to scare her. What I only found out recently was what followed; the children, having discovered they could fool grownups, claimed that they could communicate with a spirit-being called "split-foot" (a traditional name for the devil, refering to his cloven hooves). They'd ask "Splitfoot" a question, and depending on the answer, the "spriit" would produce a knocking sound a requested number of times. Adults were amazed at the girls' uncanny abilities. These adults again included Arthur Conan Doyle, who completely fell for the ruse, apparently applying none of the Holmesian logic made famous by his own stories.

Others, however, did. A group of doctors claimed that such a sound could be produced by the human's knee joints. They asked the girls to contact the spirit while in such a postion where they could not produce the sound through the knees. "Slewfoot" made no reply this time, but many of the other adults continued to beleive. 

Eventually, however, soemtime during her late adulthood, one of the sisters confessed that that was indeed how they made the sounds. 

It's all the more strange when one considers that Doyle himself showed a test reel of the stop-motion dinosaurs for the 20s adaptation of his own Lost World novel to the Society of American Magicians, and managed to confound them.

Doyle was also known to have a fondness for practical jokes. In one famous photo he posed as Edward Challenger his character from The Lost World, with his friends impersonating Lord Roxton and the others. Doyle has even been implicated by some to have been involved in the infamous Piltdown Man hoax, though evidenece points to only Charles Dawson, the famous fossil fraud and his cronies. 

Why was Doyle, omf all people so taken in? Simple: we tend to believe what we want.