In 1923, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the famous author of Sherlock Holmes – embarked on a worldwide speaking tour. But this tour was not to sell books of his famous detective. Instead, it was to win converts to spiritual,ism – the idea that through seances, knocking, and advances in photography, the living could commune with the dead. With hundreds of millions grieving in the years following the First World War and the Spanish Flu, Sir Arthur felt that the world needed to hear his message, including the Latter-day Saints of the Salt Lake Valley.
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle arrived in Salt Lake City, it was not exactly his first experience with the Latter-day Saints. In 1887, he published the mystery, A Study in Scarlet – the first adventure of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson. The intrepid Sherlock (using the "Science of Deduction") uncovers the horrors of murder, kidnapping, and forced marriages among the Latter-day Saints in the Salt Lake Valley. Sir Arthur launched the career of his famous detective, as it were, by playing up the most wild stereotypes of the Latter-day Saints. But his impression of the Latter-day Saints would undergo a profound transformation, and the author of "A Study in Scarlet," who imagined Mormon Women with faces that only showed "the traces of unextinguishable horror" would come to praise the "brave and earnest women" and the "rugged, hard-faced men" among the Latter-day Saint Pioneers.
To learn more about the information in this episode, please check out the following (excellent!) sources:
Michael W. Homer, "Recent Psychic Evidence: The Visit of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Utah in 1923," 52 Utah Historical Quarterly 3 (1984), available at https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/uhq_volume52_1984_number3/s/143282.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (1887)
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008).
"A. Conan Doyle to Lecture on Psychic Proofs," The Utah Chronicle (9 May 1923), p. 1.
"Spirit Proofs are Advanced," S. L. Trib. (12 May 1923), 1.
Key Terms: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John Watson, A Study in Scarlet, Brigham Young, Latter-day Saints, Polygamy, Utah Territory, Pioneer Museum, Amasa M. Lyman, John A. Widtsoe, Spiritualism, Seance, Ghosts, Spirits, Cenotaph, World War I, Spanish Flu, American Civil War.