Arthur Conan Doyle vs. Harry Houdini: A Friendship Ruined by Ghosts

Both Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle hardly need an introduction. Yet, not everyone knows that the two had a brief yet remarkable friendship based on a shared interest in spiritualism. Houdini was a skeptic who believed in a rational explanation of any phenomenon, while Doyle insisted that mediums, spirits, and even fairies were real. Their friendship was based on a subtle rivalry, with each of them discreetly aiming to convince the other. Read on to learn more about the relationship between Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini.

The phenomenon of crystal healers, tarot readers, and psychic coaches that occupied present-day social media platforms seems counterintuitive to many. The seemingly rational age of evidence-based medicine, space travel, and metaverse appears incompatible with magic, herb mixtures, and rituals. However, anthropologists believe otherwise. A string of financial crises and military conflicts topped up with the global pandemic has weakened the population’s faith in the existing system and led to the search for alternative mind patterns and orders.

A century and a half earlier, the same reasons propelled the rise of an alternative belief system that still remains ingrained into Western popular culture. From the late nineteenth century, Europe and America saw an enormous rise in the activity of mediums, fortune tellers, spirit photographers, and psychics of all kinds. The prevalent motive for trusting these types of people with one’s grief and sorrows was the desire to contact the dead. The American Civil War had an astonishing death toll, with almost every American household affected. Only a few decades later, World War erupted, with unprecedented destruction and terrifying realization of the new technological powers acquired. The final blow was the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic that claimed up to 50 million lives worldwide. No family was left unaffected, desperately longing for their lost children, parents, and partners.

From the earliest days of its existence, spiritualism had its fair share of critics. Yet, the desire to believe for many outweighs all evidence. Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of Abraham Lincoln, invited mediums to the White House, attempting to contact her three deceased sons and husband. The famous naturalist Alfred Wallace also believed in the presence of the human spirit that went on existing after the physical body ceased to do so.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous author of Sherlock Holmes, started his journey towards spiritualism on a critical note. In 1893, he joined the Society for Psychical Research, which aimed to explore psychic phenomena and determine whether it was real or not. As it often happened to converted spiritualists of his generation, Doyle’s faith came from emotion rather than reason.

Overall, Doyle’s family lost eleven members in the Great War and the following epidemic. Yet, the most striking of all was the loss of his son Kingsley in 1918. By that time, Doyle had already appeared in public as a spiritualist activist (and even gained notoriety for his part in the Cottingley Fairies hoax), yet his involvement reached its peak after 1918. Together with his wife, Doyle invited a prominent medium to their home, searched him to exclude possible fraud, and asked their guest to contact Kingsley.

Reportedly, the medium spoke in Kingsley’s voice and even asked his father for forgiveness. Soon, Doyle would turn into an avid promoter and practitioner of spiritualism, and his wife would discover her own psychic powers. Doyle’s reputation as the writer of rational detective literature helped to cement the reputation of spiritualism as a movement and give it more credibility. On the other side of the Spiritualist debate was the famous magician Harry Houdini, who had his own history of spiritual exploration.

Hungarian-born Erik Weisz, publicly known as Harry Houdini, had a long relationship with the occult. Aged eleven, he lost his older brother and started visiting spiritual seances in desperate hope of contacting him. His hopes were shattered after a visit to a particular Wisconsin medium that claimed to channel the voices of the diseased. Erik, still a teenager, soon realized that the voices were coming from a hidden gramophone.

Several years later, Erik’s father passed away, leaving the family of seven in poverty and debt. Now an eighteen-year-old, the future illusionist sold his watch to pay for a visit to another medium. The contact did not help much since the supposedly conjured spirit of Rabbi Mayer Weisz could not offer his son any advice, instead assuring him of his infinite happiness in the afterlife. Given the strained financial circumstances and the practical character of the father, such a response seemed weird and out of character.

Raised in a poor household with many siblings, Erik Weizs started working even before his teens. At nine years old, he already performed as a trapeze artist, before changing his name and moving to illusion and magic. In his memoir The Magician Amongst The Spirits, Houdini confessed that initially, he employed the tactics of mediums in his shows, even presenting his wife as a clairvoyant. In his early twenties, he aimed to grow his popularity with almost all possible means. Yet, he never became truly comfortable presenting the works of mind as magic. Gradually, he distanced himself from the occultish claims and focused on debunking the most famous spiritualists. He insisted that his tricks of escaping filled water tanks and getting out of straightjackets and handcuffs were only the works of mind and body.

Still, not everyone was ready to accept the non-mystical truth behind Houdini’s art. Particularly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was convinced that the tricks of the famous illusionists hid something more than he wanted to admit. They started to exchange letters with each other months before meeting in person. In some way, both of them were seeking a larger truth, although aimed their gazes in opposing directions. They were very different—a well-educated Scottish writer with a boarding school education and a self-taught Hungarian-Jewish circus performer who ran away from home when he was 12. They, however, shared a deep interest in the theoretical matters of the occult. From the start, it was an intellectual rivalry devoid of any bitterness, a debate club for the two educated and convinced men.

Their first meeting happened in 1920 during Houdini’s European tour. Eager to convert his anti-spiritualist friend, Doyle suggested the illusionist visit the medium that had recently put him in contact with his deceased son. Houdini was confident in his views, yet repeatedly stated he would be glad to change his mind if he encountered a genuine medium at least once. The visit was, as expected, disappointing. The popular medium spoke the same generic language and used the same techniques as the rest of them.

The Seance

The final blow to Doyle and Houdini’s relationship happened in 1922 when Doyles visited the US and invited Harry Houdini for a visit. By then, Arthur Conan Doyle’s wife, Lady Jean Doyle, used her alleged psychic powers to the full extent. Her preferred work method was automatic writing—a practice of uncontrollably producing written words in a state of trance.

The Doyles offered Houdini a message from his recently deceased mother. The loss was particularly hard for Houdini, who believed his wife and mother to be the closest to him of all others, so he agreed. The seance went as planned: Lady Doyle fell into a trance, pounding at the table and producing fifteen pages of written text in several minutes. The letter contained typical mother’s blessings, vague and generic descriptions of the afterlife, and a passage on how lucky Houdini was to have a friend like Arthur Conan Doyle. Houdini politely thanked the couple, and Doyle took it as a sign of his victory.

Days later, he sent letters to various newspapers, claiming he had finally convinced the staunchest of skeptics. In a rebuttal statement to the press, the magician stated that, even though he was too polite to admit it to his friend’s face, there were two principal issues with his mother’s message. First, the message was written in perfect literary English, while Houdini’s mother did not speak a word of it, using German and Yiddish her entire life. Second, the alleged spirit started the letter with the sign of a cross and a Christian blessing, while in life she was Jewish and even married to a Rabbi. Houdini’s public rebuttal launched a long public feud that would divide the two great minds for good. From then on, both started to mercilessly attack each other in the press, pushing their agenda.

Doyle, who was already in his sixties, embarked on an impossible mission to make Spiritualism an officially recognized religion and even the official religion of the British Empire. On the other side of the ocean, Houdini started his own crusade with the opposing goal in mind. His idea was to ban fortune-telling and all types of spiritualism-based services altogether, to get rid of mental intoxication and save the nation’s common sense. He sent his assistants to public seances where they wrote all the performances’ details, so Houdini could later publish exposé articles. Some historians admit Houdini’s mysterious death in 1926 to the revenge of offended spiritualists.