Sherlock Holmes, the literary epitome of rationalism and clear-headed detective work, spent his career debunking and illuminating the mysterious, the unexplainable, and the supernatural. But Holmes’s author, Athur Conan Doyle, could not have been more different from his creation. A medical doctor by trade, he was also an ardent spiritualist. And once he put his Sherlock Holmes stories to rest, he devoted his life towards using his scientific qualifications to endorse the existence spiritualism, the fringe pseudoscience that insisted upon the existence of an Occult world.
Conan Doyle was a devoted touring lecturer on the subject. And, in the years after the Sherlock Holmes series had ended, Conan Doyle had been engaged in a longstanding debate with Harry Houdini about the veracity of spiritualism, with Houdini deploying his knowledge of illusions and tricks to debunk examples of otherworldly intrusion that Conan Doyle believed were real. In the spring of 1922, the two men finally had a showdown. Houdini planned to settle the matter by inviting Conan Doyle to the Annual Banquet of the Society of American Magicians, scheduled for June 2nd at the McAlpin Hotel in New York City’s Herald Square.
In his exceptional biography of Conan Doyle, Teller of Tales, Daniel Stashower brings the scene to life. Houdini was to be the Master of Ceremonies at this illustrious banquet, and the invitation list bore the names of the world’s greatest magicians, as well as major New York City luminaries, including Alfred Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times. In front of the greatest magicians of the world and a handful of titans, Houdini planned to present Conan Doyle with numerous examples of how spiritualist frauds worked, finally curing him of his longstanding superstition.
But Conan Doyle, who believed that Houdini was truly psychic despite Houdini’s many protestations, brought his own equipment and put on a presentation of his own. Desperate to have the magicians admit that there were things even they could not explain or understand, Conan Doyle brought along a projector and played for them a silent movie about dinosaurs. The dinosaurs were clay models captured in stop-motion by Wills O’Brien for the forthcoming film adaptation of Conan Doyle’s prehistoric time-travel novel The Lost World. But the magicians did not know that. Only Conan Doyle knew. The magicians were utterly bewildered. There was no way they could explain what they had seen.
The next day, a headline of The New York Times asserted, “Spiritist Mystifies World-Famed Magicians With Pictures of Prehistoric Beasts.” One day later, Conan Doyle came clean, publishing a letter he wrote to Houdini in the New York Times. “Moving Picture of Prehistoric Beasts Was Shown Just to Fool Magicians,” said that headline. In his letter, Conan Doyle informed the magician that he knew that the film was “not occult,” but claimed that it was important to “provide a little mystification to those who have so often and so successfully mystified others.”
