Doyle continued to produce his celebrated Sherlock Holmes stories while spending much of his time studying spiritualism

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 99.

Our destination for the day was Minstead, a village in a glade in the northern part of the forest. Andrew had read that it was a good walk – which it indubitably was, through long stretches of undisturbed forest – and that Minstead had a lovely church. As a bonus, the churchyard contained the grave of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

It was spiritualism that brought Doyle to the New Forest just about a hundred years ago. Spiritualism became curiously popular at that time. Its devoted followers included not just Arthur Conan Doyle but also the future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, the philosopher William James and the renowned chemist Sir William Crookes. By about 1910, Britain contained so many devoted spiritualists that they seriously considered forming a political party. But nobody outdid Doyle for devotion. He wrote some twenty books on spiritualism, became president of the International Spiritualist Congress, and opened a psychic bookshop and museum near Westminster Abbey in London. (The building was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War. You would think he’d have seen that coming.)

The problem was that even by the elastic and forgiving standards of spiritualism and the paranormal Doyle’s beliefs grew increasingly loopy. He became convinced that fairies and other woodland sprites were real and wrote a book, The Coming of the Fairies, insisting on their existence. Through seances he developed a friendship with an ancient Mesopotamian named Pheneas, who gave him lifestyle guidance and warned him of a coming cataclysm. In the book Pheneas Speaks, Doyle revealed that in 1927 the world would be rocked by floods and earthquakes, and that one of the continents would sink beneath the seas. When these events failed to come to pass, Doyle conceded that Pheneas had got the year wrong (he’d been using a Mesopotamian calendar evidently), but that they would most assuredly happen sometime.

On the advice of Pheneas, Doyle bought a house near Minstead and there passed his days sitting quietly in the woods with a camera waiting hopefully for fairies to emerge (they never did) and his evenings holding seances at which he communicated with Britain’s most eminent dead. Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad both asked him to finish the novels they had left uncompleted at death, and the recently deceased Jerome K. Jerome, who had mocked Doyle in life, now sent a message through a third party saying: ‘Tell Arthur I was wrong.’ All this Doyle took as self-evident vindication of his beliefs. Remarkably, throughout all this Doyle continued to produce his celebrated Sherlock Holmes stories, all based on fastidiously rational thinking, and resisted the temptation, which must have been great, to have the famous detective call on spiritualism to solve his cases.

In 1930, Doyle died (though in fact spiritualists don’t die; they just get very still apparently) and was buried in the garden of his main home in Crowborough in Sussex. His wife was tipped in beside him when her time came, but in 1955 the house was sold and the new owners weren’t keen on having skeletons cluttering up the garden, so Arthur and his wife were dug up and reinterred in the churchyard of All Saints, Minstead – a move that was not without controversy since spiritualists are not really Christian on account of their dogged refusal to die. Still, it must be said that the Doyles have been in Minstead churchyard for more than half a century and not caused any fuss.