Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the ultimate fictional champion of logic and deductive reasoning, but in real life he was a massive gullible mark for spiritualist mediums and mystical hoaxes.

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, the ultimate fictional champion of logic and deductive reasoning, but in real life he was a massive gullible mark for spiritualist mediums and mystical hoaxes. The author famously destroyed his friendship with the escape artist Harry Houdini because Doyle absolutely refused to believe that Houdini's tricks were illusions, insisting instead that Houdini possessed actual supernatural powers. The ultimate embarrassment came when Doyle publicly endorsed the Cottingley Fairies, completely failing to realize that the mystical photographs of woodland sprites were just paper cutouts from a children's book propped up with hatpins. The man who invented the world's greatest detective could be easily outsmarted by two teenage girls with a pair of scissors