Great British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most successful writers in the beginning of the twentieth century. His most famous work - stories about detective Sherlock Holmes brought him fame and fortune. As we know, Sherlock was a hard core realist and intellectual who relied on the method of “deductive reasoning”. This helped him to solve any case of crime no matter how weird, bizarre or fantastic it looked.

Unfortunately Sherlock’s creator himself in the second half of his life did not follow the steps of his hero. Conan Doyle fell the victim to the Spiritualism. The reason for this were very tragic events in his family that affected and traumatized Doyle on the deep personal level. His beloved wife Louisa died in 1906. Some years later other started happening one after the other. Doyle lost one by one his son Kingsley, his brother Innes, his two brothers-in-law, and his two nephews. After World War I, because of these unfortunate and sad deaths, Conan Doyle sank into deep depression. So it happened that the only solace he found was Spiritualism and its alleged scientific proof of existence beyond the grave.

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Each Easter one can hear the same questions from children, that adults usually can’t answer. What has bunny to do with the religious holiday of Easter? And why Easter Bunny lays eggs anyways? Usually adults don’t know what to say and joke their way out.

Yet, if we go back in history, there are several explanations. In the archives of my local web analytics company, I found one story that is worth mentioning. The origin of Easter Bunny as well as the word “Easter” comes from the pre-Christian customs honoring the fertility goddess Eostre of old German tribes, including Anglo-Saxon ones. According to popular folklore, Eostre once saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a rabbit. Because the rabbit had once been a bird, it could still lay eggs. As it happens a lot with old lore, that rabbit in the end became the modern Easter Bunny.

This legend arrived to the United States with German immigrants and Amish somewhere in the eighteenth century. These guys were telling their children stories about bunnies, although very often in their stories the rabbit laying eggs was replaced with a hare.