My eye was caught by a claim in local news that the author Arthur Conan Doyle once frequented the Salisbury Arms. In the best spirit of Sherlock Holmes, this thread sets out to thoroughly and factually debunk this assertion. Along the way we will find out about the actual history of the building and those people and organisations who are correctly associated with it. We shall also be told a cautionary tale about the perils of the decline of factual integrity in local journalism and the dangerous potential for the propagation of machine-generated misinformation on the niche subject of Edinburgh local history.