What fictional character do 25% of Americans believe is a real person?

Sherlock Holmes is the fictional character that 25% of Americans reportedly believe was a real person. Created by Scottish author Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes first appeared in the 1887 novel *A Study in Scarlet* and later became famous through stories published in *The Strand Magazine*.

Holmes feels unusually real because Doyle gave him a precise address—221B Baker Street—a detailed professional identity, and a supposedly factual narrator in Dr. John Watson. Doyle also based some of Holmes’s observational methods on the real surgeon Joseph Bell. Despite those real-world influences, Sherlock Holmes himself is fictional; the many films, television adaptations, museums, and fan societies surrounding him have only strengthened the illusion that he once lived.