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This essay examines the process by which Sherlock Holmes returns to the Sherlock Holmes series almost 10 years after he was pronounced officially “dead” in “The Adventure of the Final Problem.” Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as “placeless places,” the essay argues that before he completes his return to his old room at 221B Baker Street at the end of “The Adventure of the Empty House,” Holmes occupies a placeless place in the form of the empty room, where he briefly becomes a characterless character. Just as Foucault’s placeless places display the power of language to negate something it represents, Holmes as a characterless character displays what a character is to the point where it cannot possibly be so. In “The Empty House,” as a placeless place, the empty room simultaneously enables, contests, and inverts Holmes’s existence through the tension between the emptiness and the fullness. The front window of the empty room that functions as both the window and the mirror plays a particularly important role in othering Holmes’s existence as a characterless character. Only after Holmes lets Colonel Moran destroy his dummy in his old room and thereby rid the space around them of all the heterotopic attributes can he complete his return as Sherlock Holmes.