The Cottingley Fairies: The Photos That Fooled a Knight

Two girls came back from the beck behind the house with a borrowed camera and a story the grown-ups did not believe. It was the summer of 1917, in the village of Cottingley near Bradford in the north of England, and nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her sixteen-year-old cousin Elsie Wright had been playing by the stream. Scolded for coming home wet, they claimed they went down there to see the fairies. To prove it, Elsie borrowed her father's camera, and they returned with a photograph.

The picture showed young Frances gazing at the lens while four winged fairies danced in front of her. A second image followed, of Elsie with a small gnome-like figure. Elsie's father, an amateur photographer, was sure they were fakes and dismissed the whole thing. Her mother was less certain, and that difference of opinion is where an ordinary childhood prank began its climb toward international fame.

How a prank reached Arthur Conan Doyle

Elsie's mother took the photographs to a meeting of the Theosophical Society, a movement steeped in spiritualism and open to the idea of nature spirits. From there the images reached Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the supremely rational Sherlock Holmes and, in his private life, a committed spiritualist who had lost faith in materialism, especially after the deaths of the First World War. Doyle was preparing an article on fairies for The Strand Magazine and seized on the Cottingley pictures as possible proof. He published them in 1920 and expanded the case into a 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies, arguing they might be genuine evidence of a hidden order of beings.

Experts he consulted were divided; some thought the photographs unfaked, others were suspicious of the fairies' fashionable hairstyles and flat, paper-like look. Doyle, wanting to believe, treated the endorsements as decisive. That a man famous for inventing the world's most pitiless logician could be led by grief and hope into vouching for cardboard fairies is the human heart of the story.

The confession, decades late

The pictures were faked, and the method was almost insultingly simple. In the early 1980s, both women, then elderly, admitted that they had propped up cutout drawings of fairies, based on illustrations from a popular children's book, Princess Mary's Gift Book, secured with hatpins. Four of the five famous photographs were staged this way. The girls had never expected the joke to travel beyond their own family, let alone fool a knighted author and run for sixty years.

There is one thread the tidy confession leaves dangling, and both women left it there on purpose. Frances maintained to the end that the fifth photograph was genuine, and that whatever they had faked with paper, they really had seen something by that stream as children. Elsie was more skeptical of the last image. Neither retracted the deeper claim that the beck had felt, to two girls in 1917, like a place where such things might be.

That is folklore doing what folklore does, wrapping a real landscape in a story that will not fully lie down. The photographs are settled. The question of what a child sees at the edge of a wood is not the sort of thing a hatpin confession closes.

Readers have filed their own fairy sightings and childhood encounters at the edge of the water below, each rated True, Fake or Not sure. Look hard at those paper wings, then hand the jury your verdict.