In July 1917, two cousins walked down to a stream behind a house in a northern English village and came back with what they called proof of fairies. Elsie Wright was 16. Frances Griffiths was 9. Frances had just been scolded for soaking her shoes and stockings in the stream, and the fairies were her excuse. Elsie took her father's camera along. The picture that came out looked astonishing. This is the story of how a children's prank grew until a famous author, Arthur Conan Doyle, staked his name on it. He had made his fame inventing the most logical detective in fiction. Why would such a man believe in fairies? And how long could two girls keep a secret that size?
Conan Doyle and the Cottingley Fairies
Two cousins fooled Sherlock Holmes's creator with cardboard cutouts and hatpins, and kept the secret for 66 years.
Chapter 1
Fairies by the Stream
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Frequently Asked Questions
How did Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths make the fairy photographs?
They drew and cut out cardboard fairies, copying dancing girls from a 1914 children's book and adding wings. They fixed the cutouts into mud or onto branches with long hatpins, photographed them, then threw the hatpins into the stream. They confessed this in 1983.
Why did Arthur Conan Doyle believe the photographs were real?
Doyle was a committed Spiritualist who had lost his son Kingsley in 1918 and his brother in early 1919. He wanted concrete evidence of a world beyond the physical. He hoped the pictures would jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts.
Did any expert declare the fairy photographs genuine?
Photography expert Harold Snelling called the negatives entirely genuine, unfaked photographs, meaning they showed whatever stood in front of the lens. Kodak refused to certify them. It said the images were not necessarily faked but were not proof of fairies.
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