The Peculiar Truth about the Cottingley Fairies

• England, 1920: The Strand magazine, which had been in circulation for thirty years, published its December issue. Atop the cover were the words “Fairies Photographed, An Epoch Making Event Described By A. Conan Doyle.”

• Inside were two photos of fresh-faced young women engaging with miniature bird-sized human females that possessed what looked like butterfly wings. The little creatures were said to be fairies. The girls, a pair of cousins from the village of Cottingley in West Yorkshire, insisted the images were real.

• The accompanying story about the girls and their photographs was written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous author of the Sherlock Holmes stories. He had been an avid follower of spiritualism, and he cautiously believed that the pictures were authentic.

• Thus began a mystery that continued for over half a century.

• The photographs were taken in 1917. The first showed ten-year-old Frances Griffiths with a waterfall in the background and four nymphs dancing before her face. The girl didn’t appear to be staring at the fairies, however, but more toward the camera. The second image showed her cousin, 16-year-old Elsie Wright, seated on the ground with a winged gnomish figure dancing before her.

• Elsie and Frances claimed that they had seen the fairies, as they called them, in the woods for quite some time, and the sprites had grown friendly toward them. Elsie’s father permitted the girls use of his camera, and they snapped the photos themselves.

• Later, the father processed the film and was surprised at what he saw. The girls declared that the pictures were not in any way staged.

• Elsie’s mother took the photographs to the nearby city of Bradford and showed them to members of the Theosophical Society, which in its day was somewhat equivalent to a New Age spiritualist group.

• The society’s most prominent member, Edward Gardner, found the images fascinating. He took them to a photography expert for authentication. The expert claimed them to be genuine.

• Gardner then proclaimed them as verifiable proof of the supernatural. That caught the attention of Arthur Conan Doyle.

• Throughout his life, the acclaimed author held strong beliefs in Spiritualism, the ability to contact the dead through psychic means. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1893, roughly six years after he introduced Sherlock Holmes, but the subject fascinated him long before then. He did not believe that death was the end, that there was a spirit world where loved ones resided.

• When the Cottingley Fairies pictures were presented to Doyle, he expressed initial cynicism. He felt maybe someone was trying to put one over on him in an attempt to debunk his beliefs. Even the piece he wrote for the Strand magazine expressed caution. But if the photos were legitimate, they would be a boost for Spiritualism. He wrote, “Having discovered this, the world will not find it so difficult to accept that spiritual message…”

• Doyle also fully accepted that Piltdown Man, the infamous hoax, was real.

• When the writer died in 1930, neither the Cottingley Fairies nor Piltdown had been revealed as fakes. Doyle went to his grave believing they were real.

• 1983: The cousins, Elsie and Frances, finally confessed to their fakery when both were elderly women. Neither expressed shame in fooling the public. It was a simple bit of fun that got out of hand.

• Frances was quoted as saying, "I can't understand to this day why people were taken in. They wanted to be taken in… They wanted to believe.”