In the summer of 1917, a girl named Frances Griffiths kept coming home with wet feet. She had been playing by the beck — a stream — at the bottom of the garden in Cottingley, a village in West Yorkshire. Her mother was annoyed. Frances explained that she went to the beck to see the fairies.

Her cousin Elsie Wright, who was sixteen, backed her up. To prove it, Elsie borrowed her father's camera.

When her father developed the photograph, it showed Frances leaning on her hand, looking at the camera, with a group of small winged fairies dancing in front of her.

The photographs

Elsie's father, Arthur Wright, was an amateur photographer. He suspected a prank. A month later, the girls took a second photograph, showing Elsie with a small gnome-like figure. Arthur thought the fairies looked like paper cut-outs and searched the girls' room for evidence, but found nothing. He banned them from using the camera.

Elsie's mother, Polly, was more open-minded. She was interested in Theosophy, a spiritual movement that included belief in nature spirits. In 1919, she mentioned the photographs at a Theosophical Society meeting.

From there, the pictures began to travel.

The experts

The photographs reached Edward Gardner, a leading Theosophist, who became convinced they were genuine. He had them examined by a photography expert, Harold Snelling, who said he could find no evidence of double exposure or of paper or cloth figures. The negatives, he said, showed no signs of tampering.

In 1920, Gardner arranged for the girls to take more photographs, giving them new cameras and marked plates. They produced three more images, including one, often called "Fairies and their Sun-Bath", showing a misty, shadowy shape among the grass.

Conan Doyle

Then the photographs reached one of the most famous writers in the world. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes — fiction's greatest detective — was a committed Spiritualist. He believed in communication with the dead and was eager for evidence of a spirit world.

Conan Doyle was writing an article about fairies for The Strand Magazine. In its Christmas 1920 issue, he published the Cottingley photographs, presenting them as evidence that fairies existed. In 1922, he wrote a whole book, The Coming of the Fairies.

Doubts

Many people were sceptical from the start. Critics pointed out that the fairies looked strikingly like illustrations, with fashionable 1910s hairstyles. Some said they looked like paper cut-outs. The photography company Kodak examined the photos and said they showed no obvious evidence of faking, but would not certify that they were genuine.

The girls grew up, married and moved on. For decades, when asked, they gave careful answers that neither fully confirmed nor denied the fairies.

The confession

In the 1970s and early 1980s, researchers took a fresh look. One noticed that the fairies in the first photograph closely resembled illustrations from a children's book published in 1914, Princess Mary's Gift Book.

In 1983, Elsie and Frances finally confessed. Elsie had copied the fairies from the book, drawn them on card, cut them out and fixed them in place with hatpins. The girls had never expected the photographs to become famous. Once figures as eminent as Conan Doyle had staked their reputations on them, they said, they felt too embarrassed to admit the truth.

A lasting fascination

The Cottingley Fairies have inspired books, plays and films. In 2019, prints of the photographs and one of the cameras were sold at auction. The story continues to fascinate because it involves so many human elements: childhood play, a prank that got out of hand, grief, hope and the power of a photograph to convince.

It also shows that clever people are not immune to being fooled — especially when they want something to be true.