Canada and the World
Current Events with a Canadian Perspective
Last update
19 November 2010
Photos of Fairies Faked
in Attempt to Prove Existence
The creator of Sherlock Holmes was just one
of the many people hoodwinked by a couple of young girls and their bogus photographs of fairies
Elsie Wright, aged 16, and her cousin, 10-
Fairies in Cottingley Glen
Cottingley is a village of about 5,000 people near the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire, England. In July 1917, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths said they had seen fairies while playing by a small stream at the bottom of the Wright family’s garden.
Elsie’s father, Arthur, thought the story to be nonsense, but the girls were insistent. So, Mr. Wright loaded a plate into his camera and sent the girls off to the bottom of the garden and told them to come back with a photograph of the fairies.
Elsie took a picture of Frances with several fairies dancing in front of her; and,
there was another photo of Elsie sitting with a tiny gnome-
Theosophy, Spiritualism, and the Fairy Pictures
The girls’ mothers were also dismissive but became less so when they went to a lecture on spiritualism in Bradford.
According to the Cottingley village website: “At the time of the war, people were faced with the possibility that their loved ones may not come home. Casualties were mounting and comfort was found in religion, prayer, and other beliefs. Believing in spirits and the afterlife gave many people hope that they may one day be reunited and Theosophy went some way in providing this hope.”
This was the heyday of what was called “spirit photography.” As The Daily Mail reported (October 2008) this was a time when “the Spiritualist movement fed the insatiable hunger of the war bereaved, and unscrupulous photographers made a handsome living producing portraits with ghostly images of a loved one lost in the war hovering in the background.”
Cottingley Fairy Photos Called Genuine
After the lecture, Polly Wright and Annie Griffiths were overheard talking about the fairy photos. The story got to the ears of Edward Gardner, a leading theosophist, who asked to see them. Eventually, news of the extraordinary pictures got to another prominent theosophist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The negatives were examined by experts and pronounced free from fakery. And, Doyle
gave his stamp of approval: “This original negative is asserted by expert photographers
to bear not the slightest trace of combination work, retouching, or anything whatever
to mark it as other than a perfectly straight single-
Fairy Story Goes Global
In the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand magazine Sir Arthur wrote an article
entitled “An Epoch Making Event -
In 1922, Conan Doyle followed up with a book, The Coming of the Fairies. Newspaper and magazine articles recounted the story, which became an international sensation.
Eventually, the public’s appetite for the fairy story died down, but it has been revived several times since. Throughout, Elsie and Frances maintained the photos were real and, as late as 1978, writer Geoffrey Chase believed they had seen and photographed the tiny sprites.
Chase wrote a play, Fairies, that was shown on BBC Television in 1978 in which the girls’ story was reconstructed.
Elsie Wright Confesses to Hoax
On March 19, 1983 The Yorkshire Post tracked down Elsie (shown below with a “dancing
gnome”) and she confessed the whole episode had been a prank. 
She and Frances had
cut pictures of fairies out of a book and pasted them on cardboard. They had then
fixed them in position with hat pins and taken the shots.
Elsie told the newspaper’s Michael Brown, “It was a secret between me and Frances and we have kept it all this time. But, we always intended to admit one day that it was a hoax and that the photographs were a fake and now I admit it at last.”
She said that after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was taken in they didn’t dare confess.
However, in 1986, in her last television appearance before her death Frances said that “There were fairies at Cottingley.”
Sources
“Sherlock Holmes and the Curious Case of the Garden Fairies.” Russell Miller, Mail Online, October 15, 2008.
“Hoaxers at the Bottom of the Garden.” Michael Brown, Yorkshire Post, March 19, 1983.
© Canada and the World, July 2010
All rights reserved
“Theosophy is a religious philosophy also known as the Wisdom Religion. Those that follow this path believe in one absolute, incomprehensible and supreme Deity, or infinite essence, which is the root of all nature, and of all that is, visible and invisible. They also believe that man has an eternal immortal nature, because, being a radiation of the Universal Soul, he is of an identical essence with it.”