# Two girls photographed real fairies at Cottingley

**Verdict: Contradicted.** The photographs were a confessed hoax (cardboard cutouts traced from a 1914 children's annual and propped up with hatpins) though one of the two photographers maintained to her death that she had genuinely seen fairies.

Category: Unexplained Phenomena · Era: Interwar era · First circulated: 1917 · Believed by: Convinced Arthur Conan Doyle and much of the spiritualist press by 1920–22
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/cottingley-fairies

## Summary
Five photographs taken by two young cousins in a Yorkshire garden convinced the creator of Sherlock Holmes that fairies were real. Sixty-six years later, both women admitted the figures were paper cutouts, though one never fully recanted.

## The claim
That in 1917 and 1920, cousins Elsie Wright (16) and Frances Griffiths (9) photographed genuine winged fairies playing beside a beck in Cottingley, near Bradford, England, and that the five resulting images are authentic photographic evidence of fairy life.

## Origin and timeline
- 1917: Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, playing by the beck at the bottom of the Wright family garden in Cottingley, borrow Elsie's father's camera and produce two photographs: one of Frances with four dancing fairies, one of Elsie with a gnome.
- 1919–20: The photographs circulate among Bradford Theosophical Society members and reach Edward Gardner, a prominent theosophist, who has new prints made and shows them to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
- 1920: Doyle, commissioned to write a Christmas fairy article for The Strand Magazine, contacts the family, arranges for Kodak to examine the negatives, and sends Gardner to Cottingley with fresh cameras. The girls produce three more photographs that August.
- Dec 1920: Doyle's article ‘Fairies Photographed’ runs in The Strand Magazine, reproducing the 1917 photographs under pseudonyms and selling out within days.
- 1921: Doyle publishes a follow-up Strand article, ‘The Evidence for Fairies,’ featuring the 1920 photographs.
- 1922: Doyle collects both articles, plus correspondence and analysis, into the book The Coming of the Fairies.
- 1982–83: Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, publishes a multi-part scientific investigation, ‘That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies,’ concluding the images were faked.
- 1983: Elsie and Frances confirm the hoax in print, in the magazine The Unexplained and in a letter from Elsie to Crawley, describing cardboard cutouts held up with hatpins.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Kodak's own photographic experts examined the negatives and found no signs of fakery.
  Evidence: True, but incomplete: Kodak's technicians said the plates showed no evidence of double exposure or obvious darkroom trickery, and for that reason declined to call them fakes outright, but they also explicitly refused to certify the images as genuine photographs of fairies, telling Gardner that other, undetectable methods of faking a single-exposure image existed. A rival lab, Ilford, examined the same class of prints and reported clear signs of faking.
- Claim: The girls maintained their story for over sixty years, including under direct questioning by journalists.
  Evidence: They did, but a 1976 Yorkshire Television interview shows both women dodging the question rather than affirming it, agreeing only that ‘a rational person doesn't see fairies’ while declining to say the photos were faked. Elsie later said embarrassment, not conviction, kept her quiet: having fooled ‘a brilliant man like Conan Doyle,’ she felt she ‘could only keep quiet.’
- Claim: The fairies in the photographs have a distinctive, consistent artistic style: proof they weren't simply invented on the spot by two children.
  Evidence: Correct, and that consistency is exactly what convicts the photographs: the figures are traceable, pose for pose, to illustrations by Claude A. Shepperson in the 1914 anthology Princess Mary's Gift Book, which Frances had brought back from South Africa. Elsie copied the figures, added wings and updated hairstyles with pencil, cut them out of paper, and (by her own account and Crawley's photographic analysis) pinned them upright in the grass with hatpins for the camera.

## Why people believe it
- In 1917–20, photography was still widely treated as a mechanically objective record rather than an easily manipulated medium, so a photograph carried evidentiary weight a hand-drawn illustration never could.
- Arthur Conan Doyle was already a committed spiritualist searching for proof of a hidden spirit world, and his enormous cultural authority as Sherlock Holmes's creator lent the images a credibility they could not have earned alone.
- The First World War had just killed millions of young men, and the interwar spiritualist movement (including Doyle, who lost his son) was primed to want contact with an unseen, benevolent world.
- The photographs came from two ordinary young girls with, on the surface, nothing to gain, which read as more trustworthy than a claim from an adult showman or professional medium.

## Open questions
- Elsie and Frances agreed, in matching detail, on how they faked the first four photographs, but never on the fifth. Frances maintained until her death in 1986 that the image Doyle called a ‘sun-bath’ showed something she had genuinely seen and photographed, while Elsie called it a fake like the rest. Geoffrey Crawley's 1983 double-exposure theory offers a way to treat both women as sincere rather than call one of them a liar, but why their otherwise-consistent stories diverged on that single frame, and no other, is a question about the two women's own memories that the surviving physical evidence cannot settle either way.
- Separately from the fifth photograph, Frances maintained for the rest of her life that she had genuinely experienced fairies as a child at the Cottingley beck. In a 1981 account to researcher Joe Cooper, she described them as real fairies that felt ‘peaceful and friendly’ and sometimes came ‘only inches away.’ That is a private, unverifiable childhood memory rather than a photograph or a testable claim, and it is presented here as exactly that: a hoaxer's own sincerely held recollection, not evidence bearing on whether fairies exist.

## Sources
- “Fairies Photographed—An Epoch-making Event,” The Strand Magazine, Vol. 60, Arthur Conan Doyle / George Newnes Ltd. (1920): https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Fairies_Photographed
- The Coming of the Fairies (full text), Arthur Conan Doyle / George H. Doran Company (1922): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47506/47506-h/47506-h.htm
- “That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies” (photographic investigation series), Geoffrey Crawley, British Journal of Photography (1983)
- Elsie Wright’s handwritten confession letter to Geoffrey Crawley, and related Cottingley Fairies archive (original prints, cameras, correspondence), National Science and Media Museum, Bradford (1983): https://www.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/about-us/press-office/museum-acquires-final-camera-cottingley-fairies-story
- Princess Mary’s Gift Book (source of the Claude A. Shepperson fairy illustrations), Hodder & Stoughton (1914)
- The Case of the Cottingley Fairies, Joe Cooper / Robert Hale (1990)
- “The Man Who Believed in Fairies”, Tom Huntington, Smithsonian Magazine (1997): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-man-who-believed-in-fairies-51895688/
- ‘Midg’ Camera Used to Make the First Two ‘Cottingley Fairies’ Photographs in 1917, Science Museum Group Collection: https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co469836/midg-camera-used-to-make-the-first-two-cottingley-fairies-photographs-in-1917-quarter-plate-camera-plate-camera
- Cottingley Fairies, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies

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