Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright had been teased about their stories of playing with fairies, but in 1917 all this changed. In the Cottingley Beck, close to their home in the village of Cottingley near Bradford in Yorkshire, the two schoolgirls produced two of the oddest photographs anyone had ever seen.
The Photographs
Borrowing her father's camera, Elsie set out one afternoon with her younger cousin for a romp in the nearby woods. When Mr. Wright developed the picture later that evening, he would get a shock. There in the frame, dancing around his ten-year-old niece Frances, were the forms of four female fairies — delicate winged beings dancing in the dappled sunlight of the beck.
A second photograph followed shortly after: Elsie sitting with a gnome that appeared to be leaping toward her outstretched hand. Mr. Wright was skeptical, but the girls insisted the photographs were genuine. The images were so remarkable that they could not easily dismiss them.
The Photographs Reach the World
In 1919, Elsie's mother showed the photographs at a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford. They eventually made their way to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — creator of Sherlock Holmes and a committed believer in spiritualism — who was working on an article about fairies for the Strand Magazine. Doyle was convinced of the photographs' authenticity and published them in 1920, declaring them evidence of the existence of fairies. The story became an international sensation.
Photographic experts examined the images. Some were skeptical, others could find no evidence of tampering. The debate raged for decades.
The Truth Revealed
In 1981, Frances and Elsie — now elderly women — finally admitted that the fairies in the photographs had been paper cutouts, copied from a children's book and propped up with hat pins. They had maintained the fiction for over sixty years, unable to bring themselves to disappoint those who so desperately wanted to believe.
Frances, however, maintained until her death in 1986 that the fifth and final photograph — taken in 1920 — showed genuine fairies. Whether this was truth, sentiment, or simply the last act of a very long game, no one will ever know for certain.
The Cottingley affair remains one of the great fairy stories of the modern era — not because it proved the existence of fairies, but because it revealed so clearly how much the world wanted them to exist.