Behind the ‘Fake’ Photos: Britain’s Great Fairy Hoax

In the Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand Magazine, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle set aside Sherlock Holmes to bring a new subject before the reading public.

The headline minced no words about Doyle’s newest cultural sensation, shouting: “FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED: AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT.”

In the accompanying article, Doyle got right to the point: “It was about the month of May in this year that I received a letter...to the effect that two photographs of fairies had been taken in the North of England under circumstances which seemed to put fraud out of the question.”

Fairies, in Yorkshire of all places. Doyle excitedly recounted the investigations he and research partner E.L. Gardner had undertaken to verify what would become known as the “Cottingley Fairy” photos. These black-and-white images showed young girls in the countryside, accompanied by what certainly looked like small-winged beings.

The images were said to be the creation of teenage Elsie Wright and her younger cousin Frances Griffiths. In an effort to protect their family’s privacy, Doyle gave them the pseudonyms “Iris” and “Alice.”

According to his recap, the cousins explained they routinely saw fairy folk while wandering the woods. Eager to prove themselves truthful (and to explain away their wet clothing), they pleaded with Elsie’s father for a film plate—just one, to see if they could capture an image with his camera.

Pacing and hopping outside the darkroom door, the girls snuck a peek inside and were delighted to see fairies emerge in the negative. “Iris” was said to have shouted: “Oh, Alice, Alice, the fairies are on the plate—they are on the plate!”

That photograph, called “Alice and the Fairies,” was printed in the 1920 holiday issue of The Strand Magazine alongside Doyle’s story. In the summertime image, Frances lounges calmly in the grass and dandelions, leaning head on hand. Four lithe little fairies with butterfly wings gambol in front of her. One plays a tiny trumpet.

By fall, the girls had added another image to the portfolio: "Elsie and the Gnome," which showed the elder girl reaching out to an impish little figure. Eventually, the pair would create five images of the supernatural sprites of Cottingley. All of them featured the girls and forest fairies in a pastoral, witchy, teenage aesthetic—flower crowns, long wavy hair, flowing gowns (“The Hairbell Fairy,” featuring Elsie, could well be a Florence and the Machine album cover).

This was not a coincidence. The Cottingley Fairies were evidence of something, all right: a teenage DIY art project.

Elsie was a gifted watercolorist and had made the fairy figures as paper cutouts, then staged them carefully in the grasses with hatpins before taking photographs. But this was not made known until decades later. From the 1920s onward, the fairy photographs were the subject of serious inquiry by spiritualists, occultists, theosophists (of which Gardner was one), photographers and skeptics.

For his part, Gardner was easily convinced. He saw “no sign of double exposure nor anything other than ordinary straightforward work” when examining the negatives.

Doyle and Gardner failed mostly through sexist belief: They assumed that working-class Yorkshire girls were either too innocent or uneducated to pull off a hoax, and that a young woman could not be a worthy artistic talent. They dismissed Elsie’s attributed artwork as “entirely uninspired."

Doyle was dazzled by the photographs and could not get them to leave his mind. Two years later, in 1922, he devoted an entire book to the subject, titled The Coming of the Fairies.

Not everyone shared his credulity; the writer of the October “Notes of the Month” for the Occult Review in 1922 expressed a more cautious stance, observing that “a great many readers like myself will be rather disposed to keep an open mind.” The writer emphasized the necessity of photographic expertise in evaluating the images, not to mention the larger question of whether fairies in fact exist.

Certainly, the fascination was not new to Doyle. He had experimented with spirit photography, table-tipping, spiritual mediumship and other spiritualist ideas going back to the 1880s. By the 1920s, his curiosity had crossed over to near-obsession.

The rise of various new technologies made so many marvels and discoveries seem possible, and the impetus to seek a world beyond our own was all the stronger after the massive social trauma of World War I. Doyle had also lost his son Kingsley to influenza in 1918.

Though Doyle was raised Christian, studied medicine, dabbled in law and was famous for the rigorous deductive powers of his character Sherlock Holmes, he wholeheartedly embraced spiritualism and its more ethereal possibilities as a solution to the conflict between science and religion.

"Doyle believed that spiritualism rescued the Bible from narrow-minded literalism," writes Brian McCuskey in How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method. Skepticism about the fairy photographs was not a threat to his strong belief in unseen worlds, powers, forces and entities.

As he would do in public intellectual venues, Doyle insisted the ability to reproduce alleged occult phenomena through practical effects or explainable means was not a death knell to his beliefs. All that proved, he maintained, was that “some professional trickster” could mimic with earthly means what the spirits could easily do by their nature.

He spent years trying to convince skeptic Harry Houdini of the truth of spirit contact. Author David Jaher notes in The Witch of Lime Street that “displays of the impossible would soon convince Doyle. . . that Houdini himself was a great medium.”

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the Cottingley Fairies is that they remained a mystery well into the 20th century, long after Doyle had passed away.

It was not until the early 1980s that Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, addressed the photos in a 10-part series of articles that carefully and kindly debunked the whole affair. Elsie and Frances were still alive then, and Elsie ultimately admitted in a letter that the images were fabricated.

They still maintained they had seen the fairies, though.