Cottingley Fairies

The Cottingley fairies was a phenomenon involving photographs of purported fairies. A series of pictures taken by two young girls allegedly depicted several of these enchanted supernatural beings. These photographs became widely disseminated as supposed proof of the existence of these legendary creatures.

In July 1917, Elsie Wright, 16 years old, and Frances Griffiths, her 10-year-old cousin, claimed that they had seen fairies while playing by a small stream, which they called the “beck,” located near the Wright's family garden plot. They both lived in the same house in Cottingley Glen, a small village outside Bradford, West Yorkshire, in England. Arthur Wright, Elsie's father, thought that the story was nonsense, but the girls persisted, insisting that they had indeed seen the fairies. Mr. Wright eventually loaded a photographic plate into his Midg quarter-plate camera and sent the girls off, telling them to return with a photograph [Page 226]of the fairies. Elsie returned with the camera, and later that Saturday afternoon, Arthur Wright developed the plate, unsure of what he saw appearing as the plate was developing in his darkroom, with Elsie behind him claiming that they were fairies. The photograph showed Frances in a semireclining pose, with four fairies dancing in front of her and the babbling brook behind her.

The photographs and captions for “Elsie and the Gnome” (left) and “Fairy Offering Posey of Hare-Bells to Elsie” appear in The Coming of the Fairies (1921) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was fooled by the trickery of two schoolgirls using paper fairy cutouts and a camera in 1917. He was not the only one deceived; careful examination of the photographic plates by representatives of the Kodak company in 1920 could not find “any evidence or superposition, or trick.” The spiritualist fervor of the era lent credence to the hoax.

That August, Frances used the camera to take a picture of Elsie with a gnomelike figure. The second picture was rather unclear and underexposed, and Mr. Wright thought the girls had been playing tricks and refused to lend them his camera again. He, his wife Polly, and Annie Griffiths, Frances's mother, searched the attic bedroom that the two girls shared and the wastepaper basket, looking for any evidence of scraps of cut-outs and other signs of fraud. Elsie and Frances stuck to their story; the pictures were circulated to neighbors and friends, and then were largely forgotten.

Two years later, in the summer of 1919, Polly Wright, Elsie's mother, attended a meeting of the local Theosophical Society in nearby Bradford. She had initially been dismissive of the girls' stories. Nevertheless, the Theosophy (spiritualism) lecture that evening happened to be on fairy life, and after the talk, Polly mentioned the two fairy photographs that her daughter and niece had taken. The discussion was overheard, which is how these mysterious prints came to the attention of the Theosophists, who displayed them at their annual conference a few months later in Harrogate, England. By early 1920, news of the photos caught the attention of Edward L. Gardner, one of the leading Theosophists, who asked to see the pictures.

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