The Cottingley Fairies are a series of five photographs taken between 1917 and 1920 by cousins Elsie Wright, then 16, and Frances Griffiths, then 9, in the village of Cottingley near Bingley, West Yorkshire, England, purporting to show the girls in the company of fairies.[1] The photographs became internationally famous after being championed as genuine by author and prominent Spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle, and are now among the best-documented photographic hoaxes in the history of paranormal claims.[1]
The photographs
The first two photographs were taken in mid-1917 using Elsie's father's camera: one in July showing Frances apparently surrounded by four dancing fairies, and a second in September showing Elsie with a winged gnome.[1] The girls' families had differing reactions — Elsie's father, an amateur photographer himself, was sceptical from the start and believed the images were faked, while Elsie's mother became convinced of their authenticity after attending a Theosophical Society lecture on fairy life.[1] Three further photographs were taken in 1920, after the case had drawn wider outside attention, showing similar fairy figures around Frances and Elsie.[1]
Arthur Conan Doyle's involvement
The photographs came to wider attention through Arthur Conan Doyle, who at the time was deeply engaged with Spiritualism, in part following the death of his son during the First World War.[1] Doyle learned of the images through Theosophist Edward Gardner and arranged for them to be examined by Kodak's technical staff and by photographic expert Harold Snelling; the examiners found no evidence of double exposure or obvious studio trickery but stopped short of certifying the photographs as showing genuine supernatural beings.[1] Doyle wrote an article on the photographs for The Strand Magazine in its Christmas 1920 issue, and expanded his case in the 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies, bringing the photographs to a large public audience and considerable ridicule.[1]
Public reception and scepticism
Many contemporary observers were sceptical from the outset. Critics noted a strong stylistic resemblance between the photographed fairies and illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book, a popular children's annual published in 1914, as well as the flat, static, two-dimensional appearance of the figures compared with the girls themselves.[1] The case nonetheless remained a subject of public fascination and periodic debate for decades.
The 1983 confession
A detailed technical investigation of the photographs was carried out by Geoffrey Crawley and published across a series of articles in the British Journal of Photography between 1982 and 1983.[1] Around the same period, researcher Joe Cooper interviewed Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, by then elderly women, and in 1983 both publicly admitted that the first four photographs had been faked using cardboard cutouts of fairies copied from illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book, coloured in and supported with hairpins.[1] Both women, however, maintained until their deaths that the fifth and final photograph was genuine, a claim that has never been independently corroborated. Frances Griffiths died in 1986 and Elsie Wright in 1988.[1]
Legacy
The Cottingley Fairies remain a frequently cited case study in the evaluation of photographic evidence and in the psychology of wishful thinking and belief, illustrating how a well-regarded public figure's endorsement — in this case Conan Doyle's — could lend apparent credibility to an otherwise simple hoax.[1] The story has been dramatised in film twice, in FairyTale: A True Story and Photographing Fairies, both released in 1997.
EVIDENCE ASSESSMENT
☆☆☆☆☆
Explained (confirmed hoax)