COTTINGLEY FAIRIES HOAX

Famous photographic deception perpetrated by teenage cousins Elsie Wright (16) and Frances Griffiths (9) in Cottingley, England, who created five staged photographs purporting to show real fairies and gnomes in their garden, deceiving prominent spiritualists including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for over six decades.

The hoax began in July 1917 when Frances borrowed Elsie’s father’s camera and returned claiming to have photographed fairies by Cottingley Beck. The girls produced four additional fairy photographs using cardboard cutouts copied from Princess Mary’s Gift Book illustrations, held in place with hatpins and photographed against natural backgrounds with techniques sophisticated enough to fool contemporary photographic analysis.

Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes but also a devoted spiritualist, championed the photographs after being introduced to them by prominent theosophist Edward Gardner in 1920. Doyle featured the images in his article “Fairies Photographed” for The Strand Magazine and later wrote an entire book, “The Coming of the Fairies” (1922), defending their authenticity despite skepticism from photographic experts.

The photographs gained international attention and sparked fierce debate between believers in fairy folklore and rational skeptics, with photographic analysts split on whether the images showed genuine supernatural phenomena or clever fabrications. The controversy persisted throughout the 20th century as both women maintained their story well into adulthood.

Elsie Wright finally confessed the hoax in 1981 interviews, revealing the cardboard cutout method and admitting the deception had “gone too far” after Conan Doyle’s involvement. Frances Griffiths confirmed the fabrication in 1986, though she claimed until her death that the fifth photograph remained genuine, maintaining an element of mystery around the famous case.