The Cottingley Fairies: A Photographic Hoax Confessed 65 Years Later

In 1917, cousins Elsie Wright (16) and Frances Griffiths (9) photographed what appeared to be dancing fairies at the bottom of a garden in Cottingley, Yorkshire, using Elsie's father's camera. Arthur Wright, an experienced amateur photographer with his own darkroom, developed the plates and immediately suspected cardboard cutouts — he knew his daughter's artistic ability and her time working at a photographer's studio.

His skepticism was swept aside when the photographs reached the Theosophy Society and then Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and a committed spiritualist. Conan Doyle accepted the photographs as genuine after expert analysis by Kodak photographic technicians — who could not find evidence of double exposure but declined to certify authenticity — and published them in the Strand Magazine in 1920 with an article proclaiming proof of fairy existence. The case became an international sensation.

Three more photographs followed over subsequent years, but no controlled verification was ever attempted. The photographs were subject to various expert analyses over the decades; some analysts raised doubts, none could produce definitive technical proof of fakery from the prints alone.

In 1983, both women gave interviews to magazines and newspapers in which they confessed the full method: they had cut fairy figures from Princess Mary's Gift Book (published 1914), propped them with hatpins, and photographed them in the beck. Elsie said they had been too embarrassed to confess after fooling Conan Doyle. Frances, while admitting the photographs were faked, maintained to her death that she and Elsie did genuinely see fairies — an addendum that shows how thoroughly the experience had been internalized.