A small Kodak camera, a box of watercolor paints, and a hatpin. That is all it took to fool the world. In July 1917, two young cousins in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley set up a scene beside a stream. They cut out tiny dancing figures from paper, painted them, and balanced them on pins stuck into the ground. When the photograph came back from development, it showed a girl named Frances Griffiths gazing into the lens while four winged creatures hovered before her. The Cottingley Fairies were born.
The Cottingley Fairies were five photographs taken in 1917 and 1920 by cousins Elsie Wright (aged 16) and Frances Griffiths (aged 10) in Cottingley, England, purporting to depict fairies. They became an international sensation when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published them in the Christmas 1920 issue of The Strand Magazine as evidence for the existence of supernatural beings. Decades later, both women admitted the first four images were faked using paper cutouts, though Frances maintained until her death that she had seen real fairies at the site.
We keep the original plates in our reference library only as scans, but the story matters as a turning point in the history of occult photography. It reveals what people wanted to see after the Great War, and how a camera can lie without lying.
How Did Two Girls Fool Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?
The first photograph was taken in July 1917 at the beck (a narrow stream) behind the Wright family home in Cottingley, a mill village in West Yorkshire. Elsie Wright borrowed her father Arthur’s camera, a Midge quarter-plate model. She and Frances spent an afternoon arranging paper cutouts copied from a children’s book, Princess Mary’s Gift Book (1915), which contained line drawings of fairies by illustrator Claude Arthur Shepperson. The girls traced the figures, colored them with watercolors, and attached them to hatpins they stuck into the mossy bank.
Arthur Wright developed the plate in his home darkroom. He saw the fairies but assumed the girls had cut out pictures of them. When Elsie insisted they were real, he grew angry and refused to let her use the camera again. But the local theosophist and writer Edward Gardner heard of the photographs through the Theosophical Society in Bradford. Gardner obtained prints and became convinced they were genuine. He brought them to Conan Doyle in 1920.
Conan Doyle was already a convert to spiritualism after losing his son Kingsley in the First World War and his brother-in-law shortly after. He wanted proof of an afterlife. The photographs matched his belief that fairies were real etheric beings, visible only to children and those with clairvoyant sight. He wrote a series of articles for The Strand titled “The Coming of the Fairies,” illustrated with the five photographs.
Gardner arranged for three more photographs to be taken in 1920, this time using a better camera and plates that he supplied. The girls produced “Frances and the Leaping Fairy,” “Elsie and the Gnome,” and “Fairies and Their Sunbath.” Conan Doyle paid for the plates to be examined by Kodak experts, who found no evidence of tampering. They missed the obvious sign: the cutouts had not moved in the wind, but they had cast shadows consistent with a flat object rather than a living being.
Gardner also brought in Geoffrey Hodson, a prominent Theosophist and clairvoyant, to visit the site in 1921. Hodson produced a detailed description of the fairies he saw there — their colors, gestures, and even a “king” fairy — which matched nothing in the photographs but confirmed, for believers, that the girls were authentic.
What Did the Fairies Actually Look Like?
The four original figures in the first photograph are small female forms with wings, wearing dresses that stop above the knee. They lack the detailed anatomy one would expect from a living creature: no feet, no ears, no hair texture. One fairy plays panpipes. Another reaches toward Frances. The colors are pale blues, pinks, and yellows — the same colors found in Shepperson’s illustrations.
The second photograph shows a gnome, a male figure with a beard and pointed hat, about twelve inches tall, standing on a rock as Elsie looks at it. This figure was also copied from a printed source, this time from a different book. The third photograph shows Frances with a single fairy leaping upward. The fourth shows Elsie with the gnome again. The fifth, “Fairies and Their Sunbath,” is the only one without a human subject, a group of fairies gathered in a clearing.
In 1982, the Daily Express hired two independent researchers to re-examine the photos. They identified the exact sources for the cutouts by comparing the figures to the Shepperson illustrations and other contemporaneous fairy art. The poses match precisely, including the angle of the wings and the arrangement of the limbs.
The photographs surfaced at a moment when the line between science and the supernatural was blurred. The Spiritualist movement claimed that spirit photography, images showing ghostly figures alongside living sitters, was possible. William Mumler in the 1860s had already pioneered ghost photography, though he was eventually caught using double exposure. The Cottingley Fairies appeared as the next logical step: not ghosts of the dead, but nature spirits.
Conan Doyle’s endorsement carried immense weight. He was the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the fictional embodiment of rational deduction. If he believed in fairies, many reasoned, there must be some truth. He wrote a book-length defense, The Coming of the Fairies (1922), which laid out his reasoning and the evidence from the photographs.
The public hunger for supernatural contact after the First World War cannot be overstated. Millions had lost sons, husbands, fathers. Spiritualism offered a way to communicate with the dead. Fairies were a gentler version of that same desire: a return to innocence, to a world untouched by war.
The Theosophical Society also championed the photos. In their cosmology, fairies were elementals, beings of nature that existed on a higher plane, visible only to children and psychics. The fact that two girls had captured them on film was proof that the Theosophical model was accurate.
Elsie and Frances never publicly admitted the deception until the 1980s. In 1981, an interviewer from the Daily Express pressed Frances on the old story. She finally said: “We faked all the photographs, except the last one. That one might be real.” She later clarified that the last photograph was taken with a different camera and plate, but she never explained how the fifth could be different from the others.
In 1983, the two women appeared on the BBC program Nationwide. Elsie, then in her eighties, said: “I must have been mad. I never thought it would go so far.” Frances added: “I thought it was a joke. It never occurred to me that it would be taken so seriously.”
The editor of The British Journal of Photography analyzed the photos in the 1980s and conclusively proved the cutouts’ origin. The shadows, the lack of motion blur, the visible strings in later prints, all pointed to a hoax. By then, Conan Doyle was long dead, and the damage was done.
Common Misconceptions About the Cottingley Fairies
“The girls never admitted it was a fake.” They did, in multiple interviews between 1981 and 1983, though Frances waffled in her later years.
“Conan Doyle believed the photos because he was a fool.” He was not a fool. He was a grieving father who desperately wanted to believe. He also lacked the technical expertise to detect the forgery. The Kodak experts he consulted were shown only the prints, not the original plates.
“The fairies were based on real fairies the girls had seen.” Elsie admitted she invented the entire story. Frances claimed to have seen fairies at Cottingley Beck even as a child, but she never produced any evidence beyond her word.
“The hoax set back paranormal research for decades.” That is an overstatement. It damaged the credibility of spirit photography and theosophical claims, but research into survival of consciousness and near-death experiences continued independently.
FAQ
Did Elsie and Frances ever profit from the hoax? No. They never accepted money for the photographs. Conan Doyle gave them a small payment for the rights, which they donated to charity.
How did the girls make the fairies appear so lifelike in the photos? They used a slow shutter speed (about 1/25 second) and natural daylight. The cutouts were held still on hatpins, which are too thin to register on the plate. Any slight breeze would blur the paper, the trick was to pick a calm day.
Was Arthur Conan Doyle the only prominent believer? No. Sir Oliver Lodge, the physicist and spiritualist, also endorsed the photos. The theosophist Annie Besant published them in her journal. Even the photographer W. B. Crow did not detect the fraud.
Are the original glass plates still available to view? Yes. They are held by the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England. The museum has digitized them and offers public viewing by appointment.
The Cottingley Fairies remain the most famous fairy hoax in history. They are not a failure of belief but a reminder of how belief shapes vision. A camera does not lie, but the people who use it can. And the desire to see something, anything, that confirms our deepest hopes is powerful enough to turn a painted cutout on a hatpin into a miracle.
For those who study fairy folklore, the photographs belong to a longer tradition of fairy encounters that are always visual, always ambiguous, and always just out of reach. The real fairies are not in the pictures. They are in the longing that made the world accept them.
If you are interested in the history of fairy belief, begin with our guide to fairy folklore across cultures. For the specific phenomenon of spirit photography, read our article on early paranormal photography and its skeptics. And for the glossary definition of the term, see Cottingley Fairies. The vertical hub on faeries collects all our resources on these elusive beings.