Origin of the Hoax (1917)

The story began in the village of Cottingley, near Bradford, in 1917. 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 9-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths often played near Cottingley Beck (a local stream) and frequently came home with wet shoes. When reprimanded by their parents, the girls claimed they went to the stream to see fairies.

To back up their story, Elsie borrowed her father Arthur’s Midg quarter-plate camera. The girls went out to the beck and returned with a photo of Frances posed behind four dancing fairies. Later that year, they produced a second photograph showing Elsie with a small gnome.

Although Elsie’s father (an experienced amateur photographer) was suspicious and believed the figures were cutouts, Elsie’s mother, Polly Wright, was intrigued by the possibilities of spiritualism.
The Public Sensation and Conan Doyle (1920)

In 1919, Polly Wright brought the photographs to a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford, where spiritualist and esoteric theories were widely discussed. The images quickly caught the attention of Edward Gardner, a leading member of the society.

Gardner passed copies to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was at the time a devout spiritualist searching for tangible evidence of the supernatural to support his beliefs following World War I.

The Strand Publication: In December 1920, Conan Doyle published the photographs in The Strand Magazine alongside an article declaring that spirits and nature fairies were real.

New Cameras: Gardner and Conan Doyle sent the girls new cameras to capture more evidence. Feeling pressured to fulfill the public's expectations, the girls staged three more photos in August 1920.

Mixed Reactions: While believers celebrated the images, skeptics pointed out that the fairies' hairstyles looked suspiciously like contemporary 1920s Parisian fashions, and that the figures appeared flat and static rather than three-dimensional.

How the Photos Were Staged

The method was simple:

Elsie, who was artistic and had worked in a photographic retouching studio, drew and painted the fairies. She based the illustrations on Claude A. Shepperson’s artwork from Princess Mary's Gift Book (1914).

She cut out the figures and secured them in the soil or in bushes near the stream using long hatpins.

Once the photo was taken, they removed the cutouts and threw them in the water.

The Confession (1983)

For decades, both women avoided public inquiries and moved on with their lives. Finally, in 1983, during an interview for The Unexplained magazine and a subsequent television appearance, Elsie and Frances formally admitted the photos were faked.

When asked why they waited over 60 years to tell the truth, they explained that as young girls they were too embarrassed to admit they had tricked someone as prominent as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As Elsie famously put it: "Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet."

The Fifth Photo Disagreement:
While both admitted that the first four photos were cardboard cutouts held up by hatpins, Frances maintained until her death in 1986 that she had genuinely seen fairies at Cottingley Beck, and claimed the fifth photo ("The Fairy Bower") was a real, un-staged snapshot of real nature spirits.
Impact and Cultural Legacy

The Cottingley Fairies remain an iconic historical case study in the power of belief, media influence, and early optical tricks. The original glass-plate negatives, cameras, and letters written by Conan Doyle are now held in institutions like the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and the University of Leeds, and the event inspired books, documentaries, and feature films like FairyTale: A True Story (1997).