Angels-COTTINGLEY FAIRIES

Belief in fairies has inspired folklore, literature, and the imagination
of children throughout the world. However, the question of empirical
evidence for the existence of fairies did not arouse serious consideration
until the early twentieth century, when controversy erupted in
response to the claims of two young English girls to have actually photographed
fairies. The two girls, Francis Griffiths and Elsie Wright,
friends and cousins, lived in Cottingley, Yorkshire. The Cottingley
fairies incident began when they showed Elsie Wright’s father a picture
of four tiny fairies or angels dancing around her. About a year
later the two girls took another photograph of a gnome approaching Elsie. In all, five photographs of alleged fairies were taken between
1917 and 1920.
In 1920 the news of these photographs was picked up in Theosophical
circles through Elsie’s mother, eventually reaching the ear of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes stories and a
convinced Spiritualist. In the debate over the authenticity of the
photographs, Doyle argued for their validity. He wrote articles and
even a book, The Coming of the Fairies about the case.
Efforts to prove the photographs fraudulent were unsuccessful for
more than sixty years. In the early 1970s, however, Elsie Wright wrote
a letter admitting they were fake. The letter did not raise much controversy,
however, until the early 1980s, when the case was reinvestigated
by Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography.
Crawley eventually elicited a public confession of the two women,
who revealed that they had intended to maintain their secret until the
death of their most convinced supporters, Doyle and some of the first
Theosophists to take them seriously.
The techniques used to create the fairy pictures involved singleand
double-exposure, some of which were even shot unintentionally.
Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths never did complete their autobiographies,
in which they had promised to explain exactly how the
photographs were produced.