‘The Cottingley Fairies appear in five photographs taken by Elsie Wright, 16, and Frances Griffiths, 10 near Bradford, in 1917. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used them to illustrate an article on fairies for The Strand Magazine. He interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena.
‘In 1983, the cousins admitted that the photographs had been faked, although both maintained that they really had seen fairies. Elsie had copied illustrations of fairies from ‘Princess Mary’s Gift Book’, published in 1914.’
- Wikipedia
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Thank you to Museum of Hoaxes
It’s hard not to conclude that Conan Doyle really wanted to believe in fairies.
As Frances herself said in 1985, “I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in.”
Even for the era they aren’t particularly GOOD staged photos. It’s actually quite quaint to imagine how much people wanted to believe.
People believed it partly because they wanted to, but also because they were looking at the photos in the wrong way. To discover if it was a forgery, they thought only about ways that a photograph could be doctored – not about ways that this could be staged in real life with cut-out fairies, and then photographed.
Those interested might try to watch the movie Fairy Tale: A True Story. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119095/
Conan Doyle’s interest in spiritualism was stoked by the death of his brother Innes and son Kingsley as a result of war service in 1918 and 1919 respectively.
Jim,
Thank you for the link to the movie. I purchased a copy based on the reviews.
I just heard the story of the Cottingley Fairies on the “Stuff You Missed in History Class” podcast, and they said that one of the sisters maintained until her dying day that they only took four staged pictures, and one of the five pictures is real. Anyone know which is supposed to be the un-staged photo?
Wikipedia states that it’s the last photo that is supposedly genuine. I think we can all agree that it’s not, but I guess it’s a better fake than the others.
I remember reading about this when I was in high school. Very cool stuff.
In addition to wishful thinking, there may have been a bit of classism and perhaps sexism helping to maintain Conan Doyle’s blindness. These were young girls of the working class–how could they fool such a distinguished gentleman as him!? How could they be so creative, and so duplicitous?
James Randi’s wonderful book Flim-Flam! discusses the history of the hoax in some detail.