The Girls Who Fooled the Man Who Invented Sherlock Holmes

In the summer of 1917, in the village of Cottingley on the edge of Bradford, England, a nine-year-old named Frances Griffiths kept coming home from the beck — the local word for a stream — with wet feet and a story she wouldn’t drop. She’d been playing with fairies down there. Her mother didn’t believe her and said so. Frances’s cousin, sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright, whose family Frances and her mother were staying with for the duration of the war, had an idea for how to settle it. She asked her father, Arthur Wright, an electrical engineer with his own darkroom, if she could borrow his camera. He handed over a Midg quarter-plate, loaded a glass plate, and sent the girls off to the garden to take their picture.

They came back half an hour later. Elsie developed the plate herself, in her father’s darkroom, under his supervision. What came up out of the chemical bath was a photograph of Frances, sitting behind a bush, with four small winged figures dancing in front of her. A few weeks later, the girls borrowed the camera again and produced a second image: Elsie, with a gnome-like figure apparently hopping onto her outstretched hand.

Arthur Wright took one look and thought it was obvious nonsense — his daughter had been fiddling with cutouts, he assumed, though he couldn’t say how she’d pulled it off technically. He refused to let the girls use his camera again. His wife, Polly, felt differently. She thought the photographs might be real, or at least worth taking seriously, and in 1919 she brought them along to a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford, where the lecture that evening happened to be on fairy life. The prints made their way from that room into the hands of Edward Gardner, a prominent Theosophist who believed fairies were real nature spirits glimpsed only by the psychically gifted — and from Gardner, in 1920, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Doyle is remembered today almost entirely as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, a character built out of pure, cold deduction who sneered at superstition and insisted that the only thing that mattered was evidence. The man who wrote him was a different proposition. By 1920, Doyle had lost his son Kingsley, wounded at the Somme and killed by pneumonia during the 1918 influenza pandemic, and his brother Innes to the same flu the following year. Like a great many grieving parents in the years after the First World War, Doyle had turned to spiritualism, the belief that the dead could be contacted and the unseen world was closer than people assumed; he later wrote that a 1919 séance in which a medium claimed to relay words from Kingsley was “the supreme moment of my spiritual experience.” He had also, independently of the Cottingley photographs, been commissioned by The Strand Magazine to write an article about fairies for its Christmas 1920 issue. Gardner’s package landed on his desk at exactly the moment he was primed to want it to be true, and it arrived into a wider culture that was primed for it too — Theosophy, spiritualism, and a fascination with nature spirits were all having a genuine moment in Edwardian and post-war Britain, and Gardner himself had been giving public lectures on fairy life well before he ever heard of two girls in Cottingley.

Doyle didn’t just take the photographs at face value. He sent the original glass negatives to a photographic expert named Harold Snelling, who examined them and reported back that they showed no evidence of being double-exposed or combined from two different negatives — in his professional opinion, there was “not one single trace of studio work.” Doyle and Gardner also had the prints examined by technicians at Kodak, who reached a more careful verdict: they could find no proof the images had been faked, but they also declined to certify them as genuine. A rival firm, Ilford, reportedly looked at the same prints and concluded the opposite — that they were fakes. Doyle, already inclined to believe, held onto the opinions that supported him.

To get more evidence, Gardner traveled to Cottingley himself in the summer of 1920 and supplied the girls with two new cameras and a stock of marked photographic plates, so that any further pictures could be authenticated as untampered. Over one or two sessions that August, Frances and Elsie produced three more photographs: a fairy appearing to offer Frances a flower, a fairy in a “sunbath” perched on branches, and a final image, less clear and more ambiguous than the rest, of what looked like fairies and a cocoon-like shape in the grass that came to be known as “the fairy bower.” That brought the total to five photographs, taken over three years, by two children with a borrowed camera — and that was all there would ever be.

Doyle published his article in The Strand’s Christmas 1920 issue, reproducing two of the photographs, and followed it in 1922 with an entire book, The Coming of the Fairies, that laid out the case in full. The public reaction was not what he’d hoped. Newspapers mocked him. Critics pointed out, correctly, that the fairies in the photographs looked suspiciously like illustrations out of a children’s book, with the stiff, two-dimensional look of paper rather than anything alive, and that they all seemed to be wearing fashionable 1917 hairstyles — an odd detail for creatures supposedly glimpsed by almost nobody else in recorded history. Doyle’s reputation for logic and evidence — the very thing Sherlock Holmes had built for him — became a punchline. He didn’t back down. He spent the rest of his life convinced the photographs were genuine, and continued to argue, in print, that Cottingley proved the existence of a world beyond human senses that most people were simply unequipped to see. He died in 1930, still believing it.

Elsie and Frances, for their part, mostly tried to disappear from the story. Both grew up, married, moved away — Frances eventually to the south coast of England, Elsie to India for some years with her husband before returning to England — and spent decades giving occasional, guarded interviews in which they neither confirmed nor fully denied what had happened, while insisting the photographs were real whenever they were pressed. The case resurfaced in the national press in the mid-1960s, when a Daily Express reporter tracked Elsie down and asked her directly about the photographs; she told him they were “figments of our imagination,” a line vague enough to mean almost anything, and one she repeated in a BBC television interview a few years later without ever quite spelling out what she meant by it. It was the closest either woman had come, in public, to admitting anything was wrong — and it still wasn’t a confession.

The more concrete unraveling came from outside analysis. In 1978, a researcher used photo-analysis techniques — including isolating and comparing the fairies’ outlines across different images — and showed that the figures in more than one photograph were identical in shape and position, as though the same physical object had simply been photographed more than once rather than a living creature caught independently each time. That same year, the magician and skeptic James Randi and a team from a British TV program also concluded, after close analysis, that the figures showed telltale signs of being paper cutouts, including what looked like strings or supports holding them upright. None of this proved who had made the cutouts, or why, or whether the girls themselves had been in on it as children or had simply been fooled by someone else. For that, someone still had to ask them directly — and get an honest answer.

The full admission finally came from the women themselves. Joe Cooper, a journalist who had spent years building a relationship with both cousins, got Elsie to admit the truth in an interview published in The Unexplained magazine in the early 1980s. The following year, both women went on record together: four of the five photographs, they said, had been faked using paper cutouts. Elsie explained exactly how. She had copied the figures from illustrations drawn by a well-known children’s book artist, Claude Shepperson, in a popular volume called Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published in 1914 — the kind of book that would have been sitting on the shelf of any middle-class English household with young children in it. Elsie sketched the figures, cut them out of cardboard with her mother’s hat pins to hold them upright in the grass, and the two girls photographed them from carefully chosen angles designed to make flat paper look three-dimensional and airborne. When they were done, by Elsie’s account, they threw the cutouts into the beck.

It was a prank, in other words, that got away from two children almost immediately and then kept growing for the rest of their lives, dragging a grieving, world-famous author and an entire national newspaper debate along with it, because neither girl ever found a moment where confessing felt possible. Both women later said, in various interviews, that part of what kept them quiet for more than sixty years was simple embarrassment, and part of it was a reluctance to publicly humiliate Conan Doyle and the other adults who had vouched for them so earnestly and for so long — people who, by the time the truth started leaking out in the 1970s and 80s, were almost all already dead. Frances put it bluntly in one interview: she said she’d been too scared as a child to admit they’d made fools out of two eminent men, and the lie had simply calcified over the following decades until there was no good moment left to tell the truth.

But the confession, when it finally came, had a strange loose thread hanging off the end of it. Both women agreed the first four photographs were fakes. Neither of them would say the same about the fifth — “the fairy bower,” the blurry image of shapes in the grass from that second, instrumented 1920 session. Elsie eventually said she thought that one was probably faked too, just a trick of light and shadow rather than a deliberate photograph, and that she genuinely couldn’t remember for certain after sixty years. Frances disagreed, and kept disagreeing until the end of her life. She told her daughter that she remembered the moment clearly: she had been looking at a patch of grass that seemed to have been shaped into a kind of nest or hollow, and had taken the photograph almost on instinct, without any cutout and without any plan. “It’s a real photograph,” she reportedly maintained — a photograph of something, even if she couldn’t say what. She died in 1986 still insisting on it. Elsie died two years later, in 1988. The photography expert Geoffrey Crawley, who spent more than a year investigating the case in exhaustive technical detail for the British Journal of Photography, concluded on balance that even the fifth photograph was most likely faked, just less skillfully — but he could not prove it the way he’d proven the other four.

What’s left of the story now sits, fittingly, in a museum: the original prints and two of the cameras the girls used went on permanent display at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, and in December 2019 the museum acquired the third camera, the one Gardner had supplied for the 1920 session, completing the set just a short drive from the actual beck where two children once knelt in the grass with hatpins and a page torn loose from their imagination of what a fairy should look like. The photographs that convinced Arthur Conan Doyle — the man who gave the world the coldest, most skeptical detective in English fiction — that the border between the visible and invisible worlds had a gap in it, are now displayed as exactly what Arthur Wright suspected from the very first afternoon in his own darkroom: a child’s drawing, cut out with scissors, propped up in the grass, and photographed at just the right angle to make an entire country, and one very famous man in particular, believe in something that had never been there at all.

Sources

• Cottingley Fairies — Wikipedia
• Cottingley Fairies — Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research
• Cottingley Fairies — Science Museum Group Collection