The Cottingley Fairies photographs

The Cottingley Fairies photographs
	FALSE
	"Photographs taken by two girls in Cottingley, England, in 1917 and 1920 show real fairies."
Domain	Culture, Religion & Society
Tactic	Manipulation; Fabrication;
Era	Historical
First seen	1917
Origin	Photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in Cottingley, near Bradford, England
Last reviewed	2026-10-26
	Further reading: books on Culture, Religion & Society

The Cottingley Fairies are five photographs taken by two young cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, in the village of Cottingley in Yorkshire, England, in 1917 and 1920. They appeared to show the girls with tiny winged fairies and a gnome. The pictures became famous when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, endorsed them as genuine. More than sixty years later, the cousins admitted that the fairies were paper cutouts copied from a children's book. The case remains one of the best-known examples of how intelligent, respected people can be fooled when evidence confirms what they want to believe.

The claim

The photographs were presented as evidence that fairies were real and could be photographed. In the most famous image, Frances sits in the foreground with her chin resting on her hand while four small dancing fairies appear in front of her. Another shows Elsie seated on the grass offering her hand to a small winged gnome.

Origin

In 1917, Frances, then about nine years old, was living with Elsie's family in Cottingley after moving from South Africa with her mother. The girls spent time by a stream at the bottom of the garden, and Frances often came home wet, saying she had been playing with the fairies. To prove it, Elsie, aged 16, borrowed her father's camera. Her father, an amateur photographer who developed the plates, suspected a prank, but the girls insisted the pictures were real.

The photographs might have remained a family curiosity. But in 1919, Elsie's mother, Polly, attended a lecture at the Theosophical Society in Bradford, a spiritual movement interested in invisible beings and nature spirits, and mentioned the pictures. They came to the attention of Edward Gardner, a leading member of the Society, who promoted them.

How it spread

Gardner sent the plates to Harold Snelling, a photography expert, who reported that he found no evidence of double exposure or other trickery in the negatives. The photographic company Kodak examined them too; its experts found no obvious signs of faking but declined to certify that they were genuine.

Conan Doyle learned of the photographs while writing an article on fairies for The Strand Magazine. A committed spiritualist who had become deeply interested in life after death following the losses of the First World War, including his own son, he saw the pictures as important evidence. In 1920 the girls produced three more photographs. Conan Doyle's article, illustrated with the images, appeared in The Strand's Christmas issue in December 1920 and caused a sensation. In 1922 he published a book, The Coming of the Fairies, presenting the case in detail.

Public reaction was divided. Many people believed. Critics pointed out that the fairies looked remarkably like fashionable illustrations of the time, with stylish Parisian hairstyles, and that their wings were oddly still. But no one could prove how the images were made, and the girls did not change their story.

How it was exposed

Interest revived periodically over the following decades, including in television interviews in the 1970s, in which the women gave evasive answers. In the late 1970s, researchers noticed that the fairies closely resembled illustrations from Princess Mary's Gift Book, a popular 1914 children's book.

In 1983, in interviews published in the magazine The Unexplained, the cousins, by then elderly women, finally admitted the truth. Elsie had drawn the fairies, copying from the illustrations in Princess Mary's Gift Book. The girls cut out the figures and propped them up with hatpins in the grass and foliage before taking the pictures. They said they had kept up the story partly because they felt embarrassed to have fooled such a famous man as Conan Doyle, and the joke had grown too big to admit.

Frances maintained until her death in 1986 that the fifth and final photograph, a hazy image of fairies in grass, was genuine. Elsie said all five were faked. Elsie died in 1988.

What the evidence shows

The Cottingley Fairies photographs were faked using paper cutouts. The creators themselves confirmed this, and the source of the drawings has been identified. There is no evidence that fairies were photographed at Cottingley.

Why it fooled people

Desire to believe. After the devastation of the First World War, many people longed for evidence of a spiritual world. Conan Doyle had personal reasons to want such evidence.
Authority. Endorsement by a world-famous author, who had invented the most logical detective in literature, persuaded many people.
Innocence. It seemed unthinkable that two young girls would, or could, deceive adults so thoroughly.
Expert limits. Experts examined the negatives for photographic tricks and found none, because there were none. The deception was in front of the camera, not in the darkroom. Checking for the wrong kind of fakery can make a fake seem more credible.

Lessons for readers

Experts are reliable mainly within their own fields. A brilliant writer is not an expert on photographs or physics.
"We found no evidence of tampering" is not the same as "this is genuine."
The simplest explanation, in this case two children playing a prank, is usually the right one.
People sometimes keep a hoax going because admitting it has become harder than continuing it.

Sources

Arthur Conan Doyle, "Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event," The Strand Magazine, December 1920.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Coming of the Fairies (1922).
Joe Cooper, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies (1990).
Interviews with Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, The Unexplained (1983).