The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (24 page)

Wentz concludes that the factual and scientific evidence for the existence of fairies is overwhelming, that in fact, “there are hundreds of proven cases of phenomena”.

But AE’s fairies were essentially “visions” and could therefore be classified with unicorns or centaurs. In 1920, nine years after Wentz’s book appeared, the British public was intrigued to learn of new scientific evidence that seemed to place belief in “the little people” on an altogether more solid foundation. The front cover of the Christmas issue of the
Strand
magazine announced: “An Epoch-Making Event . . . Described by Conan Doyle”. Facing the opening page of
the article was a photograph of a teenage girl in a white cotton dress, sitting in a grassy field and holding out her hand to a dancing gnome. Another photograph showed a younger girl gazing mildly into the camera over a group of four cavorting fairies, complete with gossamer wings. The caption under the first photograph stated: “This picture and the even more extraordinary one of fairies on page 465 are the two most astounding photographs ever published. How they were taken is fully described in Sir A. Conan Doyle’s article”.

It was not a seasonal joke. Doyle and his fellow investigators were convinced that the two photographs virtually proved the existence of “the little people”. The resulting controversy was to remain unsettled for the next sixty years.

The girls in the photograph were Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, and they lived in the village of Cottingley, in Yorkshire. They had taken the photographs three and a half years earlier, in the summer of 1917, and had consistently claimed, often in the face of extremely skeptical cross-examination, that the photographs were of real fairies.

The village of Cottingley is situated near Bradford, although it has today been swallowed up by suburbs. In 1917 it was surrounded by green English countryside. It was in April of that year that ten-year-old Frances Griffiths had moved to the village with her mother, Annie, from South Africa; her father was fighting in France. She later claimed that she soon realized there were fairies in the fields around her home, especially near the local beck (stream), which ran down a steep-sided dell at the bottom of her garden. She later described the first time she said she had seen a fairy down by the stream.

But she had decided not to tell anyone for fear of being laughed at.

She explained how, as the summer wore on, she had become increasingly fascinated by the stream and how she would spend hours “fairy-watching” in the dell. She occasionally missed her footing on the slippery bank and landed up to her waist in the water. When she
returned home her mother would slap her and make her promise not to go near the stream, but Frances never kept her promise – she could not resist the urge to see the fairies.

One day, when she arrived home soaked yet again, her mother and her Aunt Polly pressed hard for an explanation. What they heard left them both slightly breathless: “I go to see the fairies! That’s why – to see the fairies”!

At this point, to the surprise of the two women, Frances’s cousin, seventeen-year-old Elsie Wright, came to her defense and insisted that she, too, had seen fairies. No amount of questioning could shake the girls’ story. According to Doyle’s article, it was this confrontation that convinced the two cousins that they must produce some indisputable evidence to make the grown-ups eat their words.

That is why, on a Saturday afternoon in July 1917, Elsie asked her father, Arthur Wright, if she could borrow his plate camera. He was understandably reluctant, since the camera was new and the plates expensive, but he eventually gave way. The girls hurried off to the stream and were back in half an hour. After tea Arthur was coaxed into developing the plate.

As the plate started to develop, he realized that it was a picture of Frances leaning on a bank that seemed to be scattered with sandwich papers. Then, to his amazement, he saw that the “papers” were tiny human forms with wings growing from their backs; they were apparently four dancing fairies.

The girls’ mothers didn’t know what to think. Both had recently become interested in Theosophy – the movement founded by Madame Blavatsky, who taught that behind the solid world of everyday reality there was an invisible world peopled with spiritual beings, including nature spirits or fairies. In theory, at any rate, they agreed.

Arthur Wright, on the other hand, was skeptical:

“You’ve been up to summat”.

“No we haven’t”, Elsie insisted.

He knew that Elsie was a gifted artist and was convinced that the fairies were paper cutouts – although a search of the girls’ room and the wastebaskets failed to turn up any snippets of paper left over from manufactured fairies. And in spite of all their protestations, he remained unconvinced. Eventually, the matter was dropped. But in August the girls borrowed the camera again; this time they returned with a picture of Elsie sitting in a field watching a dancing gnome. They explained that they often saw gnomes in the field just above the stream. After this, in the interest of peace and quiet, Arthur Wright
refused further loans of his camera. But several prints were made of each plate.

The whole affair might have been forgotten if it had not been for the Theosophical Society. After the war, with its appalling casualties, Spiritualism and Theosophy had made thousands of new converts, and the Bradford Unity Hall, where the Society held its meetings, was always packed.

After a meeting in which fairies had been mentioned, Polly Wright approached the speaker and told him about the photographs. He asked to see them, and copies were soon circulating among the Bradford Theosophists.

Shortly afterward Polly Wright received a letter from Edward L. Gardner, head of the Theosophist Lodge in London; he was excited about the photographs and asked to see the original prints and negatives. Upon receiving the negatives, Gardner had them copied and the copies then retouched. He was quite open about this; in a letter to Doyle he wrote:

He then took the original prints and negatives to a professional photographer, Harold Snelling. Snelling’s previous employer had assured Gardner that “what Snelling doesn’t know about faked photography isn’t worth knowing”.

It was Snelling who examined the four-dancing-fairies negative (the better-exposed plate). He reported to Gardner:

Gardner, delighted with this verdict, began showing lantern slides of the photographs at Theosophy meetings around the country. And in the summer of 1920 he was flattered to receive a letter from the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

The sixty-year-old Doyle was not a Theosophist, but in recent years he had become convinced of the truth of Spiritualism. He had already been commissioned by the
Strand
to write an article on fairies, and the news of the Cottingley photographs must have sounded like a gift from the beyond. When he saw the photographs, Doyle was at first skeptical about them. But a meeting with Gardner convinced him that they could be genuine. The next step, obviously, was to try to obtain more of them.

Toward the end of July 1920 Edward Gardner went to visit the Wrights for the first time – Frances was then in Scarborough with her father and so was not present. Elsie’s father made no attempt to conceal the fact that he was unhappy about the whole situation. He still felt that the photographs were fakes, and the high esteem in which he held Doyle had declined sharply when he heard that Doyle was now convinced “by our Elsie, and her at the bottom of her class”!

But his wife had a long and thoughtful talk with Gardner, and Elsie later showed him the field, and the spot by the stream where the photographs had been taken. Some people had felt that the stream photograph looked a little too “magical” to be true, with its little toadstools and waterfall; Gardner was delighted to find that it looked exactly as in the photograph. He reported to Doyle that he was convinced that the girls were genuine. Doyle still felt that more photographs were needed to prove the case. So, as Doyle embarked on a steamship south to Australia to lecture on Spiritualism, Gardner went north again; this time armed with new cameras and two dozen carefully numbered plates. (Oddly enough, nobody bothered to note how many plates were eventually used by the girls, so the numbering was wasted.)

On this occasion Gardner also met Frances, then fourteen, who had returned from Scarborough for the summer holidays. He soon formed the conviction that both girls were psychic. Since the weather was rainy and dull – bad visibility for fairly-spotting, according to the girls – he left the cameras behind and returned to London. The rain continued for the next two weeks.

The morning of August 19 was dull and misty, but when it brightened up later, the girls decided to try out the cameras. They returned with two more photographs, which were promptly developed by the unbelieving Arthur Wright. One was of a winged fairy, with stylish-looking bobbed hair, standing placidly on a branch, offering Elsie a tiny bunch of harebells. The other was of a slightly blurred Frances jerking her head back as another winged fairy leapt toward her. It was clear that it was leaping rather than flying because the wings were unblurred by movement. Gardner later had these photographs
examined by an expert, who again reported that they showed no signs of fraud.

The last photograph was taken on a drizzly day, 21 August 1920. Later referred to by Frances as a “fairy sunbath”, it seems to show two fairies hanging a gossamerlike material over a tuft of grass, to make a shelter or suntrap. Frances said she often saw the little people doing this on dull days, as if to keep themselves warm. Oddly enough, this phenomenon has been reported in various unconnected fairy sightings before and after the Cottingley photographs. The fairies in this last photograph have a semi-transparent quality, which detractors claimed was a sign of double exposure but which believers ascribed to the effect of cold on the fairy constitution.

Since Doyle had written the
Strand
article before he left for Australia, it made no reference to these last three photographs. Even so, when the magazine was published that Christmas – with retouched, much sharper prints – it caused a sensation. The Cottingley fairies became the talk of every London dinner table. But skeptics were outraged at what they regarded as the public’s infantile gullibility. Their basic argument was summed up in the January 5 issue of
Truth
: “For the true explanation of these fairy photographs what is wanted is not a knowledge of occult phenomena but a knowledge of children”.

One detractor, a doctor by the name of Major Hall-Edwards, even went so far as to say:

(One wonders how he felt about parents telling their children that Santa Claus was a real person.)

On the other hand, the Cottingley fairies had their supporters in the media. The
South Wales Argus
commented: “The day we kill our Santa Claus with our statistics we shall have plunged a glorious world into deepest darkness”. The
City News
said more pragmatically: “It seems at this point that we must either believe in the almost incredible mystery of the fairy or in the almost incredible wonders of faked photographs”.

Doyle himself, still in Australia, was delighted by the new pictures. He wrote to Gardner: