They were called the Cottingley Fairies, and the little girls who invented them managed to fool everybody, including the most skeptical mind in all of England—Sherlock Holmes.

In November 1918, 10-year-old Frances Griffiths and her 16-year-old cousin, Elsie Wright, took snapshots of each other in the Griffiths’;s backyard. When Mr. Wright developed the film, he noticed little white flecks near the girls. At first he imagined them to be birds or pieces of paper, but his daughter insisted they were fairies. When Elsie showed up with a picture of herself standing with a gnome, her parents became concerned. Unable to get a satisfactory explanation from Elsie, they circulated prints of the photograph to friends seeking an explanation. That’;s when the pixie dust hit the fan.

Elsie’;s mother, who was interested in the occult, showed the photos to friends at a meeting of the Theosophical Society, a group interested in religious mysticism. The photos were copied and examined, yet accepted with little or no challenge.

By coincidence, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the scrupulously precise sleuth Sherlock Holmes, was preparing to write an article on mysticism for Strand magazine. Doyle, whose son had been killed in World War I, had become involved with the movement in an effort to contact his boy in the spirit world. When Conan Doyle heard of the photographs he dispatched an associate, Edward Gardner, to visit the Cottingley location and produce new photographs. Rather than take them personally, however, Gardner trustingly left the equipment with Elsie and Frances and asked them to do the job themselves.

reality check

Anything but Elementary

Nowhere in any of Arthur Conan Doyle’;s Sherlock Holmes stories does the famous sleuth say, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” The line is an invention used in the popular motion picture series starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.

The November 1920 Strand sold out, and so did Doyle. By January 1921, he was being denounced from Wales to Scotland. According to Tom Huntington’;s article “The Man Who Believed in Fairies” in Smithsonian Magazine, one newspaper stated, “What is wanted is not a knowledge of occult phenomena but a knowledge of children.” As if to counter the skepticism, Frances and Elsie took three more fairy photos that spring. Up to his death in 1930, Doyle remained convinced, but he was virtually alone. His conviction strained his friendship with magician Harry Houdini, who had made a career out of exposing fake spiritualists.

In August 1921, clairvoyant Geoffrey Hodson was summoned to Cottingley to verify the fairies. Hodson appeared but the fairies did not. The matter was put to a rest—until 1966 when reporter Peter Chambers of the London Daily Express discovered grown-up Elsie’;s address and quoted her as admitting that the fairies were “figments of my imagination.” Ten years later, Yorkshire Television’;s Austin Mitchell found Frances, who challenged him to explain how two children could engage in a photographic hoax. Mitchell took up the challenge and, using a variety of cardboard cut-outs, showed in a television studio how it could have been done.

In 1983, both girls—by then grandmothers—admitted that they had fabricated the fairy pictures based on Arthur Shepperson’;s illustrations in Princess Mary’;s Gift Book. They did it, they said, because they were tired of not being taken seriously by grownups.