Blake and Karen are joined by Matt Baxter to discuss the strange case of the Cottingley Fairies.
https://www.monstertalk.org/?p=2706
Hosts: Karen Stollznow, Blake Smith
Guest: Matt Baxter
In this episode, the MonsterTalk crew tackles one of the most famous photographic hoaxes in history - the Cottingley Fairies. In 1917, two young cousins in West Yorkshire produced five photographs that appeared to show real fairies dancing in the garden behind their home. What began as a bit of childhood mischief spiraled into a worldwide sensation when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophical_Society championed the images as proof of the supernatural. The team explores how layers of credibility - authentic negatives, expert validation, retouched reproductions, and celebrity endorsement - created a blueprint for how misinformation gains legitimacy. More than a debunking, this is a story about two girls swept up in forces far beyond their control, and the adults who used them.
🧚 The Five Photographs1. Frances and the Dancing Fairies (July 1917) - The iconic first image. Frances gazes past four dancing fairies, one playing a pipe.
2. Elsie and the Gnome (September 1917) - Elsie reaches toward a gnome who looks suspiciously like Rowan Atkinson.
3. Frances and the Leaping Fairy (August 1920) - Taken with the new Cameo cameras and marked plates provided by Gardner.
4. A Fairy Offering a Posy of Harebells to Elsie (August 1920) - Featuring a fairy with a very fashionable 1920s bob haircut.
5. Fairies and Their Sun Bath (August 1920) - The most blurred and "ethereal" looking image. Frances maintained to her death that this one was genuine. Matt suspects the camera simply wasn't stable.
🔍 The Story in BriefIn the summer of 1917, cousins Elsie Wright (15, turning 16) and Frances Griffiths (9) were living together at 31 Main Street, Cottingley, West Yorkshire. Frances and her mother had returned to the UK from South Africa because Frances's father, Arthur Griffiths, had gone to serve on the Western Front. The girls played constantly at the beck (stream) behind the house, and when scolded for getting wet, claimed they went there to see fairies.
To prove it, they borrowed Elsie's father Arthur Wright's Midg quarter-plate camera - a glass-plate camera from around 1912 - and returned within the hour with one of the most iconic images in paranormal history: Frances gazing past a group of four dancing fairies, one playing a pipe. A second photograph followed - Elsie with a gnome (who, Karen notes, bears a striking resemblance to Rowan Atkinson).
Elsie's father Arthur, a keen amateur photographer with his own darkroom, immediately suspected a prank. But Elsie's mother Polly believed the photographs were genuine. In 1919, Polly attended a lecture on "Fairy Life" at the Bradford Theosophical Society and shared the images. That brought them to the attention of https://theosophy.wiki/en/Edward_L._Gardner, president of the London lodge of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophical_Society, and eventually Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was already writing an article on fairies for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strand_Magazine.
Gardner had the negatives examined by photographic expert Harold Snelling, who declared them "genuine" with "no trace of studio work" - technically true, since the trick was all done in-camera with cardboard cutouts and hatpins, not in a studio. Snelling then produced enhanced copies from the original negatives for publication - transforming evidence into what Matt calls "presentation artifacts," though they continued to trade on that original credibility claim.
In 1920, Gardner returned to Cottingley with two Cameo cameras and secretly marked photographic plates. The girls produced three more photographs: Frances and the Leaping Fairy, A Fairy Offering a Posy of Harebells to Elsie (featuring a conspicuously fashionable 1920s-bobbed fairy), and Fairies and Their Sun Bath. These were again sent to Snelling for enhancement before publication.
Both Kodak and Ilford examined the photographs. Kodak found no proof of fakery but refused to certify them as genuine, noting that fairies aren't real. Ilford said they were fake. Believers interpreted the ambiguity as validation.
Doyle published his article in the Christmas 1920 Strand, and followed it with https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47506 in 1922. The reaction was brutal - the creator of Sherlock Holmes was widely mocked. Gardner sold prints at lectures, and the rights became tied to the Theosophical movement. The girls and their families received little or no money.
In 1921, Gardner returned to Cottingley with more cameras and an occultist named https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hodson. The girls were no longer present - both had moved overseas and married. No new photographs were produced, but Hodson claimed to see fairies everywhere.
The case languished for decades until 1978, when it was attacked from multiple angles at once. Fred Gettings - a prolific British author of some 59 books on art, occultism, astrology, tarot, and esoteric symbolism - was researching early illustration for his book https://amzn.to/41Onnlu (Harmony Books, 1978) when he stumbled across fairy drawings in https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39592/39592-h/39592-h.htm (1915, illustrating a poem by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Noyes called "A Spell for a Fairy") and recognized the unmistakable similarity to the Cottingley fairies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi noted in https://amzn.to/4tZQzlB, is that Gettings was himself an avowed believer in spiritualism and spirit photography - Gettings wasn't looking to debunk anything. He was simply honest enough to publish what he found. The single most damning piece of evidence against the Cottingley photos came not from a skeptic but from a believer.
That same year, Randi enlisted Robert Sheaffer - a skeptic experienced in investigating UFO claims - and https://archive.org/details/ground-saucer-watch-news-bulletin/Ground%20Saucer%20Watch%20Bulletin%20-%201976%2006%20-%20June/ in Phoenix, Arizona, to perform computer-enhanced image analysis on the photographs. Spaulding's scanning technology, originally developed for analyzing satellite and UFO photographs, confirmed the fairy figures were flat (exactly what you'd expect of paper cutouts) and turned up what appeared to be a thread support in photo number four. Randi initially reported these findings and promoted the "string" theory of how the fairies were supported. According to at least two independent sources, Elsie Wright - by then in her late seventies and still not confessing - responded via New Scientist, sarcastically asking what part of the sky the strings were supposed to be attached to. By the time Randi wrote up the case in chapter 2 of https://amzn.to/4tZQzlB (1980), titled "Fairies at the Foot of the Garden," he had reconsidered: he captioned the computer enhancement image as "doubtful evidence" and wrote that no support was even necessary for the figures. Randi included Gettings's Princess Mary's Gift Book discovery in the chapter but disappointingly did not provide a proper citation for Ghosts in Photographs.
The hoax remained officially unresolved until the early 1980s, when pressure mounted from two directions simultaneously. Journalist Joe Cooper, who had been working directly with both women for years, secured Elsie's first public confession for The Unexplained magazine in 1982. Concurrently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, was publishing a thorough ten-part forensic investigation titled "That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies" (1982-1983). Crawley's work prompted Elsie to write him a detailed confession letter dated 17 February 1983, now held at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. The combined weight of Cooper's journalism and Crawley's photographic analysis finally brought the truth out after more than sixty years: the fairies were cardboard cutouts drawn by Elsie, copied from illustrations by Claude Shepperson in Princess Mary's Gift Book (1914), with wings added by the girls. They were held upright in the grass with hatpins - the very mechanism that Randi's string theory had tried and failed to identify. Frances maintained to her death that the fifth photograph - Fairies and Their Sun Bath - was genuine.
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