Strange History

The Cottingley Fairies: How Paper Cutouts Fooled Conan Doyle

By The Unsolved Report Editorial Team · Last reviewed 2026-06-19

The Cottingley fairies hoax saw two girls fool Sherlock Holmes's creator with paper cutouts. The documented facts, the lingering mystery, and the theories.

In the summer of 1917, two cousins borrowed a camera, walked down to a stream behind a house in West Yorkshire, and came back with a photograph that would tangle up one of the most famous authors in the world for the rest of his life. The picture showed a young girl resting her chin on her hand while four winged fairies danced in front of her. It looked, to many people who saw it, completely real. The strange part is not that two children played a prank. The strange part is how far that prank traveled, who believed it, and the one small question the cousins never fully resolved even after they confessed.

The Documented Facts

The story begins in the village of Cottingley, near Bradford, England. In July 1917, sixteen-year-old Elsie Wright borrowed her father Arthur's quarter-plate "Midg" camera, made by W. Butcher & Sons, and photographed her nine-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths beside the stream known as Cottingley Beck (National Science and Media Museum; Wikipedia). (A few sources list slightly different ages, citing Elsie as fifteen and Frances as ten, but most accounts place them at sixteen and nine that July.) The first plate showed Frances with four dancing fairies; a second, taken soon after, showed Elsie with a winged gnome. Three more followed in 1920: "Frances and the Leaping Fairy," "Fairy Offering Posy of Harebells to Elsie," and "Fairies and Their Sun-Bath" (Wikipedia).

According to the girls' own later confession, the method was almost absurdly simple. The fairies were drawings, based on illustrations by Claude Shepperson in Princess Mary's Gift Book (published around 1914–1915), cut from cardboard and propped up in the grass and branches with ordinary hatpins (Science and Media Museum; Wikipedia). Elsie, who had briefly worked for a photographer, conceived it as a practical joke on the adults. Frances simply wanted to back up her insistence that she really had been playing by the beck.

The joke might have stayed within the family if not for the era's appetite for the supernatural. The photographs eventually reached Edward Gardner, a leading figure in the Theosophical Society, who promoted them, and through him they reached Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes (Public Domain Review). Conan Doyle, a committed spiritualist whose conviction had deepened after losses connected to the First World War, saw the images as potential proof of the unseen world. He had prints examined by experts. A photographic specialist named Harold Snelling declared the negatives genuine, "with no trace whatsoever of studio work involving card or paper models," while technicians at the Kodak company found no obvious signs of faking but pointedly declined to certify the fairies as real (Wikipedia). Reasoning that "such tricks would be entirely beyond" two working-class children, Conan Doyle published the photographs in The Strand Magazine at Christmas 1920 under the headline "Fairies Photographed — An Epoch-Making Event," using the alias "Alice" to protect Frances's identity (Public Domain Review). A follow-up article appeared in March 1921, and in 1922 he expanded the whole affair into a book, The Coming of the Fairies.

The confession came decades later. Between 1982 and 1983, Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the British Journal of Photography, published a long forensic investigation titled "That Astonishing Affair of the Cottingley Fairies," which steadily dismantled the case (Press Gazette; Geoffrey Crawley, Wikipedia). In a letter dated 17 February 1983 — now held at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford — Elsie admitted that the photographs were faked with cardboard cutouts and hatpins (Science and Media Museum). The two women, by then elderly, had carried the secret for more than sixty years.

The Genuine Open Question

Here is where a tidy confession leaves one loose thread. Elsie said all five photographs were fakes. Frances agreed — except about one. She maintained to the end of her life that the fifth and final image, "Fairies and Their Sun-Bath," was genuine. "I saw these fairies building up in the grasses and just aimed the camera," she said in one account (Wikipedia). The two cousins, who had jointly admitted to fabricating the rest, never reconciled on this single frame. Frances Griffiths died in 1986 and Elsie Wright in 1988, and the disagreement died with them.

So the documented mystery is not whether fairies are real — the evidence points firmly to paper and hatpins — but why two women who had finally, together, confessed to a lifelong deception drew the line at exactly one photograph. Was Frances protecting a private memory, repeating a childhood story she had told so long she half-believed it, or simply unwilling to let the magic go entirely? That question has no settled answer.

Theories and Interpretations (Labeled as Speculation)

The following are interpretations, not established facts.

The honest-disagreement theory. Some who knew the cousins suggested Frances genuinely could not remember staging the fifth image, or believed a real visual effect — light in the grass, a double exposure — had crept in. This is plausible but unprovable; the fifth photograph shows the same general style as the others, and most analysts treat it as another fake.

The face-saving theory. Another reading holds that after a lifetime of being mocked and disbelieved, Frances needed to keep one fragment of her childhood claim intact. Admitting everything was false would mean the scolding that started it all — over saying she'd seen fairies — had been justified. Keeping one photo "real" let her keep her dignity. This is psychological speculation.

The wishful-belief theory, applied to the grown-ups. The most durable interpretation concerns the adults, not the girls. Conan Doyle, grieving and primed by spiritualism, may have wanted the photos to be true so badly that his judgment bent around the evidence. Folklore and legend hold him up as the cautionary figure — the brilliant rationalist who created literature's greatest detective yet could be fooled by cardboard. That framing is partly fair, partly a story we enjoy telling, and historians caution against reducing him to a simple punchline (University of Leeds).

What endures is the gap between a trick a child could do in an afternoon and the decades of serious belief it commanded — and one quiet, unresolved insistence that, just once, the fairies were really there.

Sources & Further Reading

National Science and Media Museum: "The story of the Cottingley Fairies shows that image manipulation is nothing new"
The Public Domain Review: "Sir Arthur and the Fairies"
University of Leeds Library: "The Cottingley Fairies: A Study in Deception"
Press Gazette: "Geoffrey Crawley: The trade mag editor who exposed the Cottingley Fairies hoax"
Wikipedia: "Cottingley Fairies" and "Geoffrey Crawley"

Sources & further reading

https://blog.scienceandmediamuseum.org.uk/the-story-of-the-cottingley-fairies-shows-that-image-manipulation-is-nothing-new/
https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/sir-arthur-and-the-fairies/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/geoffrey-crawley-the-trade-mag-editor-who-exposed-the-cottingley-fairies-hoax/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Crawley
https://medium.com/university-of-leeds/the-cottingley-fairies-a-study-in-deception-2ab08b8cafb0