Mystery
The Cottingley Fairies
Five photographs, and one still unexplained.
See it clearly
- What's there
- A small wooded beck with a waterfall
- Legend from
- Wright and Griffiths photographs (1917–20)
- Best time
- Summer
- Tone
- Playful
Two girls photographed fairies by a Bradford stream, and fooled Arthur Conan Doyle.
In the summer of 1917, at the beck behind the Wright family's home at 31 Main Street, Cottingley, Frances Griffiths, aged nine, and her cousin Elsie Wright said they saw fairies. When their parents did not believe them, they borrowed Arthur Wright's camera and took photographs of fairies. Arthur Conan Doyle published them in The Strand at Christmas 1920. In the 1980s both women admitted the photographs were faked: Bradford Museums says Elsie copied dancing fairies from the Princess Mary Gift Book and mounted them on hatpins. Even so, Frances still claimed fairies existed and that the last of the five photographs was real.