In 1917, two girls in a Yorkshire village photographed fairies in their garden. They had cut the fairies out of cardboard and held them up with hatpins. Three years later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, examined the photographs and declared them genuine.

Frances Griffiths was nine. She had just arrived in England from South Africa with her mother. They went to live in the village of Cottingley with her aunt and her sixteen-year-old cousin, Elsie Wright. The two girls played together at a beck behind the house. They came home wet. Their mothers told them off. Elsie said it was because they were watching fairies. To prove it, she borrowed her father's Midg quarter-plate camera.

The first photograph was taken on a Saturday afternoon in July 1917. It showed Frances behind a bush with four winged fairies dancing on the grass in front of her. Elsie had traced the fairies from an illustration in a 1914 children's book called Princess Mary's Gift Book, cut them out of cardboard, added wings, and propped them up with long brass hatpins. They threw the cardboard cutouts into the beck after the photograph. They took four more over the next three years.

In the spring of 1920, prints of the photographs reached a man named Edward Gardner, a leading Theosophist. Gardner sent the photographs to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Conan Doyle had created Sherlock Holmes, the most rationally minded detective in literature. He had also become a public spiritualist after the death of his son Kingsley in 1918. The Strand Magazine had asked him to write something for their Christmas issue. He sent the photographs to Kodak. Kodak said they could not detect any sign of manipulation. Conan Doyle wrote the article. The Strand sold out within days. He wrote a book defending the fairies in 1922. He defended their authenticity for the rest of his life.

Conan Doyle died in 1930. Sixty-three years after the first photograph, in 1983, Elsie Wright wrote a confession letter admitting that all five fairy photographs had been faked. Frances Griffiths agreed about the first four. But she insisted, until her death three years later, that the fifth photograph was real. The cardboard cutouts and the hatpins are now in the Bradford Media Museum. The fifth photograph is on the wall beside them.

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