Two girls photographed cardboard fairies in a garden and fooled the creator of Sherlock Holmes. They kept the secret for 65 years — and even then, one of them refused to fully confess.
In 1917, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 9-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths took photographs near a stream in Cottingley, England, that appeared to show the girls surrounded by dancing fairies. Their parents dismissed it as children's play — until the photographs landed in the hands of Arthur Conan Doyle.
Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and a devoted believer in spiritualism, was electrified. He published the photographs in a 1920 Strand Magazine article as evidence of the supernatural, and later wrote an entire book about them. A photography expert examined the plates and declared them genuinely unfaked.
The fairies were cardboard cutouts. Elsie had traced them from Claude Shepperson's illustrations in a children's gift book, cut them out, supported them with hatpins, photographed them, and disposed of the props in the stream. The girls produced three more fake photos when a theosophical society member gave them new cameras specifically to continue the documentation.
Neither girl ever told the truth during Doyle's lifetime. They maintained the story through marriage, relocation, and decades of periodic media attention. In 1966, an elderly Elsie told a reporter that the fairies might be 'figments of my imagination' — which she described as photographing her thoughts.
The full confession came in 1983, when both women admitted the hoax in a magazine interview. They described exactly how they'd done it. But Frances, then 76, maintained that the fifth and final photograph was real — that at least once, actual fairies had appeared and been photographed.
The original photographs are now held at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. Individual prints have sold at auction for up to £15,000. The hoax remains a landmark case study in how strongly belief can override evidence — and in how good a secret two ordinary people can keep.