Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to Hooked. I'm Rachel, your guide through the perplexing and sometimes deadly world of Internet catfishing. Why do people catfish? And how many lies can they tell.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Before they get caught?
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Stick around to find out in this.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Week'S episode of hooked.
In 1917, a discovery by two young girls in England took the world by such storm that their evidence was picked up by national news and caught the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Some people doubted the photographic evidence, but how much old timey Photoshop could two girls do in 1917? Was this the case of two kids playing a prank? Or was it perpetuated by the gullible adult around them?
Frances Griffith spent the first nine years of her life in South Africa with her parents. But in 1917, when Frances father was being moved to France, it was decided that Frances and her mother Annie would go to Annie's native England and live with Annie's sister, Polly Wright. Polly and her husband had a 16 year old daughter, Elsie, and despite the age difference between the girls, they became instant friends. The Wrights and the Griffiths lived in Cottingley, England, a village of West Yorkshire. And the Wright's property contained a nice or garden as the English would call it.
Between a small creek at the bottom of the garden and the wet English weather. Elsie and Frances would often come home from playing with wet clothes, much to the annoyance of their mothers. Finally, after the millionth time of being bugged by their moms about their wet clothes, the girls told their moms that they didn't mean to get their clothes wet, but it was the price they paid to see the fairies that lived at the bottom of the garden. As you can imagine, Annie and Polly didn't take their daughter seriously. Fairies aren't real. Right? Though that point of view was a little rich coming from Polly, who like many people of her day, was obsessed with the supernatural. In fact, her interest in the subject is part of the reason word spread about the fairies in Polly's garden. More on that later. But Elsie and Francis insisted that they weren't lying. And to prove it, Elsie asked her dad to borrow his mid quarter plate camera. Arthur was an amateur photographer and actually had his own darkroom in the house and he reluctantly allowed Elsie to use his camera. The girls went back to the bottom of the garden and just 30 minutes later returned with what they claimed to be proof of their fairies. And when Arthur developed the picture he was stunned. The snapshot did in fact show his niece interacting with four very realistic looking fairies. However, he knew that not only was Elsie artistic, she'd worked with him in the darkroom. It was certainly possible that Elsie had staged these pictures, but Polly didn't think that was the case. There was photographic proof, and Polly couldn't imagine that her daughter would have the skills to stage something like that. She was further convinced when, two months later, Elsie and Frances borrowed Arthur's camera again and took a second picture, this time of Elsie sitting in the grass, extending her hand to a small gnome. Again, Arthur believed the picture had been faked and told the girls that they had lost camera privileges. And that was that for a while.
Despite Arthur's disbelief, Elsie and Frances themselves maintained that their pictures were authentic, even to people outside their families. In a letter to a friend in South Africa, Francis wrote, I am sending two photos, both of me. One is of me in a bathing costume in our backyard, while the other is me with some fairies. Elsie took that one on the back of the fairy photo. She wrote, it is funny, I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there and then. All was quiet for nearly two years. The girls treasured their pictures, but they also had other stuff to do. But as it turned out, Elsie's mother, Polly, hadn't stopped thinking about the photos. In mid-1919, Polly went to a lecture of the Bradford Theosophical Society. The subject of the lecture was fairy life, and Polly happened to have the prints of Elsie and Frances photos on her. At the end of the lecture, Polly showed them to the speaker, who was fascinated. He asked to keep the photos, and a few months later he presented them at a conference in Harrogate, where people were just as astounded as he was. One of the society leaders, Edward Gardner, wrote of the photos. The fact that two young girls had not only been able to see fairies, but had actually, for the first time, ever, been able to materialize them at a density sufficient for their images to be recorded on a photographic plate meant that it was possible that the next cycle of evolution was underway. And if you don't know, as I didn't, what the next cycle of evolution meant, apparently one of the big beliefs of theosophy is that humanity is undergoing a cycle of evolution towards increasing perfection. So essentially, Gardner believed that this was a sign that humans had taken a step closer to perfection, or at least were in the process.
But despite his gushing over the pictures, Gardner wanted a second opinion. He sent the prints and the original glass plate negatives to photographer expert Harold Snelling. After examining both the prints and the negatives, Snelling pronounced them unedited he wrote, the first two negatives are entirely genuine, unfake photographs, with no trace whatsoever of studio work involving card or paper models. And with that blessing of sorts, Gardner took the new negatives provided by Snelling and used blown up prints in lectures across the uk. One thing led to another and the photos fell in the hands of the editor of Light, a spiritualist magazine. And the editor happened to be friends with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. If you're unaware, Conan Doyle was majorly into spiritualism, partly because he'd lost his son in the First World War. And he certainly wasn't alone. As I mentioned, Polly was one of hundreds of thousands of people of her time who believed in the supernatural. And some historians believe that following the war, people were feeling despondent and wanted a simpler, magical world to possible. Conan Doyle wanted to use the pictures to illustrate a piece he'd written about fairies for the Strand Magazine. But before he did, he wrote to Gardner to confirm that the photographs were real. Gardner told him what Harold Snelling had said, and that was good enough for Conan Doyle. He wrote to Elsie and Arthur and asked for permission to use the photos in the Strand Magazine. As you can imagine, receiving a letter from the creator of Sherlock Holmes himself thrilled Arthur and probably the rest of the family. And whether he'd had a change of heart or didn't want to ruin the opportunity. Arthur refused Conan Doyle's offer of payment for the photo's use, saying that if the photos were real, money would soil them. He said that people would assume his daughter and niece were paid to fake the pictures. For his part, Conan Doyle believed that the photos were 100% authentic and that they were proof of psychic phenomena. But the Strand magazine, unlike Light, wasn't a spiritualist magazine, and Conan Doyle knew some of his readers would question the photos. So he had another expert, this time from Kodak, examine the pictures. The new expert said that the photos showed no signs of being faked, but refused to give a certificate of authenticity because this cannot be taken as conclusive evidence that they were authentic photos of fairies. A different examiner at Kodak added that while there was no reason to think the photos had been faked, as faeries couldn't be true, the photographs must have been faked somehow. And a third examiner, this time from the company Ilford, said that he saw some evidence of faking. But Conan Doyle must have figured out that two out of three ain't bad and ran with the opinion that the photos were unedited, likely telling anyone who asked that Kodak themselves had said the photos were real. As it happened, Conan Doyle was preparing for a tour lecture in Australia in the summer of 1920, and he sent Gardner to meet Elsie and her parents. Frances and Annie had since moved to their own place with her father in Scarsborough. When Gardner arrived in Cottingley, Arthur told him in confidence that Arthur had been so sure that the girls had faked the photos that he'd gone through their rooms and down by the stream searching for clues, but found no proof that they had staged the pictures. And Gardner believed him. He believed that the Wrights were a trustworthy family, but he did want to set up a test. Three years after the original photos had been taken, Gardner invited Frances to return to Cottingley to visit her cousin and provided the girls with two folding plate cameras. He included 24 secretly marked photographic plates. If the girls or Arthur did any sort of funny business during the development process, he would know, he wrote, the cameras were loaded. And my final advice was that they needed to go up to the glen only on a fine day, as they had been accustomed to do before, and tice the fairies, as they called their way of attracting them, and see what they could get. I suggested only the most obvious and easy precautions about lighting and distance, for I knew it was essential they should feel free and unhampered and have no burden of responsibility if nothing came of it all. I told them they were not to mind a bit.
Unfortunately for the experiment, and typically for England, the summer was rainy and gray until August 19th. When that sunny day finally arrived, the girls went down to the stream and returned with two more photos of fairies interacting with them. One final photo was taken a few days later. The plates were packed in cotton wool and sent back to Gardner in London. When he received them, he sent Conan Doyle an ecstatic telegram. Conan Doyle immediately wrote back, my heart was gladdened when out here in far Australia I had your notes and the three wonderful pictures which are confirmatory of our published results. When our faeries are admitted, other psychic phenomena will find a more ready acceptance. We have had continued messages at seances for some time that a visible sign was coming through. And so, as planned, the first two fairy pictures were published in the Strand magazine in December 1920. To protect their privacy, the girls were renamed Alice and Iris, and the issue sold out everywhere. Conan Doyle's goal with the story was to convince the public that fairies were real, which he hoped in turn would allow them to believe in other supernatural phenomena. Unfortunately, despite the popularity of the magazine issue, the public overall seemed a little Put off by the story. Perhaps when they saw the story was about fairies, they expected a Peter Pan esque tale or an examination of the history of the imaginary sprites. But when it was clear that the author, an intelligent grown man, truly believed in what he was writing, they mostly felt embarrassment and puzzlement.
In fact, the only reason these pictures were being entertained and seen by so many people is because of the respect people had for Copenhagen. Conan Doyle. A few publications labeled Conan Doyle as a fool for falling for literal child play. One photographer and doctor Major John Hall Edwards, actually said that the inculcation of such absurd ideas into the minds of children will result later in life in manifestations and nervous disorders and mental disturbances.
But Conan Doyle's story wasn't written entirely in vain. A few people loved the story and were curious about the supernatural. Others were just impressed with the pictures which Conan Doyle used in another fairy article in the Strand in 1921 about people's experiences with sprites. The next year he published a book called the Coming of the Fairies. By this point, most of the public was ready for Conan Doyle to get over his fairy obsession, to which Frances and Elsie's pictures were now forever attached. This meant that the pictures got as much examination and criticism as Conan Doyle's articles. And critics pointed out that the crystal clear fairies in the photographs looked very similar to pictures of fairy fairies shown in nursery rhyme books. But to Conan Doyle, that just proved that the fairies were real. They matched the descriptions perfectly. Perhaps that was why Gardner was sent to Cottingley for a second time to have the girls take more photos. In August of 1921, he brought with him Jeffrey Hodson, an occultist. However, no pictures were taken that day as Elsie and Frances said they couldn't find the fairies. Hodson, on the other hand, claimed that he saw them everywhere and scribbled down notes as they walked along the stream. It was then that Elsie and Frances realized that their attempt to get out of trouble for getting dirty while playing had gotten out of control. A photograph was taken that day of Hodson, Elsie and Frances. And when shown the pictures decades later, Elsie said, riley, look at that. Fed up with fairies.
According to Elsie, the girls had played along with Gardner and his ilk for years, out of mischief. After all, she and Frances were just kids. And in a time when children were ordered to be seen and not heard, especially girls, it was probably nice to get so much attention and accolades. But when the first picture was taken, the girls weren't small children. Elsie was 16, and it didn't take long for them to grow out of the fun the pictures had brought. They kept trying to move on, but the adults in their lives, from their parents to the famous Arthur Conan Doyle, wouldn't let it go. Still, the girls lived as normal lives as possible, certainly easier back then than it would be today. By the mid-1920s, they'd both gotten married and moved to other countries. But every now and then, renewed interest would crop up. Nothing like the fame the pictures had garnered back in the nineteen teens. But again, the pictures being attached to someone as famous as Conan Doyle essentially gave the photographs a permanent spot in history. After all, we're talking about them in 2024, aren't we? In 1966, nearly 50 years after the pictures had been taken, the Daily Express was running a story about the Cottingley fairies. They interviewed Elsie, now back in the uk, who said that the fairies might have been figments of her imagination, then added that she might also have photographed her thoughts. After the 1966 story, interest in the fairies renewed for nearly a decade, much to Elsie and Frances exhaustion. Interviewed again for a BBC program in 1971, Elsie said, I've told you that they're photographs of figments of my imagination and that's what I'm sticking to.
In 1978, James Randi, a magician and famous debunker of things like this, set out to do just that. He and his team from the Committee for Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal, used then top of the line computers to look at the pictures. They claimed to be able to see strings holding up the fairies. In 1982, the British Journal of Photography did a major investigation of the photographs and declared the to be fake. In 1983. Yep, we're still going. The girls, now elderly women, were interviewed by the Unexplained magazine, where they gave mixed messages. Frances, who overall was interviewed fewer times than Elsie on purpose, still insisted that she had seen fairies in the garden and that the pictures were real. Elsie, though, seemed to want to end this once and for all. She told the unexpected that just as some of the photography experts had said over the decades, the fairies were indeed cutouts from a children's nursery rhyme book on which she had drawn wings and then mounted on cardboard for the photos. The figures were propped up on hat pins. Elsie explained further in a 1985 interview that once Conan Doyle got a hold of the story, the girls really couldn't come out and say that they were fake. Elsie said, two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle, well, we could only keep quiet. Frances wrote in a 1983 letter that she'd hated the fairy pictures. Starting at 16, when, quote, Mr. Gardner presented me with a bunch of flowers and wanted me to sit on the platform at a Theosophical Society meeting with him, I realized what I was in for if I did not keep myself hidden. She added to the unexpected, I never thought of it as being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. And I can't understand to this day why they were taken in. They wanted to be taken in. And that's what this was really all about. It seems kids are always the one labeled fanciful and gullible, but in this case, the adults who wanted to believe believed. And as I said earlier in the episode, the pictures were taken near the end of the First World War. People were sad, their loved ones were dying, fear was everywhere, and wouldn't it be nice if these young girls had seen fairies in their garden in the English countryside? Frances said that she never thought of the photos or the story behind them as a fraud. And I suppose they were never intended to be. And moreover, given the sorts of stories we've looked at on this podcast, this is a harmless incident. People either got comfort from the photos or they chuckled at them and moved on. No harm, no foul. In fact, shortly before her death in 1988, Frances died. Two years earlier, Elsie said that the joke had been on her and Frances.
The whole affair had been a practical joke that had fallen flat on its face. Even though the modern opinion of the photographs is that they are fake, people are still taken in by them. At the time the photos were taken, photography only became widespread a few decades beforehand and most people in the 19 teens couldn't afford to own a camera. Photography was still something of a new inscrutable art form. Add to that that two children had managed to take these clear, well shot pictures in the middle of the woods and the whole story just seemed magical. And honestly, even though the picture's fakery was revealed, they're still rather magical photos to look at. The period garb, the rare clarity of the pictures and the girls expressions in the photos offer a peek into the past that fascinates people. Case in point, In October of 2018, prints of the first two pictures were auctioned off Dominic Winters. Auctioneers expected each picture to sell for between 700 and 1,000 pounds each. Instead, the picture of Elsie was sold for 5,400 pounds and the one featuring Frances sold for 15,000 pounds. Since 2019, the pictures in the camera that took them are in the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford near Cottingley. The collection contains watercolors of the fairies done by Elsie, as well as a nine page letter from Elsie explaining the hoax.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: Thanks for checking out Hooked this week. We'll be back next week with a new story, but for right now you can find me on social media, on Twitter hookedpodcast one that's the number one at the end on Instagram hookedpodcast and on facebookedthepodcast. Also, I'd love it if you left me a five star review on itunes.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: And if you really like what I'm doing, head on over to patreon.com hookedthepod where you can get access to early episodes and regularly released bonus episodes. Again, thanks so much for listening and I'll see you next week.
