extraordinary%20encounters

74 Cottingley fairies
Frances Griffiths with “fairies,” photographed at Cottingley, West Yorkshire, July 1917 (Fortean Picture Library)
thor of the Sherlock Holmes stories and then
an avid spiritualist, heard about the matter.
Doyle had Gardner take the pictures to the
Kodak laboratory in London, where two experts
neither endorsed nor repudiated them.
In the summer, when Gardner met the
Wrights for the first time, he provided Elsie
with a modern camera. In short order, she and
Frances had three new fairy photographs.
Doyle wrote two articles for the popular
magazine The Strand (December 1920 and
March 1921 issues), declaring the pictures as
proof of the existence of fairies. Doyle endured
a great deal of ridicule for his advocacy
of what many saw as a transparent hoax, but
that did not stop him from elaborating on the
matter in a revealingly titled book, The Com -
ing of the Fairies (1922). The year before, in
1921, a self-described clairvoyant named
Geoffrey Hodson, also a Theosophist, had accompanied
the girls to the beck where the
fairies lived. He claimed to have observed
many of them, though the girls saw nothing
and attempts to photograph the entities came
to naught.
Two and a half decades later, Ga rd n e r
w rote a memoir of the episode. He was still
convinced of the authenticity of the Cottingley
fairies. Occultists who championed the
p i c t u res noted that the two girls, now grow n
women, had never admitted to hoaxing, eve n
when prompted to do so. Still, their answe r s
tended to be more equivocal than their advocates
seemed to understand; when they said,
for example, that these we re photographs of
“figments of our imaginations,” the occultists
assumed they we re talking about “t h o u g h t
f o r m s”—paranormal projections from the
mind to photographic film. But in a 1975 int
e rv i ew for Wo m a n magazine, the two old
women appeared to respond more positive l y
to the inevitable questions. The follow i n g
ye a r, when asked by Yo rk s h i re Television if
the photos we re fakes, Fr a n c e s’s response was