The Cottingley Pictures. Do Fairies Exist?

Elsie Wright, was a sixteen year old, when she asked her father for his camera (a Butcher Midg No. 1 Magazine Type Falling Plate 1/4-plate camera) She and her eleven year old cousin, Francis Griffith, took several pictures of themselves besides the river behind their home. When Mr. Wright, unveiled the plates, he discovered that there were pictures of her daughter and nephew but also of what appeared to be fairies, but he was convinced that they were faked, so he forbade her daughter to take the camera again. Buy her mother, Polly Wright, was sure that they were real.

The affair became public in the summer of 1919, when Polly Wright, attended a meeting at the Theosophical Society in Bradford. She was interested in the occult and she had some experiences in that matter, such as astral projection and memories from past lives. That night's conference was about "the live of fairies" and Polly Wright told the person sitting next to her about the existence of the photographs taken by her daughter. After this conversation several of the photographs got in the hands of some prominent theosophs.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, father of Sherlock Holmes, also interested in the occult, had to write an article on fairies for Strand Magazine for the Christmas issue, that was to be published for the end of november of 1920. Working on this article he got to know about the existence of the copies of the photographs.

[Wikipedia]

In 1981, in an interview by Joe Cooper for the magazine The Unexplained, the cousins stated that the photos were fake; they had held up cutouts with hatpins. Frances Way (née Griffiths), however, continued to maintain until her death in July 1986 (Elsie died in April 1988) that they did see fairies and that the fifth photograph, which showed fairies in a sunbath, was genuine.

Maybe the pictures were faked; maybe they were real. But the most surprising thing is that two girls, of sixteen and thirteen years old, were capable of doing such great pictures; and especially in that time, that photography was technically difficult.