Beside a beck behind a Yorkshire home, two cousins produced photographs they presented as images of fairies. Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths made their first two pictures in 1917 and three more in 1920. An ordinary family camera had supplied something their advocates regarded as extraordinary: a visible record of beings usually confined to stories and reported sightings.
One advocate was Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He helped turn the photographs into a public question: could a camera register something that most people never saw? His reputation added attention, but it was the images themselves, and the explanations offered for them, that the case depended on. What had persuaded a writer so closely associated with a fictional detective?
From a family photograph to a public claim
Bradford's museum account follows the photographs through the Theosophical movement and Edward Gardner to Doyle. Gardner investigated, and photographic negatives became central to the discussion. An expert assessment that they showed no retouching offered the advocates a technical reason to take the claim seriously, beyond accepting the cousins' statements about what they had seen.
The two early pictures presented different scenes. In one, Frances appeared beside the fairy figures; in the other, Elsie posed with a figure described as a gnome. The latter survives in a museum collection as a photograph dated September 1917. These were tangible objects that could be enlarged, inspected and circulated, giving the debate something more persistent than a reported encounter.
Read the believer's case in his own words
Doyle's 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies, preserves his side of the argument through photographs and correspondence. He treated assurances about the negatives, together with his assessment of the cousins' abilities and circumstances, as reasons for belief. The book records how an advocate assembled a case. Its account of his confidence should be read as his position, not as a fact about the beings he proposed.
He also pursued technical opinions and reports from Gardner's visits. Doyle was interested in whether the pictures could be dismissed as a photographic trick, and whether the people who produced them possessed the skills such a trick would require. The investigation combined examination of objects with judgements about character. For the reader following it, the crucial question is what those different kinds of inquiry actually tested.
A second series raises the stakes
When the cousins were together again in 1920, Gardner supplied new photographic equipment, and three more pictures followed. In his book, Doyle describes receiving the new prints while in Australia and becoming more confident in the claim. The additional images appeared, to him, to strengthen a case that no longer depended on just one occasion beside the beck.
The photographs and cameras later entered museum collections. Conservation work has examined the surviving equipment, including CT scanning with the University of Bradford. The objects make it possible to investigate the history of the photography itself. Before accepting the advocates' conclusion, however, the original question remains: what do authentic photographs establish about the subjects placed before a camera?
Now follow the evidence.
THE EVIDENCE / SOURCE BY SOURCEOpen the evidence.The claims, what the record supports, and what remains open.
SOURCE REVIEW / 9 October 2026
The photographic process was not the deception's weak point
The historical photographs and Doyle's advocacy are real. Museum accounts describe staged cutout figures and later admissions. The disputed personal claim about the fifth image supplies no independent basis for treating it as a photograph of a fairy. The admissions emerged in the 1980s. Paper figures held with hatpins could be photographed in a real scene without retouching the negative: the camera faithfully recorded a staged subject.
The cousins produced the famous photographs in 1917 and 1920.
The series and its surviving objects are documented.
An unretouched negative proves the photographed subject was a living fairy.
It does not exclude a staged scene in front of the camera.
Doyle promoted the photographs as evidence for fairies.
His own book preserves that argument.
The fifth photograph has independent authentication as a fairy image.
Frances's later assertion is recorded, but does not establish the claim.
The next question.
There are still historical questions about how the cousins and their advocates understood the episode. Letters and surviving objects can refine that history without reopening a paranormal conclusion unsupported by the evidence. In the later accounts, Frances maintained that the fifth photograph was genuine, while Elsie regarded all five as faked. The disagreement is part of the history, but supplies no independent authentication of the final image.
The case remains useful because its deception worked before digital editing. Authentic pixels, prints or negatives can preserve an inauthentic event; verifying the medium is only part of verifying the claim.
Read the record
for yourself.
These are the documents, objects and studies behind this story. Their findings and limits belong to the named source.
- 01
Bradford District Museums: Cottingley Fairies
Curatorial account, 19 June 2017, drawing on correspondence and photographs. Describes the negatives' assessment, cutouts, admissions and disagreement over the fifth image.
- 02
National Science and Media Museum: the staged photographs
Museum history, 29 July 2012, explaining paper figures, hatpins, the image series and surviving cameras.
- 03
Doyle's original The Coming of the Fairies, 1922
Primary literary and historical evidence for Doyle's reasoning and advocacy. His conclusions are presented as claims made by an advocate, not as established science.
- 04
Science Museum Group: the original gnome photograph
Collection record for the September 1917 photograph. Iris is the pseudonym used for Elsie in the published Cottingley story.
- 05
Museum conservation: examining the Cottingley cameras
Conservation account, 17 July 2024, documenting the surviving cameras and CT examination with the University of Bradford.