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Fairies: Are They Real?

Do these beautiful fairies exist or are they mere fantasies? One can seek an answer to this question by going through this report, embedded with few startling examples. Well let’s find more about this Mystery….

There can be few people who would not accept that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the doyen of detective thriller writers, had a brilliantly sharp, analytical mind. He showed the depth of his talent for unemotional, logical, detached reasoning in the history of crime fiction the formidable Holmes. It probably follows then that when it came to finding the answer to this mystery or solving a perplexing riddle, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a clear headed and rational as his brainchild, the supersleuth of baker street. Like Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was nobody's fool. Or was he? Did Sir Arthur have the wool pulled over his eyes by two little girls barely into their teens? Was he fooled by a simple trick into believing that the high-spirited, giggling girls had actually photographed fairies at the bottom of their garden?

The photographs taken by 15-year old Elsie Wright and her 11-year old cousin Frances Griffiths, were apparently, only meant for a family album or as souvenir snapshots to send to friends. In fact the first print of the photographs which were to become the center of a furious occult controversy was posted casually to a pen friend along with a chatty letter which only made passing reference to the astonishing picture.

Frances Griffiths who was living with cousin Elsie while her father fought on the French battlefront in the first world war had written to a friend in south Africa where she had spent most of her young life. She told her: 'I am learning French, geometry, cookery and algebra at school now. Dad came home from France the other week after being there ten months and we all think the war will be over in a few days. I am sending two photographs, both of me, one of me in bathing costume in our backyard; uncle jack took that while the other is me with some fairies. Elsie took that one. Rosebud is as fat as ever and I have made her some new clothes. How are Teddy and Dolly? Frances had scrawled across the back of the photograph: 'Elsie and I are very friendly with the fairies. It is funny; I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there.'

The photograph showed Frances, nestled on a grassy bank near a beck, a small steam, at the bottom of the garden of the Wrights home in cottingley, near Bradford, Yorkshire. She had her chin nestled in her cupped hand. In front of her, dancing among the leaves and twigs was a group of fairies, dressed in gossamer gowns, wings fluttering. A fairy in the foreground played a set of pipes.

The photograph had been taken more than a year before in July 1917, when Elsie Wright had pestered her father Arthur to borrow his camera for a snapshot of Frances beside the beck that bordered their long, secluded garden. When she returned later that afternoon, her doting father began to develop the photographic plate in his darkroom. As the image appeared, he was annoyed to see what he thought were scraps of litter and old sandwich wrappings on the grass in front of the figure of Frances. Elsie blithely insisted that the images on the photograph were fairies, and then skipped back outdoors to play.

A few weeks later, the two girls asked again to borrow the camera. They ran off to a clump of trees at the foot of the garden and took another snapshot. This time when it was developed, seated on the grass, being presented with a tiny flower-bud -by a gnome wearing a doublet, hose and a fancy shirt with a frilled collar. Arthur accused the girls of playing tricks with his precious camera and he refused to let them borrow it anymore. Intrigued by the images he studied the photographic plates closely, but he could see no signs of hidden strings and wires propping up the fairy figures in front of the lens. He and his wife, Polly, even searched the girls' bedroom, looking for waste paper or scraps of pictures or cutouts, which the girls might have used to fake the photographs. They found nothing. Unsure if he was the victim of a lighthearted prank, or if he had unique, concrete evidence of the fabled creatures of folk myth, Arthur Wright made a few prints to show his neighbors for their novelty value, and thought no more about it.

It wasn't until 1919 that story of the fairy photographs reached a wider audience. Polly Wright, who had an interest in spiritualism, attended a meeting of the theosophical society in Bradford and revealed the existence of the photograph taken by her daughter and her niece. The following year prints of the slightly overexposed photographs were collected by Edward Gardner, a leading member of the Theosophical Society, a society dedicated to exploring psychic phenomena and spreading the message of Spiritualism.

Gardener was fascinated. He ordered photographic expert Fred Barlow to make new copy negatives from the prints, correcting the errors of exposure-but without any touching up or improvements of the actual images. The result was a set of greatly enhanced prints, which showed the girls, the fairies and the gnome with startling clarity.

Even then, the photographs might have remained a curiosity, studied solely by followers of the Theosophist cult. Then: Enter Cherokee Holmes, in the form of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The famous author had been commissioned by Strand magazine in London to write an article on fairies for their Christmas issue. He asked to borrow the prints from Gardner, and showed them to Sir Olivier Lodge, a psychical researcher. Lodge immediately dismissed them as fakes and suggested, bizarrely, that the fairies in the prints might have been a troupe of dancers in disguise, reduced in size by a trick of photographic perspective.

But Sir Arthur, apparently keen to seek a second opinion, gave more credence to a report by a technical expert employed by Edward Gardner, who insisted that his own analysis showed that the fairy figures were not lifeless cardboard cutouts, but actually showed signs of movement captured by the camera 's slow shutter speed.

Casting Edward Gardner in the role of 'Watson' Sir Arthur dispatched him to Cottingley to conduct his own interviews with the Wright family and their niece. Gardner reported back that the Wrights were honest, reliable people who were plainly telling the truth. That was enough for Sir Arthur; he gave the Cottingley photographs the backing of his considerable reputation and promoted them in his article in the STRAND MAGAZINE.

The following month back in London, Gardner received a letter from Polly Wright, together with five photographic plates that had already been developed. Gardner was gratified to see the secret marks he had already made on the plates showing that his own material had been used without substitution or tampering. The girls succeeded in taking three more photographs of fairies. Although no adults had witnessed the events the unsupervised girls had followed Gardener's instructions about focusing and exposure, and the plates were remarkably clear. One showed a close-up of Elsie being offered a tiny hareball flower by a fairy - which displayed a suspiciously fashionable '20s bobbed hairstyle and flapper dress. A second snapshot showed a prancing fairy in more realistic gossamer dress, flying in the air a few feet from the smiling face of Frances. And a third plate had captured the blurred image of two tiny figures in a "fairy bower ' of blossoms and twigs, shyly adjusting their dresses in the morning dew.

There may be some real scientific evidence for the timeless legends of fairies, gnomes and trolls, which are common in many northern European myths. So who says fairies don't exist? The last word should be to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or at least his alter ego the sage of baker street, Holmes, who said reprovingly to his detractors in THE MEMORIES OF HOLMES: 'You see, but you do not observe.'
 

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