The Cottingley Fairies: A famous photo hoax.

As online hoax debunkers we always find ourselves looking into the future, trying to gage what the next big scam or hoax is going to be.

But occasionally, if only just for the sake of nostalgia, we take a look at the past. So today we revisit one of the most famous cases of a hoaxed photograph and perhaps one of the longest running hoaxes of all time.

Whilst today manipulating a photo is for most as easy as the click of a mouse, the tale of this photograph hoax is particularly impressive because it takes place long before the existence of tools like Photoshop. It even pre-dates the Internet. In fact it takes place before the dawn of personal computers.

We travel back to 1917, to Bradford, or more precisely the town of Cottingley, where, according to two girls named Frances and Elsie, fairies reside. And the two girls had proof. Two photos showing them playfully interacting with the supernatural beings.

After getting their father to process the photos in his darkroom, two photos emerged. One showing Frances behind 4 dancing fairies. The second showing Elsie with a foot tall winged gnome.

Despite many being able to recognise these famous photos today, it was actually a number of years before the photos were published to the public, after catching the eye of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author behind Sherlock Holmes, who used the photos in an article he was writing on the subject.

Three more photos would soon be taken by the girls, boosting the popularity of what was dubbed “The Cottingley Fairies”. Whilst many dismissed the photos as staged, many others, including experts, concluded that the photos were genuine. Doyle included.

The popularity of the photos would both rise and decline over the following decades as they were included in various publications and then duly forgotten about. However what was consistent was that nobody had sufficiently debunked the photos and both Elsie and Frances would maintain their story that the fairies were real, later revealing that the photos showed “figments of our imagination”, and not staged.

Over those years the photos caught the attention of some of the most influential people in the paranormal industry, including sceptic James Randi.

Growing tired of the hoax that had shadowed them most of their lives, Frances and Elsie finally admitted that 4 of the photos had been staged by using cardboard cut-outs of designs copied from a children’s book, and holding them into place with hatpins. Whilst both girls – now elderly women – maintained that they really had seen fairies, it seems the legitimacy of the photos themselves had now been answered.

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The fifth and final photo however, dubbed “The Fairy Bower” Frances has always claimed was genuine, whilst Elsie stated it was fake like the others. In the case of the fifth photo, there were discrepancies between the stories of the girls. Oddly both girls claimed to have taken the photo.

Of course most experts will claim that this fifth photo featured cardboard cut-outs like the others, but with Frances’s refusal to accept that too was a fake, there still remains an air of mystery to that photo still to this day.

Both Elsie and Frances passed away in the 1980s, leaving behind them a series of photographs that will go down into the history books. The camera that the girls took the first two photos with is on display in the National Media Museum in Bradford.

The mystery of the Cottingley Fairies is a hoax that has captured the imagination of countless people over time and is regarded as one of the most famous photo hoaxes of all time.

A hoax orchestrated by two young girls, in a time where personal computers didn’t exist.

Thanks to Drew from the ‘Facebook Hoax’ group for the inspiration to this article!