Читать книгу The Element Encyclopedia of the Psychic World: The Ultimate A–Z of Spirits, Mysteries and the Paranormal - Theresa Cheung, Theresa Cheung - Страница 207

In July 1917, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 10-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths claimed they could see fairies in the small wooded creek behind Elsie’s house in Cot-tingley, West Yorkshire. Elsie’s father dismissed their claims, and so one day the girls borrowed his camera to take a picture of them.

The picture, when developed, showed Elsie with a group of fairies dancing in front of her. A month later the girls took a picture of Elsie with a gnome. Elsie’s parents were startled by the photographs, but her father remained unconvinced. Her mother, however, took the pictures to a Theosophist meeting one evening, and soon the photos were published. The girls’ most famous supporter became Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle printed the first two pictures in Strand Magazine in 1920 and three more photos a couple of years later. He then expanded his articles into a book, The Coming of the Fairies. Shortly after, Frances’s family moved away from Elsie’s, and the girls stopped seeing fairies.

In the decades that followed, the photographs were widely circulated and deemed false, and even Conan Doyle himself finally admitted that he may have been the victim of a hoax. It wasn’t until the 1980s, though, that Frances and Elsie admitted that they had faked the photographs to get back at the adults who had told them off for believing in fairies. They said that when Conan Doyle had got involved they didn’t want to embarrass him by admitting that the photos were faked. They also said that as young girls they had actually seen fairies, but that the fairies didn’t like to be photographed.