Do Fairies Exist?

When my daughter was about 3 or 4 years old -- the perfect age for fantasy (in my opinion) -- we'd go for walks in the forest and every now and again we'd chance upon small lumberjack "huts". These were little hand-made structures put together with branches and twigs and not more than three feet in height and diameter which provided lumberjacks a place store their tools or food or what have you. That was a little too technical to explain to my daughter at her age, so I always told her that these were fairy cottages and that was good enough for her! She never questioned why the fairies were never home which made my job a lot easier! Who am I to say whether fairies really exist? I've been to Scotland and England and several Slavic countries and many folks I've met swear that the "wee folk" or whatever you want to call them actually live and breathe and flit about the forests. Haven't seen any myself, but that doesn't mean they aren't out there!

Which makes me remember the most famous episode involving fairies which took place in the early 1900's. The episode in question involved two young girls - Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright who lived in Cottingley, England and produced the most famous fairy pictures in all of Britain (and the whole world for that matter) which are still talked about today.

According to their website www.cottingleyconnect.org.uk, Frances and Elsie borrowed her father's quarter plate camera. After some rudimentary instruction on how to operate it the girls went off into the area among the trees behind the family home. As the legend goes -- an hour later the girls returned -- apparently with photos of fairies in hand (see photos).

As the story goes, three years later, Elsie Wright's mother went to a folklore lecture in the nearby town of Bradford. This lecture included references to fairies and whether or not they were real. Seems that following the lecture, Mrs. Wright was mentioning the photos that her daughter had snapped some years earlier, which in turn was overheard by Edward Gardner, a leading theosophist who requested permission to see the photographs.

Quicker than you can say, "There's fairies in them there hills" the photographs were claimed to be "untouched" and the "real thing." More positive affirmation was given by leading photographer of the day Harold Snelling who was quoted as saying, "...These two negatives are entirely genuine unfaked photographs of single exposure, open-air work, show movement in all the fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures, etc. In my opinion, they are both straight untouched pictures...'

The plot thickens....

According to www.cottingley.net, the fairy photos made their way to a lecture in London and came to the notice of none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Apart from his fame as the writer of Sherlock Holmes and other classics including "The Lost World", Doyle had more than a passing interest in the afterlife, clairvoyance and unsolved mysteries.

Doyle wanted to write an extended article about the girls, the photos and the fairies. But first wanted more assurance that the photos were not faked. So he sent the photographs to Kodak Headquarters for more tests.

According to www.unmuseum.org, Kodak came back with the following prognosis:

(1) The negatives are single exposure.

(2) The plates show no sign of being faked work, but that cannot be taken as conclusive evidence of genuineness.

(3) Kodak's were not willing to give any certificate concerning them because photography lent itself to a multitude of processes, and some clever operator might have made them artificially.

(4) The studio chief added that he thought the photographs might have been made by using the glen features and the girl as a background; then enlarging prints from these and painting in the figures; then taking half-plate and finally quarter-plate snaps, suitably lighted. All this, he agreed, would be clever work and take time.

(5) A remark made by one was that 'after all, as fairies couldn't be true, the photographs must have been faked somehow.'

In 1920 -- under Doyle's supervision -- Strand Magazine published an article entitled, "An Epoch Making Event - Fairies Photographed"; the magazine sold out within days, the area behind the house where Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths became populated with "fairy hunters" and photographers, and so began a controversy which raged on for more than sixty years.

Time passes....

The girls grew up and went their separate ways. According to www.cottingley.net, both got married, raised families and tried to forget about their brief fairy encounter. In fact, over the over the years Elsie continuously stated that, although the fairies were wonderful, she got fed up of talking about them.

Elsie and Frances grew old and remained tight-lipped about their fairies until the fateful day of February 17th, 1983 when Elsie admitted in a letter of confession that the photographs of the fairies were a hoax! All those years -- a guilty conscience! She went on to claim that her and Frances had drawn the fairies, cut them out and fastened them to the ground with hatpins!

A sad day for fairies indeed!

Or was it? The mystery still lives on with many people still believing that the Cottingley fairies existed and still exist to this day. In fact, Frances maintained in her last television appearance in 1986 that "...there were fairies at Cottingley..."

The story about the Cottingley Fairies has been put to film several times. Most notably in 1977 in the film Photographing Fairies and again in more recent times in the Disney film Fairytale -- A True Story.

I tend to follow a simpler path. There's an awful lot about this world we don't know and even if it's just out of respect for children and their imaginations I'd prefer to think that somehow...somewhere... fairies exist!