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Yeah, fairies wear boots and you gotta believe me
Yeah I saw it, I saw it, I tell you no lies
Yeah fairies wear boots and you gotta believe me
I saw it, I saw it with my own two eyes,

All right now!

So I went to the doctor
See what he could give me
He said “Son, son, you’ve gone too far.
‘Cause smokin’ and trippin’ is all that you do.”

 

–Black Sabbath, “Fairies Wear Boots”

The Coming of the Fairies, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The story of the Cottingley Fairies is a fascinating tale of a creative childhood prank which spun out of control into an international deception less than one hundred years ago.  Two English girls, Elsie and Frances, used Elsie’s father’s darkroom to develop pictures they took of paper cutout fairies propped up in their forest.  Swearing each other to secrecy, they playfully claimed the pictures were authentic.  They didn’t expect the famous author of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, would encounter and promote their photos as real proof of fairies.  He was certain two little girls wouldn’t be able to fake such convincing photographs.

Much has been written about this, and I’ll not repeat the whole story here.  Instead, here are some key images and references to help you explore this tidbit of paranormal history.  Arthur Conan Doyle’s book on the matter, published in 1922, is available for free download from archive.org, here:  http://archive.org/details/comingoffairies00doylrich

Table of Contents from The Coming of the Fairies by Arthur Conan Doyle. Note the link to Theosophy.

Many of the fairies were traced and cut out from an English children’s book called Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published in 1915, also available from archive.org:  http://archive.org/details/princessmarysgif00mary

Fairy painting from Princess Mary’s Gift Book

Most of the Cottingley Fairies photos are easily found by a Google Image Search.

One of the most famous Cottingley Fairies photographs, note the blurred waterfall and the crisp fairies, indicating that the fairies aren’t moving,

Wikipedia, as usual, has a nice piece on it, including this fine comparison graphic of the fairies traced from Princess Mary’s Gift Book:

Comparison of Fairies from the Cottingley photographs and Princess Mary’s Gift Book

A recent children’s book called _The Fairy Ring:  Or Elsie and Frances Fool the World_ tells the story from the girls’ perspective.

According to James Randi’s online _Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural_, the Theosophical Society got the rights to the photos from Elsie’s mom and made a boatload of money from them, none of which they shared with Elsie or Frances.  I’ll be revisiting the Theosophical Society, founded by Madame Blavatsky, as an important early promoter of exaggerated Tibetan Master myths.  Madame Blavatsky used sleight-of-hand and other magical tricks in her own seances, receiving “spiritual” messages on pieces of paper which mysteriously fluttered down from the ceiling and manifesting teacups from the ether.

A key mistakes made by Doyle was to assume that since photography experts assured the negatives had not been tampered with, trickery was ruled out.  Add that to the mistaken notion that women, children, and “primitive people” couldn’t fool an educated, upper-class English man and you’ll understand why it’s important to be very skeptical when evaluating anecdotal “evidence” for things such as Spiritualist seances, Filipino Psychic Surgery, and External Qi Healing.

My suspicion is that Doyle’s traumatic losses during that war-torn era coupled with a cocaine habit he likely shared with Sherlock Holmes led his dopamine-addled brain to paranormal paranoia, pareidolia, and confabulation.  When he later published a book insisting that his former friend Houdini’s escapist routines were due to psychic powers of dematerialization, Houdini knew Doyle had gone too far…

“Son, son, you’ve gone too far.
‘Cause smokin’ and trippin’ is all that you do.”