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The Cottingley Fairies.

In 1920 a series of photos of fairies captured the attention of the world. The photos had been taken by two young girls, the cousins Frances Griffith and Elsie Wright, while playing in the garden of Elsie’s Cottingley village home. Photographic experts examined the pictures and declared them genuine. Spiritualists promoted them as proof of the existence of supernatural creatures, and despite criticism by skeptics, the pictures became among the most widely recognized photos in the world. It was only decades later, in the late 1970s, that the photos were definitively debunked. Shown above are the five Cottingley fairy photos, in the order in which they were taken. In the early 1980s Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were faked, using cardboard cutouts of fairies copied from a popular children’s book of the time, but Frances maintained that the fifth and final photograph was genuine.

Paul Hermann Wagner (1852–1937) Forest Nymph (Detail) Oil on canvas, 1870

“I grew into a forest child, forever rooted in nature’s wild”

-Angela Weiland-Crosby

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