* * *
NOW EDWARD Gardner and Doyle set about subjecting the fairy photographs to expert scrutiny. Gardner took them to a photographic expert at Harrow named Harold Snelling, of whom it was said that “what Snelling doesn’t know about faked photographs isn’t worth knowing.” He had worked for thirty years at the Illingworth photographic studios. After examining the negatives carefully, Snelling said (according to Gardner), “This is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen! Single exposure! Figures have moved! Why, it’s a genuine photograph! Wherever did it come from?” Snelling later sent Gardner a letter stating, “These two negatives are entirely genuine, unfaked photographs of a single exposure, open-air work, showed movement in 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.”
Then the photographs were taken to Kodak, where three experts concluded that though there was no evidence of a double exposure or any other kind of fakery they could detect, because fairies don’t exist, it was obvious there was some kind of flimflam going on, somewhere. Kodak declined to warrant the genuineness of the images.
It seemed to Doyle, at this point, that the girls and the family needed to be interviewed directly. He himself was preparing to leave on a lecture tour of Australia, so Gardner made the trip to the quaint village of Cottingley. He took with him two dozen unexposed and secretly marked photographic plates, in hopes that he could get the girls to take more fairy pictures.
Mr. Wright, Gardner later reported, “impressed me favourably.… He is clear-headed and very intelligent, and gives one the impression of being open and honest.” Mr. Wright “simply did not understand the business, but is quite clear and positive that the plate he took out of the Midg camera was the one he put in the same day.” Even so, Wright remained unconvinced and later wrote that the whole matter had lowered his opinion of Conan Doyle for being fooled “by our Elsie, and her at the bottom of the class!” Mrs. Wright told Gardner that Elsie had always been a truthful girl and that some people in the village believed in her fairy stories simply because it was Elsie.
When Gardner met Elsie herself, she seemed cheerful and guileless, though a little weary of all the attention. She told him that she had no power at all over the fairies and that the way to “’tice” them was to sit passively with her mind turned in that direction. Then, when she heard faint stirrings or movements in the grass, she’d beckon, to show they were welcome.
But Gardner also learned that Elsie was a fairly accomplished artist who once did design work for a jeweler and who sometimes liked to draw fairies. But when he asked her to draw a fairy, the pictures were “entirely uninspired, and bore no possible resemblance to those in the photograph,” he said. (Of course, it’s easy enough to draw a fairy badly, even if you can draw one well.)
Later that year, when Sir Arthur related this whole long story for the Christmas issue of The Strand Magazine (using fictitious names to protect the privacy of the family), under the title “Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event,” he seems to have felt that he had investigated the matter thoroughly enough to put it before the public. (Or at least to protect his reputation from ridicule.) Whatever people were to make of it was up to them.
Even so, having satisfied himself that the photographs were very likely genuine, he ventured further and further out onto ice so thin it would later prove acutely embarrassing. In answer to the objections of some photographers, that the shadows on the figures seemed “off,” he explained that “ectoplasm, as the etheric protoplasm has been named, has a faint luminosity of its own, which would largely modify shadows.” In one picture, depicting a gnome, it’s not difficult to see what appears to be a stick pin in the gnome’s midriff, but Doyle explained this away by concluding that the point was an umbilicus and that therefore birth in the fairy kingdom might be a similar process to human birth. He went on to respond to questions about the differences between the gnome and the fairies, noting that “most observers of fairy life have reported … that there are separate species, varying very much in size, appearance, and locality—the wood fairy, the water fairy, the fairy of the plains, etc.”
Though he had opened the Strand story with a careful distancing, backing off the claim that the pictures were genuine, the piece ended with what appeared to be Sir Arthur’s true position: “The recognition of [fairies’] existence will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life.”
The Christmas issue of the magazine sold out in a couple of days. But the public’s response to Doyle’s spectacular revelation was hardly what he had hoped. One magazine ran a scornful story with the headline “Poor Sherlock Holmes—Hopelessly Crazy?” Another sharp attack came from Major John Hall-Edwards, a pioneer in the early use of X-rays in medicine (who lost his left arm due to overexposure to radium). Hall-Edwards claimed the photographs could easily have been faked in a variety of ways, that the apparent transparency of the “fairy wings” could have been accomplished by attaching insect wings to cutout pictures, and that “on the evidence I have no hesitation in saying that these photographs could have been ‘faked.’”
Other papers took the middle ground. One opined, “It seems at this point that we must either believe in the almost incredible mystery of the fairy or in the almost incredible wonders of faked photographs.”
Several Yorkshire newspapers also carried letters from writers who claimed to be unsurprised by the girls’ revelations, because they’d seen little people on the moors themselves. One letter writer related a conversation with a notable author, William Riley, who “knows the Yorkshire moors and dales intimately,” who, though he had never actually seen fairies there, “asserted that … he knew several trustworthy moorland people whose belief in them was unshakeable and who persisted against all contradiction that they themselves had many times seen pixies at certain favored spots.”
* * *
CONAN DOYLE was still on his lecture tour in Australia when a jubilant letter from Gardner reached him in Melbourne. “The wonderful thing has happened!” he wrote. “I have received from Elsie three more negatives taken a few days back.… [They] are the most amazing that any modern eye has ever seen surely!”
Doyle answered back, equally ecstatic, saying that the average busy man, who hadn’t kept up with “psychic inquiry,” would need to be reminded again and again that “this new order of life is really established and has to be taken into serious account, just as the pigmies of Central Africa.”
In a second article for The Strand, which appeared in 1921, Conan Doyle included these three new pictures. This story became the basis for his small 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies, which also included many first-person accounts of fairies. He also added a long theosophical explanation from Mr. Gardner—what fairies eat, what their wings are made of, their speech and gestures, even their sex lives (they don’t have any).
He quoted a famous clairvoyant Theosophist, Bishop Charles Webster Leadbeater, about the great national varieties of fairies: “No contrast could well be more marked than that between the vivacious, rollicking, orange-and-purple or scarlet-and-gold mannikens who dance among the vineyards of Sicily and the almost wistful gray-and-green creatures who move … amidst the oaks and furze-covered heaths of Brittany.”
He also described inviting a clairvoyant named Geoffrey Hodson to Cottingley Beck to see what he could “see.”
Not only did he see fairies, but he described seeing water nymphs, wood elves, goblins, and a brownie. Elsie and Frances, who also went along, were unmoved; they later said they hadn’t seen anything at all and concluded Hodson was daft.
Doyle ended his little book by saying that the case for fairies was strong enough “the matter is not one which can be readily dismissed” and that “far from being resented … criticism, so long as it is honest and earnest, must be most welcome
to those whose only aim is the fearless search for truth.”
It’s fair to say that many people felt the fearless search for truth led them to believe that Sir Arthur was a credulous old fool. For them, Conan Doyle’s reputation, both literary and personal, never recovered from the embarrassment of the Cottingley Fairies incident. But to the very end of his days, no matter what further evidence or counterarguments emerged, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stuck with his story: The Cottingley Fairies were real.
* * *
OVER THE years following Doyle’s death in 1930, various newspapers, magazines, and TV crews periodically reinvestigated the fairy story. It appeared that it would never die.
In 1966, when the BBC tracked down Elsie, she made a firm but cagey statement: “I’ve told you that they’re photographs of figments of our imagination, and that’s what I’m sticking to.” Did she mean that they had photographed “thought forms” or that the pictures were simply made up? Eventually, the two cousins got tired of the publicity; they told reporters they were fed up with talking about the fairies. Finally, in a letter dated February 17, 1983, Elsie came clean. She admitted that the “fairies” had been fakes: She’d drawn them on cardboard, cut them out, and fastened them to the grass with long hat pins. They appeared to be “fluttering” only because of the wind.
In the 1980s, it was discovered that a children’s book published in 1914, called Princess Mary’s Gift Book, contained pictures of fairies that were almost identical to the ones in the Cottingley photographs.
In a 1985 television interview, Elsie added that she and Frances had staged the pictures as a lark, but when the pictures attracted the attention of the famous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, they were too embarrassed to back out. “Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle? Well, we could only keep quiet,” she said. In the same interview, Frances added, “I never even thought of it as being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can’t understand to this day why they were taken in. They wanted to be taken in!”
Even so, until her death in 1986, Frances maintained that though four of the five photographs had been staged, the girls really had seen fairies “down the beck,” and the fifth picture was genuine. “It was a wet Saturday afternoon and we were just mooching about with our cameras and Elsie had nothing prepared,” she told a TV interviewer. “I saw these fairies building up in the grasses and just aimed the camera and took a photograph.” It showed what looked like two translucent fairies beside a kind of grassy cocoon.
Though Sir Arthur had always believed that Frances was telling the truth, most of the world had already moved on—whether she was telling the truth or not.
Conan Doyle and Houdini were respectful friends in private and bitter enemies in public. Their quarrel: whether spiritualism was genuine or fraudulent.
CHRONICLE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
CHAPTER NINE
The Strangest Friendship in History
If there had been any doubt about where Sir Arthur stood on the subject of the supernatural, by the time of the Cottingley Fairies incident it was clear to the world whose side he was on. By the early 1920s—in addition to his fast-growing literary fame as the creator of a certain brilliant detective—he had become the world’s most famous defender of spiritualism. He was its high priest, its most earnest advocate, its most charming and congenial convert.
“If ever there was a whole-hearted believer, he was one,” an acquaintance later wrote of him.
But as Sir Arthur strutted across the world’s stage, with his droopy walrus mustache, his tweed coats, and his compelling convictions, there was another man in the popular press whose fame had begun to exceed Conan Doyle’s. He was hardly bigger than a boy—five feet five in his stocking feet—a diminutive Hungarian with a huge head, a mop of bushy, center-parted hair, and pale, laser-focused sea-blue eyes. Erich Weisz, one of seven children of a poor rabbi, had emigrated from Budapest to the United States with his family when he was four years old. From a very young age—for some reason—he seemed inexorably drawn to the limelight. He performed publicly for the first time as a nine-year-old trapeze artist calling himself “Erich, the Prince of the Air.” Later, he did card tricks and escape acts at circuses and sideshows and briefly ran a Punch-and-Judy show.
When he was twelve, he hopped a freight car and ran away from home but returned a year later and with his brother Theo began to develop magic acts. He was still a teenager when he took on the stage name that would make him famous, after his idol, the nineteenth-century French illusionist Jean Robert-Houdin.
Harry Houdini, or sometimes Harry “Handcuff” Houdini, soon developed an almost supernatural ability to slip free from almost any entanglement. Eventually, at the urging of a promoter, he decided to give up his conjuring and card tricks and focus on his amazing ability to escape from handcuffs, chains, padlocks, straitjackets, and anything else that attempted to bind him. His antics spawned a new word: “escapologist.” He began challenging police departments to lock him up in a jail cell, bound by chains or whatever else they could find. Inevitably, incredibly, he would escape. In 1906, J. H. Harris, the warden of the United States Gaol in Washington, D.C., signed the following statement:
This is to certify that Mr. Harry Houdini, at the United States Gaol to-day, was stripped stark naked, thoroughly searched, and locked up in Cell No. 2 of the South Wing—the cell in which Charles J. Guiteau, the assassinator of President Garfield, was confined during his incarceration.… Mr. Houdini, in about two minutes, managed to escape from that cell, and then broke into the cell in which his clothing was locked up. He then proceeded to release from their cells all the prisoners on the ground floor.… Mr. Houdini accomplished all of the above mentioned facts, in addition to putting on all his clothing, in twenty-one minutes.
Houdini took this act on a tour of the jails of Europe, and when he returned to America in triumph, he bought a brownstone in Harlem and bought his beloved mother a dress that had once belonged to Queen Victoria.
Houdini was extraordinarily attached to his mother, who lived with the magician and his new wife, Bess, in the Harlem brownstone. He loved to put his head on his mother’s chest to feel her heart beating; he would often only wear clothes that she had picked out for him. When she died in 1913, Houdini’s devotion to her did not seem to diminish in the slightest. In fact, one acquaintance later observed, Houdini’s “love for his dead mother seemed to be the ruling passion of his life.” He was also unnaturally attached to Bess, who was his accomplice in various magic acts. Once, in a public hearing, when he was accused of sometimes being viciously vindictive against his enemies, he turned to Bess and asked plaintively, “I have always been a good boy, have I not?”
Now Houdini began enthralling the world with escapes from ever more incredible and dangerous restraints. He developed a famous act in which he was tied up and locked into an oversized milk can filled with water—the ads read, “Failure Means a Drowning Death!”—bound with chains and locks, and escaped. He was dangled from cranes, in a straitjacket, over the streets of Manhattan and escaped. He was padlocked into steel boxes dunked into the freezing-cold East River and escaped. Three times, he was buried alive, without a casket, under six feet of dirt; he almost died trying to escape. But escape he did.
It was as if Houdini had become the avatar of limitless human possibility—a soaring, indomitable spirit who could break free from any chains, even the chains of mortality. As if, for all the people watching, wrapped in their own personal manacles of bad marriages, crushing debt, or health worries, he was demonstrating that they could break free.
In one of his most famous escapes, London’s Daily Mirror challenged him to escape from handcuffs that a locksmith claimed had taken him five years to perfect. Four thousand people showed up at the Hippodrome theater in London and waited, breathlessly, for more than two hours after Houdini disappeared into his “ghost house” (an onstage cabinet) to attempt the escape. Several times he emerged from the cabinet, still bound, onc
e to complain that his hands were turning blue, another to snatch a kiss from Bess. (Some later suggested that she’d passed a tiny handcuff key from her mouth to his.) But eventually, Houdini strode onto the stage, a free man. It was, he later said, his most difficult escape; he was so overcome afterward that he broke down and wept and was carried off on the shoulders of the triumphant crowd.
Houdini’s preparations for these stunts were legendary. He taught himself to hold his breath for more than three full minutes. He sat in ice-cold baths, surrounded by the gentle ting-tinging of ice cubes, to inure himself to pain. A lithe, compact, powerful man, he made a fateful boast that his stomach muscles were so strong he could withstand a direct blow from anyone.
No illusion seemed too incredible for him. He vanished a full-grown elephant from the stage. In his famous “needle trick,” he swallowed five packages of needles and twenty yards of thread, then coughed them up—with the needles threaded. He started challenging the public to devise traps that could hold him, and he escaped from them all—even the belly of a whale and an enormous barrel filled with beer.
In 1913, Houdini introduced the Chinese Water Torture Cell, an act in which he was locked upside down in a glass-and-steel box filled with water so that the audience could actually watch him wriggle free. To escape, he had to hold his breath for more than three minutes while frantically wriggling free from all manner of restraints. By then, he had become the highest-paid act in American vaudeville and—to this day—a household name. Ninety years after his death, he is almost universally recognized simply by his last name.
Houdini’s onstage marvels were so remarkable that there were spiritualists who came to believe that he must be harnessing some kind of psychic power, whether he admitted it (or even knew it) himself. At least during his early days, Houdini himself appeared to encourage this notion, claiming in ads that he was able to “dematerialize” while chained inside a locked box and then “rematerialize” once he’d floated free.
Through a Glass, Darkly Page 15