The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries

by Colin Wilson

  Doyle himself, still in Australia, was delighted by the new pictures. He wrote to Gardner:

  My heart gladdened when out here in far Australia I had your note and the photographs, which are confirmatory of our published results. When our fairies are admitted other psychic phenomena will find a more ready acceptance . . . we have had continued messages at séances for some time that a visible sign was coming through.

  In March 1921, three months after the first article, the Strand published Doyle’s second, illustrated with the new photographs. The reaction was much as before – one major criticism being that the dresses and hairstyles looked too contemporary. Other critics objected that the fairies looked too much like typical “storybook” fairies. Defenders suggested that the physical appearance of the fairies might be an ectoplasmic projection based on what the spirits thought was expected of them. And since Elsie and Frances were interested in contemporary fashions, their fairies might well look like a strange hybrid of the two elements.

  As the photographs were reproduced in foreign publications, and the debate spread overseas, it became more heated. But the second set of photographs failed to tip the balance. Few people felt that they made any real difference.

  One basic problem was that both girls were minors, and as such their testimony was legally inadmissible; their parents were also unable to offer proof since they had never claimed to have seen any “little people”. A photograph taken by an adult who could swear under oath that no trickery had been used might have been enough to swing the debate.

  A friend of Doyle’s the psychic Geoffrey Hodson – who also claimed to have seen fairies – went to Cottingley to see what he could find out. Hodson arrived in Cottingley with his wife and Edward Gardner in August 1921. Gardner stayed for just over a week, during which the weather was generally poor and no fairies were seen. On the day before he left both Hodson and the girls claimed to have sighted many “nature spirits” (as Hodson called them in his notebook) but failed to get any pictures. Hodson and his wife stayed on, and the fairy sightings became more frequent; but he still failed to capture any of them with a camera. In the end he admitted defeat and left.

  At this point the debate ran out of steam; there seemed to be too little evidence to prove the case either way. In 1922 Doyle published a book entitled The Coming of the Fairies, but although it contained many photographs and reported fairy sightings, it failed to convince the skeptics. For the next forty years or so Elsie and Frances were forgotten.

  In 1965 Elsie, then in her sixties, was tracked down in the Midlands by a Daily Express reporter, Peter Chambers. He believed that the pictures were faked, and Elsie’s comment that people should be left to make up their own minds on the subject only deepened his skepticism. Elsie made the curious remark: “As for the photographs, let’s say they are pictures of figments of our imagination, Frances’s and mine, and leave it at that”.

  This might be taken in one of two ways; either she was making an oblique reference to the ectoplasm theory; or she was admitting that the fairies never existed outside her imagination. Now that the subject had been revived, there were many more interviews with both Frances and Elsie. Much was made of a new admission that they had seen no fairies during the visit of Geoffrey Hodson; they explained that they were thoroughly bored by the whole subject and felt him to be a fraud, so they amused themselves by pretending to see fairies and were maliciously amused when he said he could see them too. (In his own book on fairies Hodson insists that he did see “little people” at Cottingley.)

  In 1971 Elsie was asked by the BBC’s “Nationwide” program if her father had had a hand in the taking of the photographs. She replied, “I would swear on the Bible that father didn’t know what was going on”. But when asked if she would swear on the Bible that the photographs were not tricks, she replied after a pause, “I’d rather leave that open if you don’t mind . . . but my father had nothing to do with it, I can promise you that”. Again she seemed to be close to admitting that there was some kind of fraud.

  On the other hand, when Frances was asked by Yorkshire Television if the photographs were fabricated, she replied, “Of course not. You tell us how she could do it – remember she was sixteen and I was ten. Now then, as a child of ten, can you go through life and keep a secret”?

  This, it seemed, was the chief argument in favour of the fairy photographs – that it seemed unlikely that Frances and Elsie would and could keep such a secret for so long.

  Frances made this comment in 1976; the occasion was a television program about Frances and Elsie, which had been suggested by the Yorkshire psychical investigator Joe Cooper. That is why, on 10 September 1976, the two women turned up at a house on Main Street, Cottingley, opposite the house where the Wright family had lived half a century earlier. In the intervening years, Elsie had lived in India with her husband, Frank Hill, a Scottish engineer; Frances had married a soldier, Frank Way, and had spent much time with him abroad.

  Cooper describes Frances as “a bespectacled woman of middle class and height wearing fashionable denim clothes but with a dash of red and black about the scarf and blouse”. Elsie, when she arrived, looked a good ten years younger than her seventy-five summers, dressed in fashionable slacks and “mod” gear, including a black derby hat. During the day Cooper became friendly with the two women, even carrying Elsie over a stile. The camera team interviewed locals – who all expressed extreme skepticism about the photographs – and filmed the women down by the stream. Interviewer Austin Mitchell made no secret of believing that the case of the Cottingley fairies had started as a joke, but had gotten out of hand. Cooper was inclined to believe Frances and Elsie. On camera, Elsie and Frances identified the place where they had seen a gnome and flatly denied that they had fabricated the photographs. When interviewed by Mitchell, Cooper stated his view that the girls had seen an “elemental form of fairy life” – that is to say, nature spirits. After all, he noted, W. B. Yeats and thousands of his fellow countrymen were quite certain about the existence of fairies.

  In 1977 there was an interesting development. A researcher named Fred Gettings, working on nineteenth-century fairy illustrations, came upon Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published during the First World War to make money for the Work for Women fund. It contained a poem entitled “A Spell for a Fairy” by Alfred Noyes, illustrated by Claude Shepperson. Two of the fairies in the illustration were virtually identical to the fairies in the first Cottingley photograph, which showed Frances gazing over the heads of five prancing sprites. Their positions had merely been reversed.

  In August 1978 The New Scientist reported that the magician James Randi (“the Amazing Randi”) and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) had put the photographs through an image-enhancement process and found that this revealed strings holding up the fairies. When Cooper told Elsie about the article she merely laughed and pointed out that there was nowhere in the region of the stream where string could have been tied. After a TV play about the fairies had been broadcast in October 1978, Randi expressed indignation that the BBC had failed to state clearly that the photographs had been proved to be fakes.

  In 1981 Cooper was writing a book on telepathy and had some correspondence with Frances – who now lived in Ramsgate – about the subject. In September 1981 she asked him to come see her, telling him that there were “some things he should know”. When he arrived she was still not ready to specify what these were. But the following day she asked him to drive her to Canterbury; once there, she asked him to wait for her while she went into the cathedral. When she returned they sat in a coffee shop, and she asked him what he thought of the first fairy photograph. He commented that it had been greatly touched up. Then Frances dropped her bombshell:

  “From where I was, I could see the hatpins holding up the figures. I’ve always marveled that anybody ever took it seriously”.

  “Why are you telling me”? asked the flabbergasted investigator.

&nbs
p; “Because Elsie has already told Glenn” [Elsie’s son].

  “What about the other four? Are they fakes”?

  Her answer was, in its way, as astonishing as the original admission: “Three of them. The last one’s genuine”.

  Cooper and Frances now discussed writing a book together and giving Elsie a share of the proceeds; Frances was adamant that Elsie should play no part in writing the book. Cooper went to London to talk to his publisher. Unfortunately, the publisher was not particularly interested in a sixty-year-old story about fairies, especially since it ended so anticlimactically.

  By this time, the present writer (CW) had also become involved. I had met Joe Cooper at a weekend conference on parapsychology (at the Swanwick Conference Centre in Derbyshire) in 1980, and he had told me he had written a book on the Cottingley fairies – this, of course, was a year before Frances told him the true story. He sent me the manuscript, and I found it fascinating. I had also come across people – one of them a hardheaded Scottish TV interviewer – who claimed to have seen fairies, and I was simply not willing to rule out the possibility that “nature spirits” might exist. Joe’s own research into the paranormal had convinced him that “elementals” could not merely be ruled out as an absurdity.

  In fact, I was on my way to Yorkshire to research a poltergeist haunting in Pontefract, and that weekend was something of a turning point in my life, for just before I left the conference centre I met Guy Lyon Playfair, a psychical researcher with whom I had been in correspondence for some time. At this time I accepted the view of most people involved in psychical research – that poltergeists were a strange manifestation of the unconscious mind of a psychologically disturbed teenager. What Playfair suggested left me rather bewildered. He felt that while some poltergeists may be “spontaneous psychokinesis”, mind over matter, the majority are genuine spirits who draw their energy from human beings, particularly children on the verge of puberty.

  I have described in my book Poltergeist how my visit to the Pritchard household in Pontefract soon convinced me that Guy Playfair knew what he was talking about. When Diane Pritchard, who had been the focus of the disturbances (i.e., the person whose energy was “stolen” by the poltergeist), described how she was dragged up the stairs by some unknown force, I suddenly knew beyond all doubt that the poltergeist was not some manifestation of her own unconscious mind. It was a spirit. This meant that as a writer on the paranormal, I had to get off the fence and stop keeping an “open mind” about whether such things as spirits can exist.

  It seemed clear to me that the spirits involved in most poltergeist cases are those of the dead – in the Pontefract case, possibly that of a Cluniac monk who had been hanged for rape in the time of Henry VIII. (The gallows had been on the site of the Pritchard house.) But that did not necessarily mean that no other kinds of spirits can exist. The travel writer Laurens Van der Post, for example, had no doubt whatsoever that the nature spirits or gods of the Kalahari bushmen are real and can cause all kinds of problems. In The Lost World of the Kalahari he describes how “the spirits of the Slippery Hills” became offended when one of his team killed a warthog on their territory and caused endless mishaps until they received a proper apology. In Poltergeist I cited many similar stories. So it was hardly logical for me to deny the existence of nature spirits on the grounds that only a child could believe in them.

  But the problem with Joe Cooper’s book, even in its original version, was that the story was too slight – it could be told in fifty pages, which seemed to mean that the rest had to be some kind of “padding”. And since, at that point, both Frances and Elsie were still insisting that the photographs were genuine, the story had no real conclusion. I tried to find a publisher for the book but was unsuccessful. And at this point Joe said he wanted to rewrite it anyway; and there the matter rested.

  It was in the following year that Frances finally “came clean”. Oddly enough, Joe was excited that the case had finally reached a definite conclusion. When he told me about Frances’s confession, I was less optimistic. If the book ended with an admission of fraud, it would be an anticlimax.

  Joe Cooper came to the same conclusion. Late in 1982 an anthology called The Unexplained, of which I was a consulting editor, published his article “Cottingley: At Last the Truth”, in which he revealed that the fairies in the first four photographs were cutouts stuck to the branches with hatpins. Understandably, this upset both Frances and Elsie. When Frances called Joe’s wife on New Year’s Day, 1983, and Joe answered the phone, she called him a traitor and hung up. She died in 1986. Elsie died in 1988, maintaining to the end that she did not believe in fairies.

  Which seems to be the end of the story . . .

  Or is it? Certainly the skeptics are justified in regarding the case as closed. Possibly they are correct. Yet before we make up our minds, there are a few interesting points to be made.

  What Frances is asking us to believe is this: She came to England from South Africa in 1917, when she was ten, and went to stay with her sixteen-year-old cousin, Elsie, in Cottingley. Elsie claimed to have had some odd ghostly experiences. For example, she insisted that when she was four she was regularly visited in bed by a woman who wore a tight dress buttoned up to her neck. And when she was six she woke up one night and called for a drink; when no one replied, she went downstairs and found a strange man and woman in the house. She asked where her parents were and was told they had gone out to play cards with the neighbours. Elsie said she wanted to go and find them, and the man opened the front door and let her out. Her parents – who were, in fact, playing cards with the neighbours – were startled to see her and even more startled to hear about the man and woman, for they had left the house empty. But when they went to investigate, the house was empty.

  Frances had had no “psychic” experiences. But in the spring of 1918 she saw her first gnome. She had gone down to the stream after school and observed a phenomenon she had often observed before: a single willow leaf began to shake on the tree by the stream. Then a small man, all dressed in green, was standing on the branch. Frances watched, breathless, terrified of disturbing him. The little man looked straight at her, then disappeared. After that, she claimed, she often saw little men wearing coats of grayish green and matching caps by the stream. She gradually reached the conclusion that the little men were engaged in some kind of purposeful activity, perhaps associated with helping plants to grow. Later, she began to see fairies, with and without wings. These were smaller than the elves; they had white faces and arms and often seemed to be holding some kind of meeting. Elsie, she insists, never saw the fairies or little men.

  It was after falling into the stream yet again that Frances admitted that she went there to see fairies. And it was the total skepticism of the adults that led Elsie to decide to take some fairy photographs. This was not simply a desire to deceive. Elsie believed Frances when she said she saw fairies; her own psychic experiences made it seem quite plausible. She wanted to shake the credulity of the grown-ups. So the photographs were taken with cutouts propped up by hatpins.

  When the world suddenly became interested in the fairies, the girls were in a difficult position. The photographs were fakes. Yet – according to the girls – the fairies really existed. If the whole thing had been a hoax, it would have been easier to confess. But it was not a hoax – not totally, anyway. They were in an embarrassing and anomalous position. If they admitted that the photographs were fakes, they would be implying that the whole affair was a deception. And that would be as untrue as continuing to maintain that the photographs were genuine. So they decided to keep silent.

  When the whole affair blew up again in 1965, the situation was unchanged. It is true that Elsie, now a hardheaded woman in her sixties, was no longer convinced that Frances had seen fairies; yet she was absolutely certain that she had had “psychic” experiences and was therefore prepared to be open-minded. As to Frances, she had seen fairies and had nothing to retract. In a letter to Leslie Gardner, the s
on of Edward Gardner, Elsie remarked that after her interview with Peter Chambers (in 1965), in which she had declared that people must judge for themselves and that the pictures were “figments of our imaginations”, Frances had said indignantly, “What did you say that for? You know very well that they were real”.

  In fact, Frances had always maintained that the fairies were real. In November 1918 she sent the first fairy photograph to a friend in South Africa and scrawled on the back: “Elsie and I are very friendly with the beck Fairies. It’s funny I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there”.

  In his original manuscript of the Cottingley book, Joe Cooper had included a chapter entitled “Other Sightings”, consisting of accounts of fairies related to him by various witnesses, and it makes clear why he believed Frances. One man, a healer, told how he was sitting with a girl in Gibraltar, eating a sandwich, when it was snatched from him by “a little man about eighteen inches high”. An eighty-year-old official of the Theosophical Society insisted that when he was a small boy he was often visited in bed by a green-clad gnome. Another old man described seeing a green-clad gnome, about two feet high, walking along a path in a cornfield. Some young male students told how, when walking in a wood near Bradford, they saw fairies who were “circling and dancing” but who were invisible to the direct gaze; they could only be seen “out of the corner of the eye”. An elderly woman showed Cooper a photograph of a gnome seen through a frosty window; she claimed that she had come down one morning, seen the gnome, and rushed upstairs to get her camera. The photograph also shows diminutive white rabbits.