Do Fairies Exist?

A Look Back at the Most Famous Fairy Hoax of All

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.