The Cottingley Fairies

It’s a warm evening in July 1917. The light is fading and you’re at the bottom of your garden, near a stream, when out of the corner of your eye you spot something strange… There’s a group of small, winged creatures sitting on a rock. They’re not dragonflies or birds but look like something much more magical – fairies.

The Cottingley Fairies

In 1917, two cousins, Frances and Elsie, claimed that they had spotted exactly this. To prove it, they took some photos. They took five photos in total. One picture shows Frances smiling with fairies dancing around her chin. Another shows a fairy giving a flower to Elsie. The images caused a sensation and became known as the Cottingley Fairies.

They looked so real that even Arthur Conan Doyle (the author who invented Sherlock Holmes) believed them. He wrote an entire book that tried to explain how fairies live. Doyle even sent the photos to experts who confirmed they showed no signs of fakery. Had the girls had a glimpse into another hidden world, or was there some clever trickery going on?

Folk tales

Every culture on Earth has its own version of fairies. Iceland has huldufólk (“hidden folk”) who supposedly live in rocks. Ireland has aos sí, similar to elves, and Wales has Y Tylwyth Teg (“The Fair Folk”) that supposedly live in the “otherworld”. These stories were passed down orally and were often used to explain things people couldn’t – sudden illness, rotting food, or strange noises. Midsummer is the time where they’re said to be most active.

Fairly unbelievable

The Fairy Investigation Society was founded almost 100 years ago. They’ve collected hundreds of reports from eyewitnesses who say they’ve seen something strange. Between 2014 and 2017, another project called The Fairy Census gathered over 500 fresh reports.

Speaking to Science+Nature, fairy expert Fiona Maher says the photos fooled people because technology was evolving so rapidly. Just two decades earlier, a German scientist had accidentally invented X-rays: a way to see through skin. Suddenly, the invisible became visible. In this exciting period, it seemed that new scientific inventions were revealing more about the world. “How many other unseen things could we see if somebody would just invent the right machine?” said Maher. “Maybe you can see ghosts, maybe you can see fairies…”

Faking it

It took 66 years for Elsie to finally admit that the photos were fake. Elsie’s dad was a photographer and they had borrowed his camera. She had traced some drawings from a book, cut them out, and fixed them to moss using pins. Elsie’s dad knew the images were a prank but shared them with people a few years later. Experts were fooled because they expected the photos themselves to be tampered with – not what was in front of the lens. Her admission makes the Cottingley hoax one of the longest-running fakes ever – but her cousin, Frances disagreed. To the end of her life, she insisted that the fairies were real.

Today, hoax photos are easier to make and even harder to spot. Phones can edit pictures in seconds but tools exist to detect fakes. Image searching, lighting, and even AI (artificial intelligence) can reveal what’s real.

Modern day fairy hunters use cameras, microphones and night-vision goggles to try and catch a glimpse of fairies but nothing conclusive has been discovered.

People from the past took stories about fairies much more seriously than perhaps we do today but fairies never went away. They just took on a different form. “We’re telling the same stories about aliens as we used to tell about fairies,” says Maher. “We’ve just dressed them up in shiny space suits and put them in spaceships.”

This midsummer, when the light stretches late into the evening, take a look at the bottom of your garden. You might not see anything – but you wouldn’t be the first to wonder…

Also

If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a wisp to find… For hundreds of years, people have reported seeing strange blue flames hovering just above the ground in forests all around the world. Sometimes known as “Will-o’-the-wisp”, people thought they were signs of the supernatural – including fairies.

Now, scientists have an explanation. Swamp gas is around two thirds methane which is released when things rot. In 2025, a team at Stanford University discovered that bubbles of methane rising through water can pick up an electrical charge and spark, causing a blue flame to burn on the surface.

First published in The Week Junior Science+Nature, issue 102, July 2026.