Hunting Fairies

It seems that many people believe in fairies, so much so that the Warin family from Cottingley, near Bingley in England have gotten used to a steady stream of errant vacationers looking for fairies on their land. It is a common occurrence for this friendly family to have uninvited guests appearing at their farmhouse, knocking on their front door and enquiring as to where the illusive, magical winged fairies can be seen.

This may seem unusual but it all becomes clear once you know that their farmhouse is in the village where the mysterious fairy photographs were taken, the magical images that became famous just before the end of the First World War.

A steady flow of magic-seeking tourists enters the village, and many of them end up at the farmyard of March Cote Farm, where George Warin and his wife Jean live.

Pictures, that have since become known as the Cottingley Fairies Hoax, were put together by two young girls – Elsie Wright, age 15 and her cousin Frances Griffith, age 10 – in 1917. The girls, Elsie in particular, wanted to prove that fairies exist, so they put together a montage of Elsie and some sprites and fairies dancing around each other amongst the local trees.

The hoax had everyone fooled for a very long time; Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes wrote an article about the fairies in 1920 because he was so fascinated by them – after this the two girls found it impossible to come clean and tell the truth. They were old ladies when they publicly revealed that the whole thing was a hoax in 1983. Having kept the magical secret their whole lives, they admitted that the image had being put together with paper cut-outs and hat pins. A mixture of primitive photography, belief in the innocence of the children and favourable lighting conditions had made their picture one of the most believable hoaxes of all time.

Even today, nearly a century later, people still show up at the Warin farm believing it to be true; the couple often do not have the heart to tell them otherwise. And anyway, who’s to say there aren’t fairies in the woods near March Cote Farm? Perhaps the young girls had seen fairies there but couldn't get them to pose for the camera; could this be the reason so many people visit the area, to follow a dream of meeting a fairy?