Anatomical Study of the Common Fairy

From the private collection of Octavius Rookwood (August 16, 1853 – July 17, 1936), American British pharmaceutical entrepreneur, explorer and occult researcher.

This specimen was acquired by Rookwood during a stay with the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at their home, Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, UK. A farmer from the village of Allestree, situated approximately 30 miles to the south of the Chatsworth estate, discovered the small fairy body when his faithful rat catcher left the limp remains on his kitchen floor. The cat normally left daily 'glory gifts' for the farmer which comprised of mice, rats and small birds but during the spring of 1902 it started to leave dead fairies. Rumours spread throughout the local villages and the farmer began to exhibit them at the pubs and cattle shows for a small fee. Rookwood got wind of the story and promised the farmer a handsome reward if he could supply him with a fresh specimen. The farmer promptly delivered two fairy corpses to Rookwood; one complete and another partially devoured by the farm cat.

The framed specimens were exhibited at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London for a number of years before disappearing in 1911. They were rediscovered in 1998 during the restoration of Rookwood's ancestral home by the National Trust. Dismissed as a late Victorian sideshow oddity, the fairies were auctioned at Sotheby's to raise funds for the upkeep of the estate and purchased by a private collector believed to be a prominent Canadian businessman.

The Cottingley Fairies - A case study in how smart people lose control of the truth

This article by Rosa Lyster for Quartz discusses something I encountered when it was revealed that the mummified fairy images I produced were fake. Even once you unveil the truth, a significant percentage of people will choose not to believe it. My hoax had similar parallels to the Cottingley case; although I revealed the whole event to be hoax, I also publicly admitted my belief in fairies and that I had also seen them, a statement I stand by to this day.

The title of Rosa's article 'how smart people lose control of the truth' can be demonstrated even more with religion. It doesn't take fairies to show how people, even the smart ones, can believe in the most absurd things. Just look to the myths and legends purported by mainstream religion and you'll find a melting pot of unfeasible craziness where the control of the truth was lost thousands of years ago.

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One hundred years ago, two girls went down to the stream at the bottom of a garden in Cottingley, England, and took some photographs of fairies. The fairies were paper cut-outs, which Elsie Wright, age 16, had copied from a children’s book. She and 10-year-old Frances Griffiths took turns posing with the sprites.

The girls developed the photographs in Elsie’s father’s darkroom, and presented them to their families as stunning evidence that fairies were real. Elsie’s father didn’t believe them—but her mother did. Two years later, she showed the photographs at a meeting of the Theosophical Society, a group dedicated to exploring unexplained phenomena and “forming the nucleus of a universal brotherhood of humanity.”

The story of the Cottingley fairies has always fascinated me—not because of the particulars of the case, but because of what it reveals about the life cycle of a lie. In contrast to other famous hoaxes, it doesn’t seem malicious, or even necessarily deliberate. Instead it seems to me to be a story about how a single, relatively small act of deception can lead a large group of people to lose control over the truth.

In the first photograph, Frances Griffiths stares somewhere to the right of the camera lens, pointedly not looking at the cardboard figures capering on the grass in front of her. In the second one, Elsie Wright leans forward to shake the hand of a toddler-sized boy fairy. Looking at them now, both photographs seem immediately identifiable as fakes. The figures are obviously propped-up and two dimensional. Everything, including the expressions on both girls’ faces, looks staged. It is hard to imagine the photos seeming convincing to anyone older than 12.

Yet the Theosophical Society saw things differently; the members immediately and ecstatically accepted the photographs as real. Edward Gardner, a writer and leading member of the Society, took them as proof that the “next cycle of evolution was underway” and mounted a campaign to convince the public of their authenticity. He gave lectures on the photographs, made copies of them, and passed them reverently around at meetings.

Initial press coverage was skeptical; one editorial noted that the photographs could be explained not by “a knowledge of occult phenomena but a knowledge of children.” But during and after World War I, spiritualism and mysticism gained increased influence over a grieving British public. The fairy photographs seemed to resonate with many people who were eager to believe in the existence of a better world, and in the possibility that we might be able to communicate with it.

Willingness to believe in the fairies was not a matter of intelligence or education. None other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a trained physician and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was dead-set on the whole notion. Doyle, a noted spiritualist, saw the photographs as evidence that communication could exists between material and spiritual worlds.

Doyle published an article about the photographs in The Strand magazine, and sent Gardner to visit the girls. Imagine being either Frances or Elsie at that moment. You have told a lie—a tale that started out as a joke, maybe, or a daydream. Now things are taking on a momentum that you cannot quite control. A stranger comes to your house with two cameras and says, No pressure, kids, but we would all just be thrilled to death if you could get us a few more shots of those fairies. Do you confess and make a fool out of everyone—or do you do what everyone clearly wants you to do, which is traipse off down to the stream and produce some more photographs?

The girls came back with three more pictures: Frances and the Leaping Fairy, Fairy Offering Posy of Harebells to Elsie, and Fairies and their Sun-Bath. These, too, look absurdly fake to modern eyes. But Gardner and Doyle fell for it again. Gardner then brought in a psychic, who claimed that the whole place was just crawling with fairies.

To me, the strangest part of this story is not that two girls pretended they knew some fairies, but rather that adults so badly wanted their encounters to be true. Not just Gardner and Doyle, whose reputations, by that point, were at least partially at stake. Lots of people were ready to believe. They twisted and massaged the narrative to add credibility. The social reformer Margaret Macmillan, for instance, emphasized that the photographers were children, and thus without motive or guile: “How wonderful that to these dear children such a wonderful gift has been vouchsafed.”

The novelist Henry de Vere Stacpool, meanwhile, insisted that the photographs were real because they just seemed truth-y: “Look at [Frances’] face. Look at [Elsie’s] face. There is an extraordinary thing called Truth which has 10 million faces and forms—it is God’s currency and the cleverest coiner or forger can’t imitate it.” The girls were telling the truth because they looked like they were telling the truth, and that was proof enough.

Eventually, people stopped caring about the fairies. Interest in the supernatural was on the wane, and Doyle was looking increasingly unhinged. The girls produced no more photographs, and the public moved on.

Every once in a while, though, someone would track down one of the girls and press them for more details, or try to get them to admit that they had been making it up. In 1983, they finally admitted that the photographs were faked, but maintained that they really had seen fairies. Elsie said that they were all faked, but Frances said that the last one was real. Frances’s daughter later insisted that fairies were real, and that her mother would never lie. You will still find corners of the internet today where people will say the same thing. Despite the girls mostly owning up to the lie, people still want to believe it, and so they will say that it is true.

The problem with telling a lie is that you often have to tell another one after that, to keep up appearances. And then it’s too late to admit what you made up, and so you just keep on lying. The issue becomes not the initial act of deception, but the fact that you’ve lied for so long—years and years and years. You may even start to believe the lie yourself. I have been thinking about it a lot lately, watching the news. Watching people on my TV lie; wondering if they even know that they are lying, as the stakes keep getting higher and higher.

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Conan Doyle Beyond Sherlock, From Fairies to Atrocities

Although I could never compare myself to such an iconic great as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, we do share a commonality that some readers may also sympathise with. It may also be considered a warning to those who have a fleeting interest in the Occult but hold good careers in more sterile and blinkered disciplines. Like myself, Doyle's professional reputation took a major hit once it became apparent he had an interest in the paranormal and more importantly, fairies.

This great article by Daryl Worthington reveals there is more to Doyle than Sherlock...

With his most well-known creation Sherlock Holmes currently in vogue, the subject of movies and TV series on both sides of the Atlantic, it is easy to forget just how diverse the life and works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle really were.

From books defending spiritualism to an expose on Belgian atrocities in the Congo, Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a hugely fascinating figure whose broad oeuvre reflected his fascinating life. He befriended and then acrimoniously fell out with the legendary illusionist Harry Houdini over the validity of spiritualism; became embroiled in solving a real life murder mystery, and was until recently believed to have been involved in one of the great archaeological hoaxes of the twentieth century.

Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 22nd May, 1859. Doyle’s family were affluent, strict Irish Catholics. His father was a respected artist whose achievements had ultimately been thwarted time and again by alcoholism. His mother was a well educated woman with a passion for reading. She would prove hugely influential in Conan Doyle’s life, as he wrote in his biography: “In my early childhood, as far as I can remember anything at all, the vivid stories she would tell me stand out so clearly that they obscure the real facts of my life.”

In 1876 Doyle embarked on a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh. It was here that the youngster wrote and had published his first short stories, in many ways reflecting a balance between practical scientific study and fantasy that would come to define his work.

The Sherlock Holmes character first appeared in 1887’s A Study in Scarlet, published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Holmes was partly based on Dr. Joseph Bell, one of Doyle’s lecturers who impressed him with his intense attention to detail, a trait clearly reflected in the character. Beyond Holmes however, Doyle’s medical background is also reflected in Round the Red Lamp and the Stark-Munro Letters; the latter a novel depicting the live of a young medical graduate in nineteenth century England, the former a collection of short stories on the trials and traumas of the medical profession.

Alongside fiction, Doyle engaged with highly controversial issues of the day. Inspired by “a burning indignation”, he wrote the The Crime of the Congo in just eight days in 1909. Dealing with the atrocities taking place in the Congo on behalf of Belgian King Leopold II, the powerful book included graphic portrayals of violence and is littered with horrific photos of mutilated victims. Not satisfied with the publication of his written description of the horrors in the Congo, Doyle used his fame to lobby world leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm and Theodore Roosevelt.

Doyle’s work straddles the line between the factual and the fantastical. His groundbreaking science fiction novel The Lost World tells the story of a group of explorers discovering a South American plateau where prehistoric animals survive. Although an adventure story, it is littered with references to real prehistoric creatures such as dinosaurs and hominids. It’s a book which engages with the idea of evolution at a time it was still considered cutting edge, and shows Doyle’s own interest in the sciences.

Towards the end of his life Doyle became fascinated with the mystical and the occult, unveiling another, perhaps totally unexpected facet to this complicated individual. He fell out with Houdini following the illusionist’s campaign to debunk Spiritualism, Doyle having spent much of the 1920s writing books championing Spiritualist beliefs. In 1922, Doyle wrote The Coming of the Fairies, a book which promoted the Cottingley Fairies photographs. Opinion was divided at the time as to whether the images of two girls playing with fairies were a hoax (the girls finally admitted in the 1980s that the images had indeed been faked), and for many, Doyle’s passionate championing of the fairies did long term damage to his literary reputation.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will likely always be best remembered for his most recognised character, the deerstalker and pipe bearing Sherlock Holmes. By looking at his other works however, an image of a deeply complicated, fascinating individual emerges.

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