In 1917 two cousins borrowed a camera and came back with photographs of winged fairies dancing by a Yorkshire stream. The images convinced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — the mind behind Sherlock Holmes — that the supernatural was real. It took the girls until the 1980s to admit the fairies were cardboard cutouts held up with hatpins.
The full arc: five photographs taken by 16-year-old Elsie Wright and 9-year-old Frances Griffiths between 1917 and 1920, and the sixty-year wait before the cousins finally confessed.
A tight documentary primer on how two children with a box camera briefly convinced a slice of Edwardian Britain that fairies had been caught on film.
The strange heart of the story: Arthur Conan Doyle, a committed Spiritualist, seized on the photos as proof of the paranormal and published them in The Strand at Christmas 1920.
The university that holds the original prints and cameras dissects exactly how the hoax worked — the cutouts, the poses, and why experts of the day couldn't spot the trick.
HISTORY on how a nation reeling from World War I wanted to believe, and how the girls' innocent prank snowballed into a decades-long cultural phenomenon.
A visual retelling that lingers on the images themselves — the flat, storybook fairies that somehow passed as evidence in an age just discovering photo manipulation.
Priceless archive footage: a grown-up Elsie Wright interviewed on the BBC's Nationwide, still coy about the truth years before the final confession.
The National Science and Media Museum reveals the mechanics behind the magic — the illustrations Elsie copied, the hatpins, and the darkroom that never actually retouched a thing.