Fairies

When I was in my primary school about 10 years old, I had a pen-friend by the name of Ari. He should be about 10 years older than me. He used to send me lots of books about the paranormal, supernatural, UFOs and unexplainable stories from all over the world.
The Cottingley Fairies was one of them.
I was very very fascinated with fairies because my sister told me the story about tooth fairy when I was 6 years old. She said the tooth fairy will come in the middle of the night and take my little tooth that we put under our pillow. This article that Ari sent me gave me proof that fairies do exist and I was very happy until..............
Here are the photos that I saw and believed.

#1. Frances and the Fairies. Taken July 1917. Camera: Midg Quarter. “The negative was a little over-exposed. The waterfall and rocks are about 20 feet distance behind Frances, who is standing in shallow water inside the bank of the beck. The colouring of the fairies was described by the girls as shades of green, lavender and mauve, most marked in the wings and fading to almost pure white in the limbs and drapery.”

#2. Elsie and the Gnome. Taken September 1917. Camera: Midg Quarter. “Elsie was playing with the gnome and beckoning it to come on to her knee. The gnome leapt up just as Frances, who had the camera, snapped the shutter. He is described as wearing black tights, a reddish jersey and a pointed bright red cap. Elsie said there was no perceptible weight, though when on the bare hand the feeling is like a ‘little breath’. The wings were more moth-like than the fairies and of a soft neutral tint. Elsie explained that what seem to be markings on his wings are simply his pipes, which he was swinging in his grotesque little left hand.”

#3. Frances and the Leaping Fairy. Taken August 1920. Camera: Cameo Quarter. “The fairy is leaping up from the leaves below and hovering for a moment—it had done so three or four times. Rising a little higher than before, Frances thought it would touch her face, and involuntarily tossed her head back. The fairy’s light covering appears to be close fitting: the wings were lavender in colour.”

#4. Fairy Offering a Posy to Elsie. Taken August 1920. Camera: Cameo Quarter. “The fairy is standing almost still, poised on the bush leaves. The wings were shot with yellow. An interesting point is shown in this photograph: Elsie is not looking directly at the sprite. The reason seems to be that the human eye is disconcerting. If the fairy be actively moving it does not matter much, but if motionless and aware of being gazed at then the nature-spirit will usually withdraw and apparently vanish. With fairy lovers the habit of looking at first a little sideways is common.”

#5. Fairies and Their Sun-Bath. Taken August 1920. Camera: Cameo Quarter. “This is especially remarkable as it contains a feature quite unknown to the girls. The sheath or cocoon appearing in the middle of the grasses had not been seen by them before, and they had no idea what it was. Fairy observers of Scotland and the New Forest, however, were familiar with it and described it as a magnetic bath, woven very quickly by the fairies and used after dull weather, in the autumn especially. The interior seems to be magnetised in some manner that stimulates and pleases.”

until.....One time when I was 12 years old, I went to my primary schoolmate Anne's birthday party and I came across a "Photography" book talking about photography hoaxes and suddenly I saw pictures of Elsie & Frances with the fairies in the book. It revealed the truth about The Cottingley Fairies. I was extremely devastated and dissapointed. I sat there looking at the pictures in the book and felt the uncanny feeling like it's meant to be. Even at that young age, I have feelings of "everything happens for a reason" but just don't know how to put it into words. All in all, this story made a big impact in my life and it still does give me the funny feeling and I still wish there were fairies :)


THE STORY
~~~~~~~~~~

The two young girls, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, were cousins. Initially they took two photographs in 1917 to prove to their parents that they really had been playing with fairies outside in the garden, as they had claimed. The photographs showed the girls posing while delicate, winged creatures danced around them. A local photographic expert was shown the photos and proclaimed them to be genuine, unretouched images. Once they had received this official stamp of approval, the fairy images began circulating through upper class British society.

Eventually the photos came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Doyle was a passionate believer in spiritualism, and he latched onto the images, convinced they were conclusive photographic proof of the existence of supernatural fairy beings. Doyle publicly made this argument in an article he wrote for Strand magazine in 1920. When the girls provided him with three more fairy photographs, he wrote a second article.

Doyle’s passionate belief in the authenticity of the fairy photos helped to make the two girls famous, and it sparked a national controversy that pitted spiritualists against skeptics.

It was not until 1978 that James Randi pointed out that the fairies in the pictures were very similar to figures in a children’s book called Princess Mary’s Gift Book, which had been published in 1915 shortly before the girls took the photographs.

Subsequently, in 1981, the two cousins confessed that the fairies in four of the pictures were, in fact, paper cutouts. Elsie had sketched fairies (using Princess Mary’s Gift Book as inspiration). She had then made paper cutouts from these sketches, which she held in place with hatpins. However, the cousins insisted that one of the photographs — the one of the fairy sunbath that contained no people in it — was real.

To the modern eye the fairies in the photographs seem quite obviously to be paper cutouts, making it all the more incredible that the controversy surrounding them lasted so long. But the photos still manage to project a sensation of dreamy, childlike innocence. The five images remain one of the most famous photographic hoaxes of all time.

Below is a side-by-side comparison of the figures in Princess Mary’s Gift Book to the fairies in the first Cottingley fairy photo.

Some sixty years later, the aging Elsie and Frances confessed to what had begun as a prank but soon got out of hand as the story was publicized. Paramount Pictures revived the case with the magical release Fairy Tale: A True Story. Unfortunately, the film failed to provide modern audiences with many of the incriminating details that are now known of the Cottingley hoax.