Photographs of "Fairies"
Photographs of "Fairies" is an article published in the Daily Express on 23 december 1920.
Photographs of "Fairies"
HOW THEY WERE TAKEN BY GIRLS IN A WOOD.
"Daily Express" Correspondent.
Shipley (Yorks), Wednesday.
The photographs of "fairies" described in the Christmas number of the "Strand Magazine" were taken in Cottingley Beck Woods, near here. Miss Elsie Wright, aged nineteen, of Lynwood-terrace, Cottingley, and her cousin, Frances Ealing, of Scarborough, are the girls associated with the incident.
Mrs. Wright told me that her daughter as a child was highly imaginative, and often painted a scene with fairies.
"My husband put one plate in the camera and lent it to the girls," added Mrs. Wright. "They went to the wood, and when they returned my husband developed the plate for them.
"He noticed the wings of the fairies, and imagined them to be the wings of birds; but Frances called out to her cousin that 'the fairies have come on the photo.' Both my husband and I asked the girls how they had 'faked' the photo, but they protested they had done nothing to the plate."
Mrs. Wright stated that last summer, under test conditions, the girls took three more photographs of "fairies." These, in consequence of an undertaking given to an agent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, have been preserved in secret.
