In the summer of 1917, two girls in a village in Yorkshire cut fairy figures out of a book, propped them up with hatpins in the grass beside a stream, and took a photograph. The photograph eventually reached Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the most famously rational fictional detective in the history of literature, who announced publicly, in the Christmas issue of The Strand Magazine, that it was the most important photographic evidence of supernatural phenomena ever produced. He staked his considerable reputation on it. He was wrong. He would not discover he was wrong for years.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: Frances Griffiths, newly arrived from South Africa and homesick in an English village, and her older cousin Elsie Wright, the girl who knew how to use a camera. The specific grief of a world at war that made millions of people desperate to believe in something beyond the material. The decades of interviews, investigations, and expert analyses that failed to expose what two girls had done with scissors and hatpins. And the ending — sixty-six years later, when both women were old, when they finally admitted what they had done. One of them added a caveat: the fifth photograph, she said, was real.

If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you're just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you.

Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it, slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are fourteen more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Cottingley Fairies. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Cooper, Joe. The Case of the Cottingley Fairies. Robert Hale, 1990.
• Conan Doyle, Arthur. Fairies Photographed: An Epoch-Making Event. The Strand Magazine, December 1920.
• Conan Doyle, Arthur. The Coming of the Fairies. Hodder and Stoughton, 1922.
• University of Leeds. The Cottingley Fairies: A Study in Deception. Google Arts and Culture Exhibition, 2021.
• Historic UK. The Cottingley Fairies. 2023.
• Time Magazine. Fairies and Fake News: Lessons of the 1917 Cottingley Hoax. 2017.
• National Science and Media Museum, Bradford. Cottingley Fairies collection.
• Google Arts and Culture. The Cottingley Fairies — A Study in Deception. University of Leeds Special Collections.