Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will always be best remembered as the creator of the cynical, deductive reasoning Sherlock Holmes but in his later years, he became a proponent of Spiritualism. His conversion lost him many friends, earned him much criticism and some cruel quarters even spread that word that Conan Doyle had gone senile. The Cottingley Fairies affair seemed to be proof of this.

 According to their account, Mr. Wright developed the photos late that day, revealing anomalous white shapes that gradually moved toward the foreground of the photographs. They looked like sandwich papers or some sort of birds to Wright, but Elsie insisted they were fairies. Mr. Wright took no notice of it but then a month later, Frances photographed Elsie with what the girls claimed was a gnome. Arthur Wright questioned the girls about it but they stuck to their story -- they simply took photos of what they saw there. They were banned from borrowing the camera from that point on.

Doyle's friend, Edward L. Gardner, was a Theosophist himself and had no trouble believing that the photographs were authentic. Even though the photographs were extremely questionable (and the fairies later turned out to be cut-outs from Princess Mary’s Gift Book, 1915), Gardner pronounced them genuine and obtained copies for Conan Doyle, was wary of them at first. He began seeking other opinions, including from Sit Oliver Lodge, who immediately pronounced them as fakes. Doyle had other ideas about the photos though. He was not sure that they were actually fairies but they were certainly mysterious figures. Obviously, the girls were central to the issue -- could they be gifted mediums? He sent Gardner back up north to meet with them and to investigate the "magical" beck. Doyle meanwhile left for Australia on a lecture tour and left Gardner to cope with the media storm that surrounded the revealing of the photographs. The newspapers, not surprisingly, were not open to the possibilities of fairies and the City News even stated that "It seems at this point that we must believe either in the almost incredible mystery of the fairy -- or in the almost incredible wonders of faked photographs".

Photograph of Frances (taken by Elsie) in July 1917

Unknown to the newspapers and to Gardner and Doyle (at the time), the girls had taken three more fairy photographs during the summer of 1920. One of them showed an obviously two-dimensional fairy with fashionably bobbed hair offering a flower to Elsie and another depicted a "fairy bower" in a tree (an ectoplasm-like cocoon) that was very exciting to Conan Doyle. The third was of a leaping fairy that the girls claimed was captured on film during its fifth leap.

Conan Doyle was intrigued but still bothered by the photographs and so he asked for an opinion about them from the Eastman Co. and from Kodak, although he never waited for their answers before declaring them the real thing. He published an article about the fairies in the Christmas 1920 issue of the Strand Magazine and soon was deluged with photographs from others who also claimed to have seen their own fairies. Conan Doyle examined them all, but saw none which appeared to be as genuine as the Cottingley photographs. He later penned a book in 1922 called The Coming of the Fairies, which detailed the entire account of the affair.