What is the Curse of the Cottingley Fairies and who were Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright?
The Cottingley Fairies appeared in a series of photographs taken by two young cousins and came to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
THE Cottingley Fairies appeared in a series of five photographs taken by two young cousins who duped many with their antics.
These pictures caught the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and a war hero academic whose family believe was cursed by the fairytale.
What are the Cottingley Fairies?
The fairies were featured in photographs taken by two cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in 1917.
When the first photos were taken the girls were 16 and nine years old.
The pictures were seen by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who sued them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write in 1920. He later started writing a book on them but never finished it.
Public reaction ranged from disbelief to a cult following.
Interest in the fairies waned after 1921 and both girls lived abroad for some time.
In 1966 a reporter from the Daily Express found one of the cousins, Elsie Wright, and after she said she thought she had photographed her thoughts the media became interested in the story again.
Who were Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths?
In 1917 nine-year-old Frances Griffiths and her mother had arrived back from South Africa and were staying with Frances' aunt, Elsie Wright's mother.
Elsie was 16 years old at the time and the two young girls often played beside a stream.
They would come back with wet feet and clothes, but their excuse was that they only went there to see the fairies.
To prove it they borrowed a camera and when the photographs were processed they showed the girls with "fairies".
Elsie's father thought they were fake, but her mother believed them.
The photographs were then shown at a meeting of the Theosophical Society in Bradford in 1919, and they became public.
What is The Curse of the Cottingley Fairies?
An academic, Joe Cooper, became captivated by the photographs in the 1970s.
He was obsessed with the story and decided to take up where Conan Doyle had left off.
He spent more than seven years and a personal fortune on investigating.
Eventually he was told by the cousins they had faked the whole thing, in 1981.
He was devastated and disappeared for months - writing The Case of the Cottingley Faries.
He died from heart failure in 2011.
Now Joe's daughter Jane is writing a TV script she has called The Curse of the Cottingley fairies.
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