The Cottingley Fairies Hoax: How Two Little Girls Tricked the World

Welcome to Sleepytime History — true stories from the pages of history for a full night's rest.

Tonight, settle in and unwind with the remarkable true story of the Cottingley Fairies, one of the most charming and famous hoaxes in history. In the summer of 1917, in a peaceful Yorkshire village, two young cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, kept slipping down to the beck behind the house and coming home with soaked shoes and skirts. When they were challenged, they blamed the fairies, and to prove it they borrowed Elsie's father's camera. The Yorkshire fairies they produced might have stayed a small family secret, had the fairy photographs not surfaced in a Britain still deep in mourning. The Great War had taken so many young men that a grieving nation had turned to séance rooms and Spiritualism, and this gentle thread of spiritualism history runs all through the tale. And so, when the pictures appeared at an evening lecture, they came at last to the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the celebrated Sherlock Holmes creator and a devoted spiritualist, who championed them as irrefutable proof that fairies were real. He was far from alone. This was no medieval age of superstition, but a modern world of motorcars, telephones, and electric light, and even the experts who studied the negatives could find no trickery in them. A knighted national hero had staked his name on two schoolgirls and a borrowed camera, and beneath it all lay a secret that would remain hidden for decades. Let this tranquil history carry you gently from a mossy Yorkshire stream to the drawing-rooms of scholars and sceptics alike, as you drift off alongside Elsie and Frances into the strange summer of the Cottingley Fairies hoax that fooled the world.

Let this quiet story of childhood mischief and belief guide you into a restful night's sleep.

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Chapters:

00:00:00 The Cottingley Fairies Hoax: How Two Little Girls Tricked the World

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