Arthur Conan Doyle, Spiritualism, and Fairies
By
Donald E. Simane
Frances and the Fairies, July 1917, taken by Elsie. Midg Quarter
camera at 4 feet, 1/50 sec., sunny day.Photo No. 1. (detail) This photo, and the four which follow were provided by the James Randi Educational Foundation. These pictures are cropped to show the important details clearly.
Photo No. 1, above, taken in July, showed Frances in the garden with a waterfall in the background and a bush in the foreground. Four fairies are dancing upon the bush. Three have wings and one is playing a long flute-like instrument. Frances is not looking at the fairies just in front of her, but seems to be posing for the camera. Though the waterfall is blurred, indicating a slow shutter speed, the fairies, are not blurred, even though leaping in the air.
Photo No. 2, taken in September, showed Elsie sitting on the lawn reaching out her hand to a friendly gnome (about a foot high, with wings) who is stepping forward onto the hem of her wide skirt.
Photo No. 3 "Francis and the Leaping Fairy" showed a slightly blurred profile of Frances with the winged fairy suspended in mid-air just in front of her nose. The background and the fairy are not blurred. Hmmm...
Photo No. 4 shows a fairy hovering in mid-air offering a flower to Elsie. Well, this fairy may be standing on a branch, for the fairy images are of indeterminable distance from the camera.
Photo No. 5 "Fairies and their Sunbath" is the only one that looks as if it could have accidental or deliberate double exposure.
Photographic experts who were consulted declared that none of the negatives
had been tampered with, there was no evidence of double exposures, and that
a slight blurring of one of the fairies in photo number one indicated that
the fairy was moving during the exposure of 1/50 or 1/100 second. They seemed
not to even entertain the simpler explanation that the fairies were simple
paper cut-outs fastened on the bush, jiggling slightly in the breeze. Doyle
and other believers were also not troubled by the fact that the fairy's wings
never showed blurred movement, even in the picture of the fairy calmly posed
suspended in mid-air. Apparently fairy wings don't work like hummingbird's
wings.
Hardly anyone can look at these photos today and accept them as anything
but fakes. The lighting on the fairies does not match that of the girls.
The fairy figures have a flat, cut-out appearance. But spiritualists, and
others who prefer a world of magic and fantasy accepted the photos as genuine evidence for fairies.Three years later, the girls produced three more photos.
The girls said they could not photograph the fairies when anyone else was
watching. No one else could photograph the fairies. There was only one
independent witness, Geoffrey L. Hodson, a Theosophist writer, who claimed
to see the fairies, and confirmed the girls' observations "in all details".
| Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. |
|---|
Arthur Conon Doyle not only accepted these photos as genuine, he even wrote
two pamphlets and a book attesting the genuineness of these photos, and including much additional fairy lore. His book, The Coming of the Fairies,
is still in print, and some people still believe the photos are
authentic. Doyle's books make very interesting reading even today.
Doyle's belief in spiritualism, convinced many people that the creator
of Sherlock Holmes was not as bright as his fictional creation.
Some thought Conan Doyle crazy, but he defended the reality of fairies with all the evidence he could gather. He counters the arguments of the disbelievers eloquently and at great length. In fact, his evidence and arguments sound surprisingly similar in every respect to those of present-day books touting the idea that alien beings visit us in UFOs. Robert Sheaffer wrote a clever article drawing these parallels beautifully.
Over the years the mystery persisted. Only a few die-hards now believe the photos were of real fairies, but the mystery of the details of how (and why) they were made continued to fascinate serious students of hoaxes, frauds and deceptions. When the girls (as adults) were interviewed, their responses were evasive. In a BBC broadcast interview in 1975 Elsie said: "I've told you that they're photographs of figments of our imagination and that's what I'm sticking to."
In 1977 Fred Gettings stumbled on important evidence while working on a study of early nineteenth-century book illustrations. He found drawings by Claude A. Shepperson in a 1915 children's book which the girls could easily have posessed, and which were, without a doubt, the models for the fairies which appeared in the photos.
Some thought Conan Doyle crazy, but he defended the reality of fairies with all the evidence he could gather. He counters the arguments of the disbelievers eloquently and at great length. In fact, his evidence and arguments sound surprisingly similar in every respect to those of present-day books touting the idea that alien beings visit us in UFOs. Robert Sheaffer wrote a clever article drawing these parallels beautifully.
Over the years the mystery persisted. Only a few die-hards now believe the photos were of real fairies, but the mystery of the details of how (and why) they were made continued to fascinate serious students of hoaxes, frauds and deceptions. When the girls (as adults) were interviewed, their responses were evasive. In a BBC broadcast interview in 1975 Elsie said: "I've told you that they're photographs of figments of our imagination and that's what I'm sticking to."
In 1977 Fred Gettings stumbled on important evidence while working on a study of early nineteenth-century book illustrations. He found drawings by Claude A. Shepperson in a 1915 children's book which the girls could easily have posessed, and which were, without a doubt, the models for the fairies which appeared in the photos.
Illustration for Alfred Noyes' poem "A Spell for a Fairy" in Princess Mary's Gift Book by Claude Shepperson. (Hodder and Stoughton, no date, c. 1914, p. 101ff). Compare the poses of these figures with those of three of the fairies in Photo No. 1. The figures have been rearranged and details of dress have been altered, but the origin of the poses is unmistakable.
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