3.7 • 928 Ratings
🗓️ 8 December 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
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0:00.0 | I'm not so fairy tale. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town. |
0:19.3 | In 1917, 10-year-old Frances Griffiths and her mother moved from South Africa to the |
0:24.0 | small village of Cotagli in West Yorkshire of the United Kingdom. They stayed with Frances's |
0:29.2 | aunt and uncle, Pauline Arthur, who had a daughter of their own, a teenager named Elsie. |
0:33.8 | Frances and Elsie were close, playing together in the backyard garden, going by the stream, |
0:38.6 | and generally just being fancy, uptight British kids playing in the woods. But here's the thing. |
0:43.6 | The two girls swore that they went to the woods to see fairies. And to prove it, they took a camera. |
0:50.1 | Little did they know a couple innocent photos would change the course of their lives forever. |
0:54.5 | Today, we're talking about the mysterious Cotagli fairies, a bizarre phenomenon that took |
0:59.2 | great Britain by storm. Elsie's dad Arthur loved photography and was known for being an |
1:03.4 | amateur photographer around town. The girls took his camera, a mid-G quarter plate, into the woods, |
1:09.2 | and 30 minutes later ran back excitedly. Arthur took the camera to his own makeshift dark room |
1:14.1 | to develop the picture. The photo shows Frances kind of laying behind a little hill or bush, |
1:19.7 | flowers in her hair, her face in her hands. She's staring directly at the camera seemingly |
1:24.8 | unmoved by four dancing fairies, right by her elbows. Of course, Arthur was impressed by the girls' |
1:30.6 | cute little creative prank, dismissing the fairies as cardboard cutouts the girls probably created |
1:35.4 | and trucked out to the middle of the woods. No harm, no foul. But two months later, the girls borrowed |
1:40.5 | his camera again and returned from the woods with another photograph. This one was of Elsie |
1:45.7 | sitting on the lawn holding her hand out to a gnome. The gnome is like textbook looking gnome, |
1:51.7 | tights a kind of reddish coat and a pointy red hat. Seeing that photo, Arthur Wright was like, |
1:56.4 | yeah, okay, I think I've had enough of your prank. Elsie's mom, Polly, though, believed that this |
2:01.6 | photo and the one before were absolutely real. Towards the end of 1918, Frances sent a letter to |
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