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Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & the Paranormal

182: The Cottingley Fairy Hoax

Ghost Town: Strange History, True Crime, & the Paranormal

Ghost Town

Social Sciences, True Crime, History, Science

3.7938 Ratings

🗓️ 8 December 2021

⏱️ 17 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A series of mysterious photos from the woods of Cottingley, England took the esoteric world by storm in 1917.

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Transcript

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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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