Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Hansel and Gretel & The Cottingley Fairies
24 Plays1 year ago
This week, we're putting the Sinister Sisters spin on “fairy tale cottagecore!”
First, Felicia peels back the page on the real life history behind the classic Grimm's Fairy Tales "Hansel and Gretel.” It may be a story we all know, not to mention one that provided plenty of nightmare fuel for the fire at bedtime as children, but the fact behind the fiction is far more horrifying than just witches eating children. The Great Famine of 1315-1317 that plagued Europe early in the 14th century led people to go to extreme lengths to stay alive…and if you know the fairy tale, well then you can imagine where it goes from here. Let’s just say things get dark on the episode…leave a trail of breadcrumbs to find your way back.
Next, Lauren explores the case of “The Cottingley Fairies” - a series of several photographs taken by young girls Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths in England in the early 1900s that supposedly showed real life fairies. Eventually the photos caught the attention of theosophist Edward Gardner and even Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The photos are still discussed and debated to this day - how did these girls with primitive photography equipment manage to fake such convincing? Or did they actually provide photographic proof of the existence of these mythical creatures from folklore?!
PS: If you have requests for future episodes or just want to hang out, follow us on Instagram @sinistersisterspodcast
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Sinister Sisters Podcast
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome to the Sinister Sisters podcast. I'm Felicia. I'm Lauren. We're best friends. And we like spooky stuff. Yeah. I actually went to see a movie in theaters. Was that two days ago? Maybe that was even yesterday. Time doesn't exist. I'm a teacher and on summer vacation right now. And time is just all a blur to me. She's living like a teenager. That's right. Summer vacation.
Review of Dracula-inspired Film
00:00:38
Speaker
So I saw the last voyage of the Demeter. Did you see it already? Oh my gosh, not yet. How was it? Okay. It was so I was very excited because I love a Dracula story. The trailer looks good. Like I like that it was going to be kind of like a Nosferatu looking Dracula on this ship, but seemed exciting. I really liked that director.
00:01:04
Speaker
Andre, oh god, Ovidahl? How do you say it? I can't remember his last name. Yeah. But he did the autopsy of Jane Doe. It's that guy. I love that. Yeah, me too. And so I was very excited about it. And like the aesthetics
00:01:20
Speaker
the direction, the acting, there was a lot about it that I really did like, but I did not like the writing. Some things happened in the writing that I thought were on the nose, not great, of little cheese balls. And then there was also times where things would happen that just didn't make sense to me.
00:01:48
Speaker
There was some plot things that happened that I was like, okay, that just kind of confused some things. And okay, I'm just going to give an example. It's not really, I mean, whatever. It's a spoiler, I guess. Fast forward if you don't want it. Fast forward. So basically, like, two of the characters, they go down, they discover the box that Dracula sleeps in. Okay.
00:02:11
Speaker
and then proceed to do nothing with that information after they do that. They're like, work so hard to get this box open. They see that that's the box he sleeps in. And they don't do what to me would be the obvious thing, which would be to take it up on the deck and the sunlight and take the thing out.
00:02:30
Speaker
But they just have this whole journey of discovering it, and then it's never discussed again. There's just some things like that where I was like, what's going on here? Why? That's a bummer. Yeah. So it's not so much the dialogue. It's more gaping plot
Discussion on Horror Movie Tropes
00:02:48
Speaker
holes.
00:02:48
Speaker
Yeah. And then there was also this moment that just made me I roll so hard. There's like one girl in the cast. And of course, you know, her character development was just so classic. Like I could just I know you've seen this in 1000 movies, I'm just gonna tell you exactly what it is. At some point, they go to get guns to protect themselves. The guy hands her a tiny gun, and she takes the shotgun off the wall goes, shh,
00:03:15
Speaker
And it's just like, okay, yeah, we know, I don't know. Like it was just this thing of like, she's not a normal girl, she's a tough girl. And it was like, that's all you could give me was that gun thing that we've seen in like 100,000 movies. Like I just- And it does, it feels so overdone now. Yeah.
00:03:34
Speaker
Like, oh, I think you could handle this gun. And she's like, JK, I could do a shotgun. And it's just like, what's going on? Great. Yeah, that's really a bummer. Yeah, it looks good. Like the movie looks fantastic. It just had some things like that where I was just like, yeah, man. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense. It is hard. I feel like horror movies are like the number one genre for things like that. I know. I know. Unfortunately.
00:04:04
Speaker
No, I mean, and then I don't know. I still, I really like to talk to me. So sometimes I feel like they do a good job of, I don't know, being scary and not having plot holes. Yeah. Do you have any recommendations? I was just trying to think if I have any like scary movies that I've seen, I really haven't seen anything in a bit. That's like, I feel like real horror except talk to me. We've been watching, I can't remember if I said this last episode, I hope I didn't
00:04:32
Speaker
but we've been watching Only Murders in the building. Did you ever do that? Oh, I just started it. I'm like a few episodes in because my mom told me to watch it. I really like it. Yes. I've really been enjoying it. I just think Steve Martin and Martin Short are so good and their chemistry is so good. And honestly, I thought I was going to be offended by Selena Gomez or not like her very much, to be honest. And I'm like, she's great. She's doing great job. I like Selena. I like her a lot these days, honestly.
00:05:00
Speaker
Yeah. I like her makeup line. I'm like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. She's great.
History Behind Hansel and Gretel
00:05:05
Speaker
She's great. But it's been fun. And I like the, like, as you keep going, I'm sure you'll like, I like the twists and turns and it's still like kind of light, like in a way that I needed, I think for TV. So I've really been liking it, but I think that's pretty much, I'm like, I don't think I've really seen a movie in a while. I'm going to save some for next week.
00:05:24
Speaker
That's fine. Okay, so my story today is about the historical inspiration behind the grim fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. I'm so excited. Yeah, I didn't really know. Is there a truth to some parts or is it also lore? So it's lore. It's definitely a story told to kids that is fictional.
00:05:54
Speaker
the things it's based in in terms of what was going on at the time are very, very real. So if you don't know the story of Hansel and Gretel, I'll just give you a brief overview. So once upon a time, brother and sister, Hansel and Gretel, they lived in the woods with their dad who was like a
00:06:16
Speaker
a woodcutter and his wife had died at some point and he remarried and of course the stepmother was not nice.
00:06:25
Speaker
We always get a bad rap. They really do, Lauren, and I'm so sorry. They do me dirty every time. Every story, every time. So the family was poor, they didn't have enough food, and the mom or the stepmother would always feed the children last, maybe just a crust of bread, lots of chores, just generally mean.
00:06:50
Speaker
And at some point, she said, there is not enough food for the four of us. These kids got to go. That is savage. That is terrible. Yeah. So the story differs based on your version, but the version I had heard growing up was that the father walked the kids out deep into the woods. The kids were suspicious. So they left bread crumbs.
00:07:20
Speaker
So they could remember their way back home and he left them there on the middle of the woods. The kids look for their breadcrumbs to go back home. The breadcrumbs are all gone. They wander through the forest.
00:07:33
Speaker
And they come upon a cottage made of gingerbread, candy, whatever your version is, something delicious. They go and start eating what they can find. An evil witch comes out, gets them to come inside and puts Hansel in a cage and puts Greta to work.
00:07:54
Speaker
She continually feeds Hansel while Gretel's doing chores and stuff. And the kids figure out that she is planning on cooking them and eating them. And so they have to escape. And at the end, they open up the giant oven, throw the witch inside, and escape out of whatever. So is that generally the version you've heard? Yes, I think so. I think so. I feel like, yeah.
00:08:23
Speaker
I, Felicia and I sort of did some like Grimm's fairy tale research at different points in our lives. That's right. And I feel, yeah, this feels, it all feels familiar. All feels right. Okay, good. So the basis for this story, most people say is based around the time in Europe of
00:08:45
Speaker
1315 to 1317, which is the Great Famine. So, later on, the kind of the most, the biggest death toll that people always talk about is the Plague Black Death, which was a little bit after this.
00:08:59
Speaker
But the toll of the Great Famine was huge and it lasted for years, so it actually, you know, it really did a lot of damage. By the end of the famine, 10 to 25% of the European population was dead. Damn. And it's somehow- That's a lot of people. Yeah, and it somehow seems worse because it's not like people were being diseased and dying from something. It was that they didn't have enough food to eat, so they were dying of starvation.
00:09:25
Speaker
which is just so much worse to me in my mind. And more preventable or something. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. But yeah, so the reasons of this famine is, so there's a lot of bad weather conditions. I think cold temperatures and heavy rainfall, it rained for months. And they couldn't, they basically had full agricultural failure
00:09:55
Speaker
They couldn't plant, they couldn't grow crops, and totally disrupted their harvest season. So that was kind of the start of it. And the main grains that this affected, if you want to know, I don't know, wheat, barley, and oats. And then pastures became flooded, which caused problems for the livestock.
00:10:17
Speaker
And so also a lot of cattle and various animals that people ate also died. There was also some kind of cow disease that had gone around. It was a bunch of factors that all kind of happened at once.
00:10:33
Speaker
So people are facing extreme food shortage, malnutrition becomes widespread, starvation, or diseases associated with starvation lead to more people dying. And yeah, millions of people died in this famine. So because of this, people have to resort to extreme measures to survive. So some things that sound less insane than what I will tell you,
00:11:02
Speaker
things like eating rotten vegetables, just trying to eat anything they could to survive. And then things got worse and we start to hear stories of families abandoning their children to either die or survive on their own because they can't feed them. And then eventually to rumors and lots of stories that happened all over the place of cannibalism.
00:11:32
Speaker
I was waiting for it. I was like, were people eating kids? Yes, yes, yes, yes. There's a form of cannibalism that I had never considered that I came upon in this research. Just never even thought about it. And people started grave robbing bodies to eat.
00:11:55
Speaker
Is that not mind blowing? So that's rock bottom. That's rock bottom, baby. Particularly if people died like by hanging or like prisoners that were killed. So like not diseased. People that hadn't died of some disease or something. People that had been killed. Those bodies, you know, and this is more delicious. Yes. So these bodies seemed like the food source. So they would literally dig up the corpse, take it home and eat it.
00:12:25
Speaker
Wow. There then started to be stories of parents eating their children and children eating their parents depending on circumstances. Damn. Yeah. That's awful.
00:12:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so the parents eating the children, I mean, this is so dark, I'm sorry to even say this. So sorry to even say this on the internet. But also like, this was also a time of like huge children mortality rates of kids just dying really, really young. So I think that's also like part of
00:12:58
Speaker
potentially the truth or rumors of this, of parents eating their kids. And yeah, so this famine basically people think inspired the story of Hansel and Gretel that we got
Adaptations of Hansel and Gretel
00:13:14
Speaker
And Hansel and Gretel originally did in medieval Germany. So once again, the family we're talking about was 1315 to 1317 ish. And we started hearing the tale of Hansel and Gretel sometime before the year 1500. And then the Grimm brothers
00:13:38
Speaker
credited this tale from a particular part of Germany called the State of Hesse, I guess, H-E-S-S-E, heard to say. And they had said that they had heard the story from a family member that it's kind of like oral tradition, oral storytelling. And then they wrote their own version of it that they then eventually published in their fairy tales.
00:14:03
Speaker
Yeah, and that was published not until 1850. So a really, really long time. So this is a story that has been had been around for almost 500 years before it actually was published in any kind of book. But yeah, and I'm also sure that there's about a million versions of that story that changed over time. And the grim fairy tale one is just the one we know, because it's the one that was written down.
00:14:30
Speaker
But yeah, some other versions of Hansel and Gretel. So there is a apparently an opera of Hansel and Gretel, which I'm like, would maybe want to see that. Interesting. Yeah. And then for movies, there's like a few like TV specials that happened. There is the I've never seen these movies, but the Hansel and Gretel like Witch Hunter movies from like 2013. I've ever seen those.
00:14:59
Speaker
I think I maybe saw one, but if you asked me, I don't remember a single moment from it. I'm like, maybe I never did, though. Maybe I'm just confusing it with the Kristen Stewart Snow White movie. Yes, they're back. They're back. And then the most recent version that I saw in theaters was Gretel and Hansel, which was the 2020 horror film by Oz Perkins. Did you see that one?
00:15:28
Speaker
That's the horror movie, right? With the girl from it? Yeah. Yeah. I did. I actually quite liked that I remember. And I really, that one focused, that one definitely changed the story up where Gretel was kind of being trained as a witch by this witch. It was a very different story, but I thought it was cool. I remember liking it. I liked it too. Yeah, me too. I remember it being like creepy and different and cool. Yeah.
00:15:58
Speaker
I also looked up that, and this is something I've never seen, but I'm dying to know more about. So Tim Burton apparently directed a 1983 TV special of Hansel and Gretel for the Disney Channel. Oh, we got to watch that. I know. I know. I was like, how have I never seen that? It's live action or like it's not like claymation or. No, no, no. Oh, my God.
00:16:25
Speaker
Oh my God, Lauren, we have to see this. Oh my God, it looks insane. It's live action. It's live action. I can't wait. The witch has a candy cane nose. Oh my God. The house, it looks absolutely bananas. What is this? How am I going to find it on the internet? It looks like an art film. It looks like an experimental art film is what I'm looking at right now. Wow.
00:16:53
Speaker
I feel like we have to share a picture now on our Instagram. I'll put that in the thing for sure. But as I'm looking online, I don't see a great way to watch it. Oh, wait, it looks like there might be a version on YouTube. Sorry, I'm literally doing this research myself right now. And I don't know what this is, like the title looks like The Nightmare Before Christmas Hell kind of.
00:17:17
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Isn't that weird? Oh, interesting. Yeah. Oh, my God. OK, I'm just like skipping through some of these images for OK, I'm watching this literally tonight. This looks awesome. It does. Anyways, so yeah, we'll share some images of that and yeah, this is crazy. I know. It looks so sorry. I'm like stopping this podcast to talk about this thing because I just can't get over these images. OK, moving on, moving on. But yeah, that's basically the story.
00:17:48
Speaker
inspired by real life famine and real life. I know it's rumored, but there was enough reports of cannibalism just for survival. I think we've talked about this before with the grim fairy tale at some point, but the stories of grim fairy tales are typically meant to scare children, tell them to stay out of the woods, tell them to avoid strangers, all those kinds of things.
00:18:14
Speaker
This is really no different. Stay out of the woods, as they say. And mistrust your stepmom, I guess. Unless your stepmom is Lauren. And then she's amazing. No, they are the original Grimm's fairy tales are all so scary. Honestly, I love that you did like a little history on one. Little history. Yeah, yeah.
The Cottingley Fairies Photographs
00:18:39
Speaker
But that's it.
00:18:52
Speaker
Amazing. Okay. Well, I'm kind of keeping us in this sort of fairy tale vibes. So I'll just be honest. James sent it to me, but it's because it was covered on Criminal either last week or recently. Do you have a post on the podcast? No, but I know about it because it's on the same network as the... Oh, wait. No, actually, I don't know. That's true.
00:19:14
Speaker
I don't know what podcast network it is. It's just like a true crime thing. Yeah, yeah. Yes. And they're there. It's interesting. It's actually not so dissimilar. Like some of their stories are closer to what we do. I feel like where it's like a true crime. She does do a lot of just like regular true crime, too.
00:19:32
Speaker
but the main woman has the best podcast voice ever. I don't know how she ever did anything except podcast. It's Phoebe Judge, but she- Oh, duh. Okay, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yes, right? Okay, I'm with you. I'm sorry. That took me a second.
00:19:51
Speaker
No, as soon as you say her name, you can hear it in the voice. Yeah, literally. Yeah, she's amazing. I'm Phoebe Judge. I can't do it. That's so good. No, that was good. Thank you. They covered it. Mine obviously is going to be a little bit of a different approach. I feel like they always have such good interviews and
00:20:08
Speaker
kind of bounce around. So I'm going to tell it more like, you know, as it occurred, I guess. But so the Cottingley fairies is what I'm talking about. And they are a series of five photographs. And you would you would recognize them. I'm sure Felicia here, I should just send you a picture before I start this because it's like helpful. Did they make a movie about this?
00:20:32
Speaker
from like the early 2000, I'm sorry, I'm already interrupting. I just texted you a picture. Is this what you were thinking? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is a movie about this. Go ahead. I used to watch it as a kid and I loved it. I used to watch it all the time. Why the heck did you watch this as a kid? I don't know because I liked berries and I was like, I don't know. I just, I loved it a lot of times, but go ahead. So I guess, yes, there's,
00:20:59
Speaker
There's the 1997 films fairy tale, a true story and photographing fairies. Is that one of the ones or no? Say the title again. Fairy tale, a true story and photographing fairies. Or is it something else that you watched?
00:21:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's fairy tale, a true story. I love that. Okay, great. Yeah. So they did, they do have movies about them, but they're like very distinct black and white photos with like, I would say like kind of stereotypical fairies in them.
00:21:31
Speaker
But they were taken by cousins, Elsie Wright and Francis Griffiths. And they lived in England in kind of a small town. And the first photo was in 1917, was when the first two photographs were taken. So Elsie was 16 and Francis was nine, which is like my favorite part of the story. This is like these two little girls. Just lookin' yeah.
00:21:54
Speaker
Just little kids. So the first photo is just the one that I think is probably the most famous is a little girl sitting with her hand kind of up under her chin. It was Francis. Then there are four fairies kind of frolicking in front of her face. So in mid-1917, nine-year-old Francis had just moved with her mom to the UK from South Africa. They were staying with Elsie and her mom.
00:22:20
Speaker
And so the girls like often went into the back garden and played and obviously the moms didn't really like it because they would always come back dirty and wet. And so they claimed at some point that they were going out to the garden to see the fairies. And to give further proof to their moms, they eventually borrowed Elsie's father's camera.
00:22:42
Speaker
and then they returned 30 minutes later with these photos. So, Elsie's father, yeah, it's amazing. It's just like such a good, I don't know, I feel like I have like a lot of memories of like a similar just like kind of playing pranks on your parents or like, you know, I don't know, messing around with your friend in the backyard.
00:23:02
Speaker
And so just making your own magical world in your backyard. Like, yes, exactly. So her father was an amateur photographer. He had his own dark room. The picture on the photographic plate that he developed showed the picture that I talked about at the beginning. So it's Francis, the four fairies dancing. The parents knew that these girls were like creative and tricky, especially the older one, like is like artistic, like she had artistic ability.
00:23:32
Speaker
So they just like assume they were cardboard cutouts and then
00:23:36
Speaker
Two months later, the girls borrowed the camera again. This time they came back with a photo of Elsie. And again, you've probably have seen it, but it's like Elsie sitting on the grass and she's holding out her hand to this little like one foot tall gnome. So the dad got frustrated at this point and he was like, you can't borrow my camera again, which also just feels like such a dad move to be like, you can't use my camera. But the mom was at that point convinced that they were authentic photos.
00:24:04
Speaker
Which I love. I know. Mom just was fully bought in. And at that time too, so Frances was nine, but she had like a pen pal or like a friend back in South Africa that she sent the photos to and said, it's so funny. I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there. So she was like continuing, you know, she was continuing to send out these photos of the fairies.
00:24:33
Speaker
And then the photographs became public in mid-1919. So Elsie's mother went to a meeting and it was the Theosophical Society in Bradford. So the lecture that evening was on fairy life and at the end the mom, Polly Wright, showed the photographs to the speaker.
00:24:54
Speaker
And the speaker loves them. And so they were displayed at the society's annual conference in Harrogate. That was a few months later. And there they came to the attention of Edward Gardner. So he was like a leading member of this society. I just like, it's crazy to me that like all these people were just like, okay, they're real. Like immediately just like fairies are real. These are real photographs.
00:25:18
Speaker
Yeah, I guess so like photography hadn't been around it like is it is it something to do with like the magic of photography and be like Oh, what's a photo? So like obviously it's I think so and I think the girls I mean I'll get into it a little bit later, but I think they had just done such a good job of setting it up and I think these people like I think it obviously is like a little bit of like a
00:25:42
Speaker
the people that believed wanted to believe in fairies already. It's not skeptics that are looking at these photos and saying fairies are real. So Edward Gardner just felt that these photos were like, so he basically believed that evolution is like
00:25:59
Speaker
you know, continuing our road to perfection. And he really felt like the fairies were like proof that like there was another step beyond humans in evolution, which again, feels like a really bold jump to me. Big leap. Big leap. So he sent the prince to Harold Snelling, who is a photography expert who said that they were unfaked photos, they weren't card or paper models.
00:26:25
Speaker
He didn't straight up say they were fairies, but he just said like the photo is legit. They took a photo of what was in front of them. So at this point, Edward Gardner started using the photos at all of his lectures moving forward. And then you might know this name. So Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who I think is most famous for Sherlock Holmes. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God.
00:26:51
Speaker
Yeah, so he's most famous for Sherlock Holmes for writing Sherlock Holmes. So he found out about the photographs from Edward Gardner. So he had actually been commissioned by the Strand magazine to write an article about fairies for their Christmas issue. So he got Elsie's contact information. He asked to use the photos in the article in the magazine.
00:27:13
Speaker
and Elsie's father gave permission, but he refused payment because he said if they're actually photos of fairies, I think taking money will soil the photos, which I'm like, I don't know. Superstition. Yes. I feel like I would take the money, but anyway.
00:27:33
Speaker
So Gardner and Doyle brought the photos to Kodak, which we all know is still a brand that's around. It was a photo company at the time, is still now. And they saw the photos and said it's, you know,
00:27:47
Speaker
We're not going to issue a certificate of authenticity, which is what they wanted them to do. They said there's no sign that the photo is fake, but they just didn't want to say that it was a real photo. Another photographic company at the time also ruled that there was evidence of it being fake, but they kind of ignored it, it seems.
00:28:09
Speaker
Doyle was planning this big lecture tour in Australia. He sent Gardner, the Theosophical Society guy, back to meet the girls, go to the family's house, see the fairies for yourself.
00:28:24
Speaker
And at that time, he met Elsie's father who actually said, like, I searched their rooms at the time that they took these photographs. I don't, like, I couldn't find anything that was like them building models or coloring or like, you know, like kid things, basically.
00:28:43
Speaker
So Gardner believed the family to be honest. He didn't like see any reason that they were faking it. So Francis had actually moved away but was asked to come back and stay for the summer so that they could get more pictures of the fairies. So very smartly, the girl said that no one could be around for the fairies to come out. And so Gardner kind of took that.
00:29:06
Speaker
and said, okay, I'm going to give you a camera. Or they gave, I guess they took two of Gardner's cameras. They waited for like their mom to go to like her sister's house. And they eventually took several photos. So two that showed fairies, which I also think is so smart on the girls side. Like they had like five photos, but only two had fairies in them. Those are geniuses.
00:29:34
Speaker
So in the first one, Frances and it's called Frances and the Leaping Fairy. So she's kind of shown in profile with a winged fairy close by her nose. Then the second one has a fairy either kind of like it's like hovering or like tiptoeing on a branch and offering LC a flower. We'll put all these pictures up on our Instagram so you can look at them too. I'm literally googling them as you're saying them because I just want to. Yeah, they're so beautiful. It feels like
00:30:04
Speaker
fairies. I want to get printed for my house. Yes, I felt the same way. Can we do that? I love it. We should. We really should. Yeah, so the second one. Oh, no, I talked about the pictures.
00:30:17
Speaker
So two days later, the girls took the last picture, which is fairies and their sun bath. And that's like the most interesting one to me because the girls aren't in it. It's just the fairies. It's very cool. But it looks mostly like, I don't know, it's like the most vague and sort of artsy one to me. Did you find it? Oh, yeah. It's very cool. So the plates were packed. The photos, basically the photos were packed.
00:30:45
Speaker
sent to Gardner in London and he wrote a thrilled telegram to Doyle in Australia and was like, we got more photos. So the first two photos, oh, I guess the original photos were published as I said earlier, like for the Christmas issue of the strand. It had different names for the girls, a different last name for the family so that they wouldn't be like tracked down or associated with it.
Revelation of the Cottingley Hoax
00:31:12
Speaker
And there were mixed receptions to the photos. Some people believe they were real, others were just like delighted, but are like, these are fake. And then others were like, this is a straight up scam. And they're, you know, taking advantage of people.
00:31:27
Speaker
So Doyle used the later photographs in another article of the Strand where he described like other accounts of the fairy sightings. And then he later used this article as the foundation for his 1922 book, The Coming of the Fairies. So he was like pretty much, you know, profiting about this. So Gardner made a final visit to Cottingley in August 1921. This time he brought with him a cultist Jeffrey Hodson.
00:31:57
Speaker
The girls showed them around and they said, we don't see any fairies and there were no photographs.
00:32:04
Speaker
But weirdly enough, the occultist Jeffrey said he saw fairies everywhere and took a lot of notes on what he saw. So he came back with a bunch of notes. I don't think anything really came of what he said he saw. But eventually people kind of lost interest. It sort of died down in the media. The women got married. They moved away.
00:32:29
Speaker
And then in 1966, Elsie was tracked down by the Daily Express newspaper. And she said that she felt the fairies were figments of her imagination, but that they had somehow managed to photograph her thoughts, which I kind of love. Unlike, I mean, keep the magic. She was like, maybe it was fake, but we just took photographs and my thoughts happened to be on the picture.
00:32:54
Speaker
So they continue to kind of like dance around the subject whenever people ask them as adults. And then in 1978, it was kind of like a turning point, I guess, James Randi.
00:33:08
Speaker
James Randi was a magician and a skeptic and was obsessed with outing people who were trying to get away with fake things like this. He found a picture in a children's book called Princess Mary's Gift Book, which had been published in 1914, which if you'll remember is like three years before they took these pictures.
00:33:31
Speaker
So that was kind of like a, you know, a moment of like, okay, maybe this was a fake. And then in 1983, the cousins finally admitted in an article published by the magazine, the unexplained that the photographs had been faked. But they did maintain that they had really seen fairies.
00:33:51
Speaker
which I also kind of love, but Elsie admitted to copying illustrations of the dancing girls from the book. She said she just like basically drew, you know, I think traced basically the pictures of the, of the fairies from the children's book, but they were just dancing girls in the children's book. So she drew wings on them. Wow.
00:34:14
Speaker
Yes. Sorry. I mean, also, she was so little how she's such an artist. I know. So Elsie is actually the older one. So she was 16. But still, oh, okay. Well, yeah, still, it's still impressive. But she so they like cut out the cardboard figures.
00:34:30
Speaker
cut the figures out of cardboard and then supported them with hat pins and then got rid of all the fairies and all the evidence after they had taken the photos. When you look at the pictures, it's still an incredible feat. Yeah, it really is.
00:34:51
Speaker
So, interestingly, Frances insisted that the last photo that they took of the series, the one that I said was like the most artsy and kind of interesting one, she said that they had nothing prepared and they saw the fairies building up in the grasses and caught a photograph.
00:35:08
Speaker
Until Francis died, she said that last photograph was real, which I also kind of love. But in a 1985 interview on a TV show, Elsie said that like, you know, basically what happened was they were just playing a prank on their parents. Like they were just, you know, having fun as little kids do. And then kind of as it snowballed, they just got too embarrassed to admit that it was real. Once Arthur Conan Doyle got involved, like he's the man that wrote Sherlock Holmes, they said like they just felt like
00:35:38
Speaker
they couldn't admit it. Which I can totally see, right? I feel like I would never as a child ever think that people would believe that those were real, even if you did take such beautiful pictures. And so it's kind of great. It doesn't sound like at least from what I could tell that either of the women really felt bad or felt like
00:36:03
Speaker
you know, any guilt about it. Like they just, they weren't like thinking of themselves as frauds because they just like were two girls having fun and didn't expect it to like grow to that level.
00:36:14
Speaker
And Francis did pass away in 1986 and Elsie in 1988. But I just think it's like the coolest story. I mean, we love like any stories where it's like two like little girls or two women just like, you know, causing like such a commotion. Did you cover it? The one with the girls that were saying they were psychic and they would like snap with their toes. That was you. Yeah.
00:36:41
Speaker
I think the history of seances or something like that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, that was also like two girls. But anyways, yeah, I love that. And I mean, for me, because I used to watch that movie so much, now I like have to go watch it again. You just brought back such a core youth memory for me.
00:36:57
Speaker
Now I'm like, I shouldn't have done it. You should have covered it. It means so much to you. No, it's fine. It's beautiful. I knew it was based on a true story, but I don't remember the specifics of the movie or the specifics of the historical context. So this was great.
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah, it's just it's a cool story and I love that Arthur Conan Doyle was involved and like that they just got to like that level I think it's just so cool and honestly like yeah The photos are just impressive and I feel this way whenever you find out like how psychics do things or magicians or mediums or any of that where I'm like Honestly, you are so skilled you did like it is magic. I am impressed. I
00:37:39
Speaker
I'm still impressed either way. Exactly. But yes, that's the Coddingly fairies. And definitely everybody go listen to the criminal episode because they have like some interesting interviews and other tidbits too. Amazing. I loved that. All right. Well, everyone, that was your sort of cottage core episode. And we hope you have some sweet, sweet nightmares. Bye.