Fairy Tale

entire civilizations over the years. That's why archaeologists travel all over the world trying to fill in the missing pages of the historical record, one dig site at a time. In two thousand four, a new dig site was unearthed, and in the most unusual of places, Marian Gary's backyard. Gary lived in buck Haven, a small town in Fife on the eastern coast of Scotland, residing along the North Sea,

just across from Norway and the Netherlands. It wasn't completely out of the question for Vikings to have landed along Scottish shores hundreds of years earlier. In fact, from the eighth to the fifteen centuries, Vikings and Norwegians did colonize parts of Scotland. This period of time is known as Scandinavian Scotland, and there is evidence of their presence still

around today. For example, on the island known as the Brof of birth Say, there are archaeological remains of an entire Norse village, but unfortunately we know very little about this period. Written records were stolen or destroyed, and the records that do exist tend to be biased depending on which culture wrote them. English or Irish. Carved ruins are still present, though having been etched into large stones and

rocks that have lasted to this day. What remains, though, is often found in remote areas of Scotland or on uninhabited islands, areas easily preserved due to lack of population and construction activity. Nobody, including Mary and Gary, would have imagined finding a settlement right in her backyard. Her home had been built in the nineteen thirties, and surely someone

would have found something when the foundation was poured. But while she was digging in her garden in the summer of two thousand four, Gary uncovered smooth stones beneath the soil. Stones she hadn't put there in the first place. She had recently watched the television program about valuable artifacts discovered in public places and believed these stones were evidence that she had also found something valuable herself, so she reached out to her local town council for their advice, and

they contacted chief archaeologist Douglas Spears. Spears came to the house and examined the stones. He believed Gary was in fact sitting on a major historical discovery. He called in his team, who immediately trucked in specialized equipment as they took over her backyard and established the dig site. As they worked, they uncovered more stones, as well as a

few odd artifacts. The team didn't think too much of them, though, considering this was someone's function in backyard, a digging tool or gardening glove would be an expected thing to find in such a location. However, Spears and his team didn't find a digging tool or a glove. What they found instead was much stranger than that. One item was a child's gas mask from World War Two. They also found an old television remote control, yet there had been no

TV out there at the time. Still, they kept digging, hoping defined Viking tools or the foundation of some ancient villagers home, something to justify the months they'd spent tearing up this poor woman's backyard, and by January. They've done it. After months of toiling at Marian Gary's house in buck Haven, Spears had in fact made a discovery. All the telltale signs were there, the antiquated construction techniques, the depth at which the stones had been found, as well as the

sheer size of the area. Marian Gary's garden had been sitting on top of a patio, a sunken patio to be exact, one that had been laid down in the nineteen forties. Spears and the other archaeologists had been so obsessed with the possibility of uncovering an ancient Viking settlement that they ignored all the evidence that what they had spent months unearthing had been nothing more than a place

to enjoy a cold glass of lemonade. Spears felt like a fool for wasting all that time, but Marian thankfully wasn't too upset by all of it. After all, she now had a new backyard restoration project with which to occupy herself, all because she had left no stone unturned. It's difficult to believe in things we cannot see. I'm sure there are exceptions, like gravity or the wind, but we can anchor our belief in them on the way

that they affect the world around us. Other things, though, are a lot more difficult to believe in, unless, of course, we managed to capture them on film. Elsie and Francis were cousins. Francis and her mother had come to Cottingly, a small village in northern England, to live with Francis's aunt in nineteen seventeen. Elsie was a bit older than her nine year old cousin, but the two often played

together in a stream close to the property. When the girls returned to the house, they usually came back wet and with muddy feet. However, they also came back with the reason for their frequent trips to the water. They were playing with the fairies. Their mothers didn't believe them, of course, but Elsie was determined to show them the truth. With her father's camera in hand, the girls trudged back down to the stream. Half an hour later, they returned

with that proof. Elsie gave her father back his camera and he developed the photographic plate in his private dark room. The photo depicted Francis half hidden behind a bush as four fairies hovered in the foreground. Elsie's father thought it was a joke. Another photo was taken a few months later, and this time Elsie was in front of the camera and she had her hand extended to a gnome nor

more than a foot tall. Her father still wrote the photograph office at prank, but her mother, Polly, believed them to be true. Fairies, you see, were a hot topic back then, as was the field of occultism. Polly attended a meeting in nineteen nineteen of the Theosophical Society, which believed in a secretive group of spiritual masters who were more evolved than everyone else. These masters were smarter, lived longer,

and could even read minds. The meeting that Polly attended was about fairy life, and after it was over, she showed her daughter's photos to the speaker. From there, they quickly went public. They were viewed as proof of the girl's higher evolution, since they had manifested the fairies to such a degree that they could be photographed by a

common camera. One of the leaders of the Theosophical Society, Edward Gardner, sent both the photos and the original photographic plates to an expert who concluded that they were indeed authentic. The fair's were not paper cutouts, as Elsie's father had originally assumed. Gardner continued to use the photographs in his

talks and sold prints of them in his lectures. Eventually they were noticed by another theosophist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the celebrated author behind the most famous detective in the world, Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was working on a piece about fairies for the Strand magazine. When he learned of the photographs, He wrote to Elsie and her father and offered to pay for use of them in his article. Her father it was only too happy to oblige, but refused to

accept payments. He believed the photos should remain pure or the benefits of the public. Of course, the photos were subjected to more scrutiny, this time under the expert eye of the Kodak company, who determined that they had not been doctored. However, there was no way to determine whether

the fairies posing with Francis were real. Other experts attempted to debunk the photos as fake, but Gardner shrugged them off as biased opinions by nonbelievers, and en twenty Gardner went to visit the Right family Incottingly for definitive proof using his own cameras. He left the cameras, as well as two dozen glass plates with Elsie and Francis in order for the fairies to come out for their pictures.

Though the girls had to be alone, so Elsie's mother went to her sister's house for tea while Elsie and Francis took more photographs in the garden. One picture depicted a fairy practically leaping towards Francis's nose, while another had a fairy presenting Elsie with a flower. The glass plates from a camera were then packed up and sent back to Mr Gardner, who wrote to Doyle with some good news.

Those new photos were eventually published as part of Doyle's article, and the public was unsure of how to take them. Some believe them to be real, but most laughed, claiming the girls had pulled a fast one on Doyle and Gardner. Still, there was something to be said for the innocence of two children who had not lost their sense of wonder as they had grown older. It didn't take long for

the hype surrounding the Cottingly fairies to die down. For many years, Francis and Elsie fell out of the public eye, and then in nineteen sixty six, the Daily Expressed newspaper in England interviewed Elsie about the photos. She said it was possible that they've been nothing but her imagination run a muck, but there was also a chance that they

were real. Twenty years later, the girls came clean. In an article for the Paranormal magazine that Unexplained, Elsie and Francis confessed that they actually had seen fairies down by the streaming coddingly, but the photographs have been faked. The fairies had been nothing more than paper cutouts. After they took the photos, they tossed the evidence of their deception into the water. But there was one photo of the

women disagreed on. It was the fifth and final picture taken, titled Fairies and Their sun Bath, in which one fairy enjoys the morning sunshine while the other struggles to wake up from her peaceful slumber. Neither Elsie nor Francis are anywhere in the photo, only the two fairies. Elsie believed it to be a fake, just like the others, but Francis maintained until her death in nineteen eighty six that

the photograph had been real. Her belief was so strong that she instilled it in her daughter, who also went on television attesting to the authenticity of the photo that her mother had taken. For Elsie Rights and Francis Griffith's their fairy photos became a worldwide phenomenon, inspiring several books and films, turning their story into a real life fairy tale. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet

of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious one