The Fifth Fairy

In 1917, two young girls apparently managed to take photographs of garden fairies. Using a borrowed camera, they took five photos in the woods behind the family house.

The Cottingley fairies, as they were known, caused quite a stir when people heard about this "photographic proof" that fairies exist. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, wrote an article for a leading magazine claiming that they were authentic.

In the 1980s the girls, who were by now old ladies, admitted that four of the pictures were fakes. But one of the girls claimed right up to her death that the fifth photo was, in fact, genuine. In an interview, she said:

"It was a wet afternoon and we were just mooching about with our camera ... I saw these fairies building up in the grasses and just aimed the camera and took a photograph."

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