Fake News: Disinformation, Deception, and Magical Thinking Over Time

In Too Deep

Elsie and Frances both went on to marry and live abroad for several years before settling back in Britain. Reporters managed to track down Elsie in 1966. When asked about the fairies, she referred to them as "figments of our imagination" and declined to say whether the photos were authentic. Five years later, at the age of seventy, she maintained the same coyness during an interview on the BBC's Nationwide program. Elsie and Frances appeared together on a Yorkshire Television program in 1976, during which they traveled back to Cottingley and continued to evade direct questions about the fairies.

In 1983, Frances finally told a reporter from The London Times that the fairies had been cutouts traced from illustrations of the poem "A Spell for a Fairy" in Princess Mary's Gift Book, an anthology published in 1914. After more than sixty years, she had finally had enough, stating, "I hated those photographs and cringed every time I saw them. I thought it was a joke, but everyone else kept it going." Elsie confirmed her story. Once their hoax had spread, they felt trapped by it and didn't want to embarrass anyone, particularly Conan Doyle.


Curiously, Frances maintained until her death in 1986 that she really had seen fairies as a child, and that while the first four photos were fabricated, the fifth and final photo had been real. Elsie claimed that they fabricated all five photos and that she, personally, had never believed fairies were real. Near the end of her life in 1988, Elsie summed up the entire affair: "The joke was only meant to last two hours, and it lasted seventy years."

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