Tag: cottingley

Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, in his later years became attracted to spiritualism and occult topics. This was after the death of his son Raymond during World War I. While researching the topic of fairies, some photographs from a working-class family in rural Yorkshire were brought to Doyle’s attention by a Theosophist friend. These photographs appeared to show diminutive fairies cavorting in the presence of humans, specifically two teenage girls, Elsie and Frances. They had taken the photographs by themselves, and there were no overt signs that the negatives had been tampered with. Doyle championed the photographs, and in the process destroyed his reputation; which is probably why this book, out of all of the Doyle corpus, has not been put into etext until now. The Coming of the Fairies was possibly a bigger disappointment for Doyle fans than when he killed off Sherlock Holmes.