In the summer of 1917, two girls in Yorkshire kept coming home with wet feet and invented a wild excuse: they’d been by the stream watching fairies. To prove it, they borrowed a camera. What started as a childish prank ended up fooling one of the greatest literary minds of the 20th century.

This episode unpacks the Cottingley fairies hoax, five photographs taken by cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths that became a global sensation. It’s less a story about fake photos than a master class in human psychology, early photographic manipulation, and how desperately grieving adults wanted to believe in the supernatural.

• Why Elsie’s father, an amateur photographer, instantly dismissed the figures as cardboard cutouts but his wife believed them
• How a post-WWI surge in spiritualism set the stage, and how the photos reached Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a 1920 Strand Magazine article
• The experts who pushed back: Kodak refused to certify them, Ilford found evidence of faking, and a physicist questioned the fairies’ Parisian hairstyles
• The simple method finally confessed in 1983: cutouts copied from a 1914 gift book, propped up with hatpins, then thrown in the stream
• Why Frances insisted to her death that the fifth photo was real, and the double-exposure theory that explains her genuine false memory