For his first step, he consulted experts at the London offices of the George Eastman Kodak Company. To his credit, Conan Doyle made what was (to him) a thorough, scientific, step- by- step investigation of the “fairy” photographs. Mistake Number One: Misinterpreting the Evidence How could the creator of the world’s most famous, least-fool-able detective have convinced himself that “fairy” photographs were real? Let us proceed, Holmes-like, to examine the question. The great man’s claim that fairies –real fairies – had been photographed in the north of England by two young girls was greeted with wonder, but unfortunately for Conan Doyle, most of it was of the “what can he be thinking?” variety. CONAN DOYLE.” The Strand’s readership was well acquainted with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle most of his wildly popular Sherlock Holmes stories had appeared for the first time in its pages. In the winter of 1920, readers of the popular British magazine the Strand found a curious headline on the cover of their Christmas issues. This article, Sir Arthur and the Fairies, was originally published in The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Mary Losure explores how the creator of Sherlock Holmes became convinced that the ‘fairy photographs’ taken by two girls from Yorkshire were real.

In the spring of 1920, at the beginning of a growing fascination with spiritualism brought on by the death of his son and brother in WWI, Arthur Conan Doyle took up the case of the Cottingley Fairies. Spirit photograph of Arthur Conan Doyle taken by the ‘spirit photographer’ Ada Deane in 1922, the same year in which Conan Doyle’s The Coming of the Fairies was published / Wikimedia Commons

The fairy ring by mary losure