The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright (1901–1988) and Frances Griffiths (1907–1986), two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 9. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, others believed that they had been faked.
Adrian Malcolm Conan Doyle was the youngest son of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his second wife Jean, Lady Doyle or Lady Conan Doyle. He had two siblings, sister Jean Conan Doyle and brother Denis, as well as two half-siblings, sister Mary and brother Kingsley.
Charles B. G. Sturridge is an English director and screenwriter. He is the recipient of a BAFTA Children's Award and four BAFTA TV Awards. He has also been nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards.
"The Adventure of the Dancing Men" is a Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as one of 13 stories in the cycle published as The Return of Sherlock Holmes in 1905. It was first published in The Strand Magazine in the United Kingdom in December 1903, and in Collier's in the United States on 5 December 1903.
Henry de Vere Stacpoole was an Irish author. His 1908 romance novel The Blue Lagoon has been adapted into multiple films. He published using his own name and sometimes the pseudonym Tyler de Saix.
Clive Merrison is a Welsh actor of film, television, stage and radio. He trained at Rose Bruford College. He is best known for his long running BBC Radio portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, having played the part in all 64 episodes of the 1989–1998 series of Sherlock Holmes dramatisations, and all 16 episodes of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (2002–2010).
Phoebe Sarah Nicholls is an English film, television, and stage actress. She is known for her roles as Cordelia Flyte in Brideshead Revisited and as the mother of John Merrick in The Elephant Man.
Photographing Fairies is a 1997 British fantasy film based on Steve Szilagyi's 1992 novel Photographing Fairies. The film explores some of the themes of folklore, such as possession, paganism, animism, hallucinogens, parapsychology and fairies. It was inspired by the Cottingley Fairies hoax, and was released in the United Kingdom on 19 September 1997.
A Little Princess is a 1995 American fantasy drama film directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Loosely based upon the 1905 novel A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the film stars Eleanor Bron, Liam Cunningham, Liesel Matthews, Vanessa Lee Chester, Rusty Schwimmer, Arthur Malet, and Errol Sitahal. Its plot, heavily influenced by the 1939 cinematic version, focuses on a young girl who is relegated to a life of servitude at a New York boarding school after receiving news that her father was killed in combat.
Cottingley is a suburban village within the City of Bradford district in West Yorkshire, England between Shipley and Bingley. It is known for the Cottingley Fairies, which appeared in a series of photographs taken there during the early 20th century.
"Small Worlds" is the fifth episode of the first series of the British science fiction television series Torchwood, which was originally broadcast on the digital television channel BBC Three on 12 November 2006.
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are milestones in the field of crime fiction.
The Fairy Investigation Society was a semi-secret occult group devoted to collecting evidence and information about the existence of fairies and to organize documented instances of fairy sightings. The society was founded in Britain in 1927 by Capt. Sir Quintin Craufurd, MBE and the artist Bernard Sleigh.
Geoffrey Crawley was a photographic expert and journalist, and was the editor in chief of British Journal of Photography for two decades. He was noted for exposing the photographs of the Cottingley Fairies taken in the early 20th century as a hoax.
The Man from Beyond is a 1922 American silent mystery film starring Harry Houdini as a man found frozen in arctic ice who is brought back to life.
Daniel Stashower is an American author and editor of mystery fiction and historical nonfiction. He lives in Maryland.
Photographing Fairies is a novel by Steve Szilagyi. Taking place in the 1920s, the novel is loosely based on the story of the Cottingley Fairies and includes Arthur Conan Doyle as a minor character. The story dwells on themes such as magic, human sexuality, photography, and human perception.
The Cottingley Secret is a 2017 fantasy novel written by British novelist Hazel Gaynor, in which she retells the story behind the Cottingley fairies from 1917. This novel intermingles the real events that occurred in 1917 with a fictional story set in 2017. The Cottingley Fairies were made famous through a series of photographs taken from 1917 to 1921 by two young girls of nine and sixteen years old—Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright—in Cottingley, England. The story became renowned worldwide mainly because of the intervention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who took particular interest on the fairy photographs and tale. The photographs, which depict the two girls in the company of fairies, were originally published in Doyle's article written in 1920 for Strand Magazine, but can be found in other articles as well since the matter of their copyright has been largely disputed.
Cottingley Town Hall is a municipal building in Main Street in Cottingley, West Yorkshire, England. The building, which was used as a church and a community centre, is a Grade II listed building.
The Cottingley Cuckoo is an urban fantasy and horror novel by A. J. Elwood, pen name of English writer Alison Littlewood. It was first published in the United Kingdom in April 2021 by Titan Books. The book was inspired by the 1920 Cottingley fairy photographs, and is about Rose, a caregiver at the Sunnyside Care Home in the 2020s who is shown letters by a resident that were written in the 1920s soon after the fairy photographs were published. In the letters, the author claims to have also seen fairies, and maintains that he has proof of their existence.
