The Cottingley Fairies with Chelsey Weber-Smith

This week, Sarah tells her favorite kind of story to American Hysteria’s Chelsey Weber-Smith: one where two girls hoaxed the world without trying very hard.

You can find Chelsey + American Hysteria online here.

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Transcript

Sarah: And look, are we sure that the fairies don't follow human fashion trends? No, we're not sure. That could have happened. But why would they though? They're fairies.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, I'm Sarah Marshall and today we are talking about fairies. It took us long enough. More specifically, we are talking about the Cottingley Fairies. And we are talking about them with my favorite spiritualist, Chelsey Weber-Smith. This is an unusual episode for us in that not too many horrible things happen with the exception of World War I, and we had a really fun time making it for you.

Another thing I had a fun time making for you is our current bonus episode, Flowers in the Attic with Carmen Maria Machado, because I like talking about paperbacks, and so does she. And so if you want Patreon or Apple+ subscriptions, head on over there. And on Patreon we are currently having a very complicated voting process for our next paperback book club with Carmen. So if you remember, get in there and throw out some ideas. 

And that is it. Have a great time with this episode. We had such a good time making it. Have a great rest of your summer. Eat something delicious today. Have some corn. And if you don't like corn, have the thing you like.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where inevitably we are talking about fairies. With me today is Chelsey Weber-Smith. Hello, Chelsey. 

Chelsey: Famously a fairy myself. Hello, Sarah. 

Sarah: Before we get into it, I was very much a fairy kid. I was a very fanciful, high fantasy kind of a kid and fairies slotted right into that. And also anything where you could add lace unnecessarily to something I was into as an adolescent. And I think that the story we're talking about makes so much more sense when we also start off with the understanding that this takes place in England, primarily between 1917 and 1920. And that this is a time when the Industrial Revolution has recently changed within a generation, the way Millions of people live their daily lives, and we have also just seen World War I.

Chelsey: Yeah. And we're on the precipice of what I think would be the first sexual revolution of the ‘20s. So we're in a very charged moment in the history of tragedy, but also possibility, and it's an intense time in history.

Sarah: Yeah. And it's a time when modernity, I think, is driving out the mythology of the past and the ways of life people have when you think about people who, maybe for as many generations back as anyone can remember, have lived in the country, in villages close to the land, working if not in farming, then with the land in some capacity, being part of nature. And then the exodus to cities that happens partly because of the jobs created by the advent of factory labor as the force that it became in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I think it makes total sense for fairies to capture the nation at a time like that. 

I'll start by setting the scene and just telling you the basics, which is that in the village of Cottingley in West Yorkshire, there are two girls named Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. This is 1917. Elsie is 16. Frances is 9, 9 and turns 10 that year. And she has just come to stay with her cousin, Elsie, after growing up in South Africa, and then her father going to fight in World War I in France. And so she and her mother have come to stay with their family, and Frances hasn't grown up in England. And there's this big age gap between the girls, but they seem to love to play together. And Frances loves to play down by the beck, which is Yorkshire for creek. 

So Frances loves to play in the beck, and so one day when her mother is scolding her for coming back with her shoes all wet and dirty and asking her why she's going to the bottom of the garden, she says, I go to see the fairies. So she and her older cousin, because there's nothing more exciting than an older cousin. 

Chelsey: God, truly. The coolest people on planet earth.

Sarah: Yeah, older cousins. She and Elsie decide that they're going to take a photograph of the fairies to prove to the adults that the fairies are real. And then the adults won't bother them anymore and it'll serve them right. It'll be a petty revenge. And then once the adults are like, oh my God, I should never have doubted you. They'll be like, aha, we tricked you. Those aren't fairies. We're clever. And that's the plan. 

Chelsey: I love that plan. 

Sarah: Get them. And Elsie's father has a camera, so he allows them to take it down to the beck to get a picture of the fairies.

Chelsey: Okay, so the dad's okay with this plan? 

Sarah: Yeah, he's like, take my camera, which shows a high degree of trust, really. 

Chelsey: All right, cool, dad. Okay. 

Sarah: And so they come back within the hour. And he develops the photo, and this is what he sees.

Chelsey: Wow. Wow, they're good. They're good. Obviously, I can tell very quickly that this is faked, but... it’s good.

Sarah: Yeah, what do you see? What does it look like? 

Chelsey: I'm not sure which girl this is. Do you know?

Sarah:  So that's Frances. 

Chelsey: So we see Frances and she's got some flowers and a crown on her head and she's resting her face on her hand.

Sarah: It's a really good picture of her. It's shocking to see someone take a flattering photo in 1917. I guess they were getting better at it. 

Chelsey: Exactly. She's there. And then in front of her are four fairies caught in a moment of merriment, I would say. One of them is playing a tiny little horn of some kind, and the rest seem to be dancing. And I think on the left-hand side, there might be some kind of waterfall. It's a beautiful picture, for sure. 

Sarah: I think that Elsie is the photographer here, you can see good composition at play. She was also an accomplished artist and did a lot of watercolors, which as you can imagine, might come into play later in the story. Something that people who comment on these photos, specifically who believe them to be real, talk about a lot is the idea that obviously children have the ability to see fairies and various wee folk. And then as we get older, we lose that ability. And one of the arguments people make is that photography being this relatively new medium, although it's been around for a long time, it's making a lot of technological advances that makes it a lot more accessible. 

Chelsey: Yeah. And getting it in the hands of normal people. Yeah. 

Sarah: There might be something about the fact that children are taking these photos that is making the fairies photographable when an adult couldn't do that.

Chelsey: Okay, that makes sense. 

Sarah: As this is happening, this is the era of World War One, this is also the era of the spiritualist movement. I would love for you to talk about that. 

Chelsey: Yeah, absolutely.  There's so much there. And I guess a good place to start would be with photography. Photography originally came about after the Civil War, and it had so much to do with the fact that we were used to caring for and preparing our deceased loved ones for death and then for their funeral, family members dressing the dead, cleaning the dead, doing everything for them. And that was very much our American ritual, right? 

And so when the people we loved died far away on a battlefield it was an extremely devastating severing of family and of that ritual and then a confusing new frontier in death. So this sort of came about with the desire to preserve photos and have mementos of people so that if they died or had died, they would be able to keep that image. Very quickly the paranormal entered this medium, which isn't surprising, right? If we're talking about the people we love being gone, we don't want them to be gone. We miss them. We want them to come back.

Sarah: I think it's possible for a lot of people to spend their entire lives not particularly caring about the idea of ghosts or spirits and then lose someone they care about and suddenly are more open to the idea.

Chelsey: Oh absolutely. Quite quickly, those who saw money in this bereavement and understood the early mechanics of photography, not unlike our fairy girls would, eventually, they started to create spirit photography. And what that was is using double exposure to create a ghost impression of your deceased loved one standing beside you or doing something that they loved in a photo with you, so they have this ghost like image, this impression behind you. I think everyone can probably imagine what that would look like. 

Sarah: Especially if you grew up in the late 90s watching History Channel specials narrated by Zelda Rubinstein. 

Chelsey: Exactly. Exactly. Some people thought that this was just a nice memento. Other people believed that this was real. And that's because people who were making money off these, like the Hucksters who saw the value in this, would promise that your loved one would show up in the image. And, they wouldn't have any pictures, so it was like, oh yeah, you’ll see. But what they would do sometimes is actually break into the houses of the people who had ordered those portraits to be made and then use that as a double exposure. And then people would be like, oh my God, there he is, or there she is. And it would provide them obviously with some comfort and they were willing to shell out a lot of money to do that. 

Sarah: Wow. Which is also a horrible thing to do, but really above and beyond in terms of customer service. And then, of course, you can only see your loved one doing something they've already done in a photo, but whatever.

Chelsey: Yeah, but whatever. But now you don't have that photo anymore, so you can't. prove it.

Sarah: That's right. You can't compare it to anything. 

Chelsey: Mary Todd Lincoln is the one who has the most famous example of this phenomenon. She commissioned a portrait of herself after her husband died. So you get to see Abraham Lincoln being lurched behind her. I think it's interesting to note that Mary Todd Lincoln was already so primed for this because she was really into the spiritualist movement and that had a lot to do with her son, Willie, dying when both of them were living in the White House and she started to do seances to try to contact him. So I think that it makes sense that she would be into this and a believer in spirit photography. 

Sarah: Yeah, and then without getting too off course, this of course does remind me how you have talked on American Hysteria about Nancy Reagan, astrology believer, and how Nancy Reagan is by no means the first First Lady to have an astrologer helping to plan what the President does. And is that Harding? We know that was going on? 

Chelsey: Yeah, the farthest back after Mary Todd Lincoln and her seances was Florence Harding. And she was into seances and astrology. And this was in the early 1920s, late teens, early 1920s.

Sarah: So about the same period actually. In England they've got fairies. to deal with and in the U. S. we've got our second first lady to possibly have seances at the White House. 

Chelsey: And of course we can't disclude Nixon and Strom Thurmond, but that's a tale for another time.

Sarah: Oh my God. Is it ever? I don't know. I don't want to imply that I'm laughing at Mary Todd Lincoln, I'm really not. I think it's clearly relevant that at least in the case of Mary Todd Lincoln and Nancy Reagan, both of these focus on the supernatural, although very few people today would call horoscopes supernatural, following a serious trauma. And in Nancy Reagan's case, it was after Reagan was nearly assassinated. 

And the way she started working with her astrologer was that her astrologer, Joan, said, I could have prevented that. Nancy was like, Oh, okay, great. Let's do it. Let's make sure that nobody tries to shoot the president, not thinking through the reality that if a random woman in San Francisco knows the president's schedule intimately, then could be compromised. 

Chelsey: Could be a national security risk all its own. I don't know. I guess I also would compare the way I talk about astrology to the way I feel like people in this story are talking about fairies because do I really think that where the planets were when I was born controls my personality? When you put it that way, it sounds pretty illogical. But then it's something that is a way that we organize socially, we get to like, when we're dating someone who's throwing up red flags, we get to be like they're a cancer. 

Chelsey: Of course they're cry-assing around. What I think is so interesting about that, I like astrology, but like you, it's not something I subscribe to as a science. But there is at least some evidence that the seasons that you are born in can affect your personality.  I think that makes sense.

Sarah: Which makes so much sense, right, it’s happening in the atmosphere in which we live every day. 

Chelsey: Exactly. And so I think that lends at least a little bit of credence to the idea, though, it wouldn't have much to do with the celestial placements.

Sarah: And even if you take the position, as I'm sure many people would, that there's absolutely nothing there scientifically, it still is very powerful folklore that has been kept alive for so long that clearly it's serving us in some way. You and I both cover a lot of dangerous religious extremism, mostly Christian on this show.

Chelsey: We get into some bad boy new agers, too.

Sarah: Yeah. The fact that a superstitious belief is serving people or answering some kind of hunger they need doesn't mean that it's affecting them positively, but I feel like one of the themes of the story and the spiritualist movement and a lot that you research is the question of if something is definitely not real, in any scientific sense, any provable way, then why is it such a powerful belief for humans, and why is it such a big part of our culture?

Chelsey: I think that ritual and belief, whatever that may be, which is obviously different across culture and time, acts as a community fusion tool when we are lacking that our culture has been in a lot of ways since the scientific revolution in which belief is no longer the value. We've created a religion out of science, certainly, but it lacks mythology in a lot of ways. And I think it lacks a connection to ancestors and it lacks a connection to God, whatever the idea of God is, some sort of figure that has our fate in its hand, which is, of course, a comforting thing in a lot of ways, maybe terrifying too. 

But I think when we're lacking something like that, as so many of us are coming out of Christian tradition in this country, we are trying to build within our communities, which are no longer localized groups that are working together, but groups spread across the country and world who share some sort of common trait. I'd say that queerness is one such trait that connects people together, and astrology has become a part of that mythology for us, even if in the back of our heads, we aren't fully believing this thing to be true because, we are scientifically grown in many ways, but we still suspend our disbelief to have that community connection together. I don't think that we really can get by without something like that.

Sarah: Yeah. I don't know, you think about fairies also as maybe representatives of nature who feel that you are able to reason with or at least outwit, right? You know the concept of fairy circles? 

Chelsey: I don't.

Sarah: I feel like I probably actually learned about this from the late 90s masterpiece Fairytale, which is about the Cottingley Fairies, but what this movie presupposes was, what if they were real? I think that was what introduced to my American brain, the idea of if you see a circle of toadstools, you can't step into it because then the fairies will take you away. You'll belong to them. 

Chelsey: I mean, would that be the worst thing? 

Sarah: No, it would be great but to me, such a great example of the way that superstition works in our brains, which is that if we know what to avoid, we know how to keep ourselves safe as well. 

Chelsey: Fairies almost seem like a typical ‘don't go into the woods’ tale to warn children of the dangers of the wilderness which of course probably grew more and more intense as we moved into the industrialized world. There are real dangers in the woods. You get mauled by a bear, but kids tend to not care about getting mauled by a bear as much as they would care about an evil fairy kidnapping them away. 

Sarah: Yeah, right, and that also before you could surveil your children, you needed to invent terrifying stories to get them to do what you asked them to. To the parents' credit, they look at this photo of Frances with the fairies and are like, this is baffling. We don't know how you did this, but we also don't really think those are fairies, so whatever. Their response is basically, huh. 

Chelsey: Is it, we're going to be rich? 

Sarah: That doesn't appear to cross their minds at all. And then actually when the time came to get some money off of licensing the photos, they declined to do so. 

Chelsey: That’s shocking to me. 

Sarah: It is.

Chelsey: Good for them. Good for them. Although also, it would have been okay with me if they did that hustle. 

Sarah: Absolutely. The girls take a second photo, and in this one, I'll let you describe it. This one is of Elsie. 

Chelsey: Oh my god, okay. This is so high school photography class to me. The girl is sitting in a kind of flowing white dress and in a grassy little opening amongst the trees and she's wearing a very, I would say, elven looking hat. She's looking down and a fairy is climbing onto the hem of her dress toward her. And this fairy isn't quite as feminine. It's a little more troll-like, would you say? 

Sarah: Yeah, I think he's a gnome, is what they said. He has this kind of gnarled Rumpelstiltskin face. 

Chelsey: Oh, yeah. Yeah, he's giving Rumpelstiltskin for sure. 

Sarah: And it looks like she's shaking his hand or he's giving her something. I don't know. I wonder too because I think to our modern eyeballs, it seems obvious that is a flat little guy, that's something two dimensional. 

Chelsey: Like a cutout. It looks like a paper cutout. 

Sarah: The dimensionality just doesn't look the same. Also, I don't know, I can chalk that up to confirmation bias. And a lot of people, obviously, at the time who saw this were like, no, that's not a fairy. Come on, you guys. Whenever there's something like the War of the Worlds, which I know we talked about before, where it's like, it fooled everybody. There's kind of nothing when you think about it that fools everybody in a society. It's just that sometimes something can fool a surprising number of people and that's a good enough story. 

Chelsey: And we see that on the internet all the time now, if you want to believe there's a lot you can believe in. 

Sarah: So the response from all the parents, I think, is that's weird, but we're not going to lose sleep over it. And so a couple of years later in 1919, Elsie's mother, Polly, takes the photos to a Theosophical Society meeting. Can you speak to theosophy? 

Chelsey: I probably can't very well. I know it had to do with reincarnation upon death, which was a really new idea and taken from Eastern religions by people like Madame Blavatsky and brought over here and these clubs were started. It had surprising people involved in these clubs, like T.S. Eliot and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I believe. 

Sarah: Yeah, this is one of the new religions that have appeared in the 19th century and kind of in this modernizing world. And as you said, talk about reincarnation and also evolution of human society that we're going to also in this new technological world be able to perceive things that we weren't able to previously.

Chelsey: It's the beginning of the new age, I would say. 

Sarah: Yeah, which might be surprising how early that started, but this is technology and an interest in spirits go together. I would call the period around the Industrial Revolution, the period when the world as we know it now comes into focus. So Elsie's mother takes the photos to the Theosophical Society, people look at them, they're deemed interesting enough to then go up the chain to the annual conference. 

They are found by Edward Gardner, who is like, yes, I love these. And he's fairly powerful in the Theosophical Society and so Gardner gives them to Harold Snelling who is a photographer and someone who has as much expertise as a person can in 1920 in terms of whether something has been faked and what he says is that the photo depicts whatever was in front of it which is neither a confirmation nor a denial. 

What comes up when people are talking about this, throughout the time they're in the limelight, is this idea that it doesn't look like the photography was tampered with. The girls couldn't have tampered with the negative. There's no evidence of there being a double exposure. So therefore, fairies! Which is kind of a classic fallacy in reasoning and also detective work of if it's not the specific thing that we've arbitrarily decided is the only alternative, then it's the thing we think.

Chelsey: Sounds familiar.

Sarah: And there's a psychical researcher, which is just a fun phrase to say, who argues that the girls have gotten a photo of a dance troupe and superimposed it on the original picture of Frances. Which is interesting too, because he's like, oh yeah, those are real people, but it's a double exposure.

Chelsey: Yeah. And they don't look like real people at all. 

Sarah: They look like really flat people. 

Chelsey: People really wanted this to be real. 

Sarah: That's the thing. That I feel is the real story here and so many other ones like this, where you're like, how, why did people believe this? And you're like, because they wanted to. So when you start off wanting to believe it, you'll believe it. And one of the people who believes and who dies believing is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 

Chelsey: Author of such books as Sherlock Holmes. I don't know what the real name of the book is.

Sarah: Yes, author of one million Sherlock Holmes stories and also some novellas. Do you care about Sherlock Holmes? 

Chelsey: I do not care about Sherlock Holmes. 

Sarah: I think that's great. I am not allowed to not care about Sherlock Holmes because my mom loves Sherlock Holmes because Sherlock Holmes is a hottie. He's a creature of pure reason who also does a lot of cocaine. He plays the violin even though he's bad at it.

Chelsey: Which is what you do on cocaine, is play the violin even if you're bad at it. 

Sarah: I have long been fascinated by the fact that the modern detective and the modern serial killer were both born in 1888. They were born holding their little hands because Sherlock Holmes first appears in print in 1888 and Jack the Ripper, the man, the myth, the maybe not just one person appears also in 1888 and it's almost like they needed each other and maybe once the detective was born, we needed the serial killer to give him something to do.

Chelsey: Yeah, that makes sense to me.

Sarah: First of all, I am NOT making fun of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for believing in fairies. One of the really important parts of backstory for this and which the girls were aware of was that he had been very affected, a trend is emerging here. His grief had made him very interested in spiritualism after the death of his son Kingsley during the influenza epidemic in 1918. 

And so Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is as much a famous figure, I think, as Sherlock Holmes at the time, and the thing I find interesting and enduringly about Sherlock Holmes, aside from the fact that these are really good stories, you learn a lot about reasoning they're fun to read, Sherlock and Watson do have some kind of a profoundly intimate relationship, and are they having sex?

Chelsey: Yeah, why not?

Sarah: Let them have sex. It is like one of the great relationship pairings of the ages, the relationship between Sherlock and Watson is one of the reasons that I think the stories have endured. A lone genius is not as interesting as one with a best friend. But Sherlock Holmes, his whole thing is the idea of pure reason, right? And the idea that deductive reasoning can allow us to truly get to the bottom of things and that I can, in a way that you can really see how it inspired the way we now conceive of FBI profiling or criminal profiling generally, if not the way it actually works is the idea that if your background knowledge and faculties of reasoning are powerful enough and if you work hard enough at it, then you can observe a crime scene after the fact and deduce what has happened. 

Sherlock Holmes is also one of the early figures in our conception of forensics, he has stuff like a collection of different, I think, cigar ash, so that he can determine what someone was smoking if he finds ash at a crime scene. I don't know. I love watching Sherlock Holmes solve crimes. That's what people love, one of the things people love. It's so great to see. It's like watching somebody solve a Rubik's Cube. But I think it's also a grand fantasy that it can be possible for anyone to definitively know what happened 100%. And I think that there is actually magical thinking in that. And that's one of the things that feels revealed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's advocacy for the fairies. 

Chelsey: Some of you know who've listened to the show that I was once a pretty fantastical thinker and I believed in many things, not fairies. And I've slid down the skeptic's hill. But I remember when I was in my age world, I was talking to two of my friends at a bar and they had recently transitioned from being like people who believe in magical things to people who believe in science so rigidly that when I said to them But what about the mystery? What about the fact that we don't know why we're here? 

And I said, do you think science is going to solve that question? And they just were like, yes. I think science will tell us everything that it's possible to know. And I just remember being like, that's nuts. That feels like magical thinking to me as well. And I could be wrong. Maybe we will figure out the great mystery of why we are here in life. But, it feels like the rigidity of that, the idea in Christianity that there is this ultimate truth that this book is literal and can tell us what reality is down to its finest points is not dissimilar from the idea that we can figure out everything as an irrefutable truth. 

Sarah: I think there's just limits to any kind of knowledge and maybe that's a big part of this. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is, and I just love this, working hard in 1920 writing an article on fairies. And so he finds out about the pictures, he writes an article, I think for the Strand Magazine, that ultimately he has a short book called The Coming of the Fairies, and I am going to send you the opening of it because it is very much the kind of thing that you talk about.

Chelsey: “The series of incidents set forth in this little volume represent either the most elaborate and ingenious hoax ever played upon the public, or else they constitute an event in human history which may in the future appear to have been epoch-making in its character. It's hard for the mind to grasp what the ultimate results may be if we have actually proved the existence upon the surface of this planet of a population which may be as numerous as the human race, which pursues its own strange life in its own strange way, and which is only separated from ourselves by some difference of vibrations. We see objects within the limits, which make up our color spectrum. With infinite vibrations unused by us on either side of them, if we could conceive a race of beings which were constructed in material, which threw out shorter or longer vibrations, they would be invisible unless we could tune ourselves up or tone them down. It is exactly that power of tuning up and adapting itself to other vibrations, which constitutes a clairvoyant, and there is nothing scientifically impossible, so far as I can see, in some people seeing that which is invisible to others. If the objects are indeed there, and if the inventive power of the human brain is turned upon the problem, it is likely that some sort of psychic spectacles, inconceivable to us at the moment, will be invented, and that we shall all be able to adapt ourselves to the new conditions. If high tension electricity can be converted by a mechanical contrivance into a lower tension, keyed to other uses, then it is hard to see why something analogous might not occur with the vibrations of ether and the waves of light.” Sounds like something my dad would say.

Sarah: Right? And when he puts it like that, you're like, surely he has a point. To be clear, I don't believe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's argument here, but it is rendered very persuasively.  

Chelsey: I agree, and it goes back to the idea of technology affecting the paranormal, where if we rewind the tape here and go to 1848, which is the very beginning of this spiritualism movement that I think the fairies were born out of, we can meet the Fox sisters, who are two girls, Maggie, who's 14, and Kate, who's 11. And in this house they live in Hydesville, New York. They are plagued by cracks and raps and pounds and knocks, and all these unexplainable noises that we associate now with ghosts and the parents were really shocked at this and can't figure out what's going on. 

They start calling neighbors over and soon they start asking questions into the ether of the room and they start hearing taps. Through those taps, they start to create this code of what they soon come to believe the dead are using to speak from beyond the grave. They start to charge money for the seances, unlike the fairy family, and these girls are getting more and more famous and people are coming from all over to go to this house. They start to go on the road, they go to London, and it becomes this theatrical show. And these girls are starting to channel not only these random spirits, but taking requests. Someone's like, channel Ben Franklin! And then Ben Franklin comes through communicating, but it's suspiciously in the cadence and words of a teenage girl.

Sarah: How are we to know Ben Franklin didn't just want to talk about Brett W. 

Chelsey: Yeah, no kidding. I think he did. He was a petty man. To go into the debunking of it a little bit, eventually it was able to be shown, which I find so gross, they learned how to crack their toes and other joints on command and hit them against wood surfaces. They also would tie apples to strings and drop them off the stairs and then pull them up again. They were creating these sounds from different parts of the house that they weren't in. 

What's the most interesting and I think the most important thing about this is that, not long before this started, was when the telegraph was invented. So this is only four years after the first message, what hath God wrought, which I find so scary that Samuel Morse tapped from D.C. to Baltimore. And this freaked people out, right? Suddenly you could communicate with someone who was not next to you, and instantly. You didn't write a letter and have it fucking galloped across three states, you were able to communicate pretty much instantly with people. And that is paranormal, if you think about never having that experience before.

Sarah: Yes. And electricity is paranormal, I would say. And also the beliefs people had in electricity which I realize we've been playing with electricity since at least the 18th century to some extent. And guess that when we first were able to conjure it and capture it and do stuff with it. We just were treating it like a sprite that we had captured in a bottle, and this idea of also electricity as a force of nature that can power our homes and power our cities and allow us to have 24-hour lights so the factories can never stop running. And also can kill people very easily. 

Chelsey: We don't think about it, but light. Like holding light, it's just absolutely just something we couldn't have imagined, and we take that for granted. And it makes sense that as soon as this tapping was happening as soon as we were like, okay, we can communicate with people from a distance. Why can't we go the extra mile and communicate with people who are outside of our realm? Just like photography, that was a quick thing that started happening was this tapping religion. 

Sarah: And this has never occurred to me before, but it is then the exact same mode of communication, right? Because Morse code is dots and dashes. The ghosts that the Fox sisters are communicating with are also communicating in raps and like little bits of percussion. They are telegraphing with them.

Chelsey: So cool. 

Sarah: And also, in the case of Frances and Elsie, they didn't use the fairies for their own advancement or to build careers, nor did they seem to ever want to, but in terms of the Fox sisters, you can build a whole career off of the ghosts that come talk to you or people's belief that's happening. 

And also, you get into this in much more depth in your episodes on spiritualism and we did a bonus episode on it, too, at some point in the past, but the fact that mediumship is one of the only things that rewards being a girl or a woman in terms of your ability to fulfill a job, aside from doing something where you're literally using your body to care for another living creature like as a wet nurse or something. Because your innocence and simple mindedness, I believe, is supposed to make you a more receptive vessel for a spirit.

Chelsey: Yeah, a lot of this does have to do with the telephone, just to bring it back there. Suddenly we could hear disembodied voices, right? And that was, ah! That's crazy, right? That's so scary. That's around when mediumship started. It's like, okay, now we've moved on to voice. And now people are fully speaking through our bodies. And at this time, women weren't valued members of society and weren't generally invited to speak on much of anything. 

So at this point, women being the primary mediums, started to be able to speak and have people listen to them because they were channeling men. So they were allowed to speak on issues of equality. It was a political movement. They talked about everything from segregation to the right to vote. It wasn't themselves speaking, they were able to channel an authority through them so much so that sometimes when people came to the seances, they spoke to the women and asked, hey, can I speak to a guy? I need to talk to a guy here. And so the woman would channel a man and then be able to actually speak freely as she would like to. And it was really one of the first times that women had a voice, but it had to be the voice of a guy.

Sarah: And you get to matter by tricking the world into believing that you're not really you're a spirit who has more authority than you do. And I don't know, something I like about this story is that it doesn't seem to be about a thwarted attempt to gain the recognition of adults or to gain power. It was just something that two girls came up with and then tired of pretty easily. 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publishes his fairies article. He makes a very strong case for the fairies. Of course, many people are like, no, but plenty of other people are very excited by it. And it's a huge hit. It's national news. Mr. Gardner from the Theosophical Society comes to the house where the photos were taken and gives each of the girls a camera, and they are sent out to get new photos. They do say that the fairies won't come out if adults are around. They have to do it on their own. 

Chelsey: Smart, smart, smart.

Sarah: Smart, smart, smart. I feel like that reminds me of so many different stories that you've covered, and also the beginning of Mormonism with Joseph Smith and the golden plates or whatever.

Chelsey: No, you can't see them. 

Sarah: He has to transcribe them, but he can't do it when anyone else is looking, is that it? 

Chelsey: It's something like that. Nobody else could ever see them. 

Sarah: But when you're starting from a confirmation bias, you're like, of course the fairies don't want to be seen by these crass adults! They'll only appear before the girls. And so they got three more photos. And then let's click through. And then not the next slide, but the one after that is their fourth photo. 

Chelsey: Okay, honestly, I’m really into this.

Sarah: Yeah, the girls look great. 

Chelsey: Yeah, they look really good. So this one is Elsie and she's looking at the fairy also unimpressed but not negative in any way, just neutral. And the fairy is offering her something. She's standing there, the fairy is in a dress herself, and she's handing something to Elsie. And maybe, is it a cake of some kind? Can you tell what it is? 

Sarah: The title is Fairy Offering Posey of harebells to Elise. So I think I remember from my American Girl books that a posy is like a little bouquet. I feel like this fairy is a good example of something that the doubters pointed out at the time, which, can you guess, in terms of the fairy's appearance, what people might have noticed?

Chelsey: Is it that she's a little see through?

Sarah: There's so much going on, but the thing I'm thinking of that this fairy is exemplifying is that these are really fashionable fairies. 

Chelsey: Yes. Okay. Okay. They do have little dresses that look good. That's for sure.

Sarah: Yeah. And this, specifically, this fairy looks like a flapper.

Chelsey: All she lacks is the headband and the feather. 

Sarah: And a cigarette holder and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And look, are we sure that the fairies don't follow human fashion trends? No, we're not sure. That could have happened. But why would they though? They're fairies. I don't know. And to that end, I feel like there's something about the fairy pictures where this, again, it's 1920. You're living in a world ravaged by war, ravaged by pandemic, there are these pictures of girls with fairies. 

I think part of the longing some people would have felt looking at them as this longing for childhood. And also, where are the fairies? The fairies are in the countryside, the fairies aren't in the cities. The fairies aren't near the factories. Their wings would get covered in soot. 

Chelsey: No, they just happen to look like upper middle-class women in their 20s. 

Sarah: Yeah. What if the fairies are actually drunk drivers and it's clear that the Great Gatsby is my only frame of reference for the 20s. But what if they're just like really irresponsible and-

Chelsey: Heading to the club, the jazz club, that is.

Sarah: The fairy jazz club. Click through a couple more. And then there's the final picture, fairies and their sun bath, which is interesting because it's the only one they've taken with no humans in it, which I actually would say makes the fairies look a lot less fake.

Chelsey: Yeah, and I would say also that they've arranged the grass to fall in front of-are they, do you know, are they cardboard cutouts or just paper? 

Sarah: We'll get into it later, but is that your best guess currently? 

Chelsey: Yeah, I'd say that's my best guess, but you can see in this photo, they've placed them back within the bramble, so it looks more real versus the other photos where they are in front, fully visible, and thus easier to see that perhaps they're fake. And these look more ambiguous. They look like something you would see now in a ghost show to me. 

Sarah: Totally. Yeah, their method is improving. So these are the final photos after this gardener tries to get them to take more photographs the following year, but they're like, Nope, we're over it. Can't find any fairies. Yeah, they're over it. They're so over it. According to them both, they're like, oh my God, we were so sick of the fairies. The argument that different fairy experts make in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's eventual book, which again is called The Coming of the Fairies. No comment. I recommend it.

It's a really fun read. One of the arguments for why the fairies have stopped appearing to the girls is that they have aged out of fairies appearing to them. They're too old now. So it makes sense that they can't see the fairies, especially because Gardner brings an adult man who's looking for fairies and he's like, I see them, they're everywhere and it's okay, whatever. And the girls are like, Oh, yeah, those sure. Yeah, that's true. They won't sit still for a picture, though. And so behind the scenes, what is going on is that Elsie and Frances, who have faked these photos, and I'll explain in a moment how, they're like, oh my god, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was tricked by our stupid prank for our parents.

Chelsey: This is getting way out of hand. 

Sarah: Yeah, and what they decide is to just keep it a secret until Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mr. Gardner are dead because they don't want to embarrass them.

Chelsey:  Oh my god, really?

Sarah: Yeah. Wow. Wow. 

Chelsey: Same. 

Sarah: So they just decide to keep it a secret and to not rock the boat for these grown-up men who have been fooled by truly something they just did for their parents initially, the same way that it's such a family thing to try and prank a family member, and then what if it just got out of hand and became a national concern. 

Chelsey: My whole family convinced my brother that he was born a mime, literally, out of the womb, and that was mean. So sorry, Riley. 

Sarah: Then he cried silent tears. 

Chelsey: So sorry, Riley.

Sarah: I think something we also forget, and this reminds me of the satanic panic even, is that kids, I feel like, pretty rarely are like, wait a minute, I'm a kid. They're like, I'm responsible for this situation now. And I just got to keep the cat in the bag until both of these men have died. 

Chelsey: God, it's like just such a relatable the feminine urge to.

Sarah: Yes, the feminine urge to maintain a fairy myth for decades until the old men who believed it are dead. So they do that. And then it is something that will come back into the spotlight occasionally when one of them gives an interview. As time passes, I think more and more people can be like, yeah, that's fake. I know that's fake, but I don't know how they did it. And the fact of the negative itself being undoctored is compelling in its way. 

Chelsey: Yeah, absolutely. So you want to tell me how it was faked? 

Sarah: So there were a couple different investigations in the 70s, both by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and by the British Journal of Photography.

Chelsey: Good team. 

Sarah: Yeah, that's who I want investigating my mysteries. They do determine that they're fake. And then finally, in the early 80s, the girls who are now very old ladies, explained how they did it. This is in a magazine article. The way they did it was that there is a book for children called Princess Mary's Gift Book that has these dancing kinds of Gibson girl figures. And then Elsie improved them with drawings of wings and added fairy touches and then cut them out and pinned them into the moss or whatever with hat pins, which you can actually see sticking through in a couple of instances. 

Chelsey: That's so cool.

Sarah: And then the experts who looked at them, who were persuaded, one of the things they pointed out was that based on the frame rate, the fairies seemed to be moving. You could see movement in the wings. So how could you have faked that? And what I think Elsie pointed out is that they were moving in the wind. 

Chelsey: Was the material the dolls themselves? Or is this a tracing? 

Sarah: So Elsie has made copies of the illustrations, but then added wings and made them more fairy-like. But I think they're tracings and they're on what seems like a light cardboard that will stand up on its own but still be pliant enough to be moved around by the breeze.

Chelsey: What a cool thing to do with your childhood. 

Sarah: Just fool a nation. 

Chelsey: Epic! 

Sarah: Yeah. The sun never sets on the people Frances and Elsie tricked.

Chelsey: God. Could you imagine if we still believed the Blair Witch Project was real? 

Sarah: Or just if you spent like 80 years or whatever, or 60 years, being like, we’re pretty sure it's fake, but we don't know how they did it. 

Chelsey: But yeah, to create something as culturally important as these fairies, just as a child, as a fun kind of prank, I guess you would call it. Are we calling this a prank? Because it wasn't a hoax necessarily because it wasn't really meant for anyone.

Sarah:  It's like an accidental hoax. If you're trying to hoax your parents, that's just a prank. The fairies just got out on their own. Honestly, it does make you believe in fairies to the extent that the idea of fairies was volatile enough to escape the village and just rampage around the world. 

Chelsey: Their magic comes in their ability to spread these images or to turn people toward them through some sort of unseen force.

Sarah: So this is from Fairies, A Dangerous History by Richard Sugg. This passage in the opening reads, “Few beings of the supernatural world have suffered greater indignities than the fairy. Vampires and witches have been the victims of much distortion and even ghosts rather belittled by their role in the jokey films of recent years. But fairies? 

Imagine that one day you are torn from the earth, scrubbed clean, hideously perfumed, shrunk down from four foot of sturdy muscle into a diaphanous five inches, showered in glitter and rainbow hues, and forced to wave a flimsy wand at small girls for the rest of your immortal life. Once, the fear of you moved people to murder, and scared some to death. Your pedigree stretched back to the edge of Time itself”, that’s Time with a capital T Chelsey. “And your powers ranged from the tiniest accidents of field and kitchen to the potential destruction of the world.” 

Chelsey: Wow! Love that drama! 

Sarah: Love it. And I guess that's now represented by the fact that Tinkerbell… well she did try and kill Wendy. Tinkerbell does not get enough credit for being an attempted murderer.

Chelsey: Yeah, she was a jealous lady.

Sarah: That's why men love Tinkerbell. She's chaotic. They secretly want their lives to be destroyed. 

Chelsey: Could we call her the original manic pixie dream girl?

Sarah: Oh my god, she is. Ah, oh boy. Tinkerbell. 

Chelsey: Absolutely. And so is that excerpt talking about how the idea of fairies has changed a lot? Can you tell me at all about that transformation of fairies?  

Sarah: I think it's similar to what you talked about in our Killer Clowns episode about the idea that the clown starts off as this morally ambiguous trickster figure who isn't just this kind of cute comedic, uncomplicated good guy for kids’ parties, which then I think…

Chelsey: Ronald McDonald. 

Sarah: Yeah. Which then explains, I think, why the complicatedness of the figure seeps in at the edges, where clowns have always been complicated, and we can't hide that, I think.

Chelsey: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I would be really curious what the response was, was there any kind of a moral panic about these fairies or a panic about them being somehow evil or because they are outside of the Christian religion. 

But what I think is really interesting about spiritualism is you would immediately assume that it is opposed to the Christian religion, but actually they were very blended together. It wasn't the same as ‘spiritualism is satanic’. It was like, the dead are talking to us and Jesus is cool with it. They were blended together. So I don't know if fairies would necessarily be sorted into a satanic category, maybe because they just weren't there at the time the satanic panic really kicked off. We weren't talking fairies then.

Sarah: I haven't found anyone panicking about the fairies. It seems like people who believe in it are psyched about it and people who don't believe in it are somewhat embarrassed by the people who believe. Yeah, to speak to spiritualism feeling like something that does not feel contradictory to Christianity to people at the time, I feel like this could also have given people, and I'm totally speculating here, but have inspired in people a feeling of fairies being visible to the camera and also angels will be and, and ghosts being visible and spirit photography and this idea that technology is bringing us closer to God and that technology is not a force opposed to religion that we don't have to see it that way at this time. And how so much of history is adolescent girls having a laugh and then accidentally changing history. 

Chelsey: It's so true. Just a little lark.

Sarah: And so much of this comes back to people not suspecting children of being able to trick them because adults are so smart, and children must be so much less smart than adults. And in some ways, kids’ brains have a lot of time developing that they need to do, and they are clearly outpaced by adults, but in other ways but in other ways, I think we're pretty evenly matched. 

Chelsey: Obviously, if these girls tricked the author of Sherlock Holmes until his dying day, that is some power for sure. 

Sarah: And interestingly, even when they reveal how they did it, they keep some ambiguity in the record, especially Frances, because she was younger at the time, she was nine when all this started. And so what she says is that the fairies really did appear to them, the pictures were faked, but they really did see the fairies. And she also maintains until the day she dies, that the final photograph is real, the one of the fairies without the girls.

Chelsey: I like that. I don't know. There's so much danger in what we're talking about, too, because it's if we apply the same sorts of magical thinking to things we see now that are so dangerous, like hoaxes that we see constantly on like Twitter that are really harming certain groups of people, but then there's these that inspire wonder in a way that doesn't feel targeted toward some sort of fascist goal.

Sarah: Frances also, many years before it happened, explained the Trump administration. She said... “I never even thought of it as being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun, and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in. They wanted to be taken in.”  I would just really like to see more hoaxes that are fundamentally lighthearted and harmless. It's very hard to find evidence of any ill effects that these fairies had on anybody. They were just a curiosity. And you could argue that they gave people false hope about other aspects of spiritualism or theosophy or what have you but whatever. If people want to get false hope, then they're going to get it somewhere. 

Chelsey: And maybe that's what fairies are representing for us. It's not a trick, but it's an invitation into the unknown and the ability to be humbled by what we don't know, which I think is so valuable because so often we're convinced of everything we know. And so when a magical doorway opens, when you get to the back of the closet and you move the coats aside and enter this world and even if it's not real, if it's not a place where we are going to punish people with hell or we're going to manipulate people with their beliefs to do a certain thing or to act a certain way, then that adds a dimension to our life that I think can really have value and can connect us to other people. I don't know if that's a perfect way to connect with other people. But as we talked about astrology, we've got to find something and the more benign the things we believe in are, I think we can have the best of both worlds. 

Sarah: Yeah, I don't know, I think maybe I used to see it as embarrassing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his old age was like, Fairies! And now I think it's great. I think it's great to abandon, not abandon, I don't think he ever even felt that these were at cross purposes, but to spend less time focused on the quest for pure reason and go more toward, if the little girls say they saw it then who am I to argue. And in some way to honor the part of yourself that wants to believe in fairies and wants to believe that maybe technology will enable you to talk to your son again. I don't know. I don't think that it's a choice between rationality and superstition. I think it's a choice between doing harm and not doing harm to the best of your ability. 

Chelsey: Absolutely. I think you put it perfectly.

Sarah: Chelsey Weber Smith, what are you up to? Where can we find you? Have you talked about pig people recently?

Chelsey:  Oh my gosh, yes, yes. Our most recent thing that we're doing that feels like it relates to this is we're doing an urban legends hotline. You can go to Americanhysteria.com and leave us an urban legend that you heard from your childhood. We've got a big back catalog just scroll through to find something you like. And you can find me on Instagram at @americanhysteriapodcast. And at this point, just don't find me on Twitter. There's a lot of hoaxes there and they are not about fairies. At least not that kind.

Sarah: And that was our episode. Thank you for joining us. And remember, every time someone says, I don't believe in fairies, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle falls down dead. Thank you so much to Chelsey Weber-Smith for guesting on this show. You’ve got to go listen to Chelsey’s show, American Hysteria. It's the best. Thank you so much to Carolyn for editing and producing and for releasing a new song this week.

Carolyn has just released a heart stoppingly beautiful cover of Lullaby by The Chicks, who, of course if you listen to this show, you've spent some time with. And now let's spend a little time with this song.

Carolyn Sings

It's available this week on Bandcamp. You can find the link in the show notes, and it'll be streaming next week. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. We'll see you next time.