3. The Two Little Girls Who Conned Sherlock Holmes’ Author
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created the sharp-minded, cynical, and deductive reasoning Sherlock Holmes. That being so, one might reasonably assume that Sherlock Holmes’ author was one of those hard-to-fool skeptical types. One might, but one would be wrong. In reality, Doyle was nothing like his famous character. Late in life, the famous author became a big booster of spiritualism, and in his eagerness to credit anything that would support his beliefs, he became a gullible old fool who fell hard for a hoax perpetrated by two little girls.
It all began in 1917, in the English village of Cottingley. There, 9-year-old Elsie Wright and her 16-year-old cousin Frances Griffith claimed that they often interacted with fairies beside a nearby stream. Their parents scoffed, so to prove it, the girls borrowed Elsie’s father’s camera, and came back half an hour later with “evidence”. When Elsie’s father developed the film, he was surprised to find a picture of fairies dancing around Frances. However, he dismissed it as a prank by his daughter, who knew her way around cameras. When the girls came up with more fairy photos in subsequent months, Elsie’s father finally forbade them to borrow his camera. By then, however, the seeds had been planted for one of history’s most fascinating hoaxes.
