1. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Cringeworthy Fall For the Fairy Hoax
In December of 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published a cringe-worthy article urging the public to accept that fairies existed. The article opened him to significant ridicule from a press that was equal parts puzzled, and equal parts embarrassed for the respected author. It did not dissuade Doyle, who followed the first article with a second in 1921, describing even more fairy sightings. A year later in 1922, he capped it off by publishing an even more cringe-worthy book, titled The Coming of the Fairies.
As it turned out, Sherlock Holmes’ creator should have been more skeptical. In 1983, cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths published an article, in which they confessed that the whole thing had been a hoax. They had used illustrations from a contemporary popular children’s book, and simply drew wings on them. The girls had kicked off the prank as a means of getting back at adults who teased them for “playing with fairies”. The joke snowballed, however, and got out of hand once the Theosophical Society and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got involved. Once that happened, they could not think of a graceful way to back out, so they just kept the hoax going, before finally coming clean, six decades later.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
Listvrese – 10 of History’s Most Prolific Con Artists and Their Famous Cons
Live Science, June 25th, 2008 – A Savage Hoax: The Cave Men Who Never Existed
Money Inc. – The 20 Most Notorious Con Artists of All Time
Museum of Hoaxes – Lord Gordon-Gordon
New York Herald, July 8th, 1849 – Arrest of the Confidence Man
Smithsonian Magazine, December 15th, 2009 – Crop Circles: The Art of the Hoax
Smithsonian Magazine, July 2nd, 2015 – The Great Moon Hoax Was Simply a Sign of Its Time
