Speaker 1: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 1: is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
Speaker 1: right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the cabinet of curiosities. So much of history
Speaker 1: has been buried. Colonialism takes quite a bit of the blame,
Speaker 1: as does nature itself, which has swallowed the remains of
Speaker 1: entire civilizations over the years. That's why archaeologists travel all
Speaker 1: over the world trying to fill in the missing pages
Speaker 1: of the historical record, one dig site at a time.
Speaker 1: In two thousand four, a new dig site was unearthed,
Speaker 1: and in the most unusual of places, Marian Gary's backyard.
Speaker 1: Gary lived in buck Haven, a small town in Fife
Speaker 1: on the eastern coast of Scotland, residing along the North Sea,
Speaker 1: just across from Norway and the Netherlands. It wasn't completely
Speaker 1: out of the question for Vikings to have landed along
Speaker 1: Scottish shores hundreds of years earlier. In fact, from the
Speaker 1: eighth to the fifteen centuries, Vikings and Norwegians did colonize
Speaker 1: parts of Scotland. This period of time is known as
Speaker 1: Scandinavian Scotland, and there is evidence of their presence still
Speaker 1: around today. For example, on the island known as the
Speaker 1: Brof of birth Say, there are archaeological remains of an
Speaker 1: entire Norse village, but unfortunately we know very little about
Speaker 1: this period. Written records were stolen or destroyed, and the
Speaker 1: records that do exist tend to be biased depending on
Speaker 1: which culture wrote them. English or Irish. Carved ruins are
Speaker 1: still present, though having been etched into large stones and
Speaker 1: rocks that have lasted to this day. What remains, though,
Speaker 1: is often found in remote areas of Scotland or on
Speaker 1: uninhabited islands, areas easily preserved due to lack of population
Speaker 1: and construction activity. Nobody, including Mary and Gary, would have
Speaker 1: imagined finding a settlement right in her backyard. Her home
Speaker 1: had been built in the nineteen thirties, and surely someone
Speaker 1: would have found something when the foundation was poured. But
Speaker 1: while she was digging in her garden in the summer
Speaker 1: of two thousand four, Gary uncovered smooth stones beneath the soil.
Speaker 1: Stones she hadn't put there in the first place. She
Speaker 1: had recently watched the television program about valuable artifacts discovered
Speaker 1: in public places and believed these stones were evidence that
Speaker 1: she had also found something valuable herself, so she reached
Speaker 1: out to her local town council for their advice, and
Speaker 1: they contacted chief archaeologist Douglas Spears. Spears came to the
Speaker 1: house and examined the stones. He believed Gary was in
Speaker 1: fact sitting on a major historical discovery. He called in
Speaker 1: his team, who immediately trucked in specialized equipment as they
Speaker 1: took over her backyard and established the dig site. As
Speaker 1: they worked, they uncovered more stones, as well as a
Speaker 1: few odd artifacts. The team didn't think too much of them, though,
Speaker 1: considering this was someone's function in backyard, a digging tool
Speaker 1: or gardening glove would be an expected thing to find
Speaker 1: in such a location. However, Spears and his team didn't
Speaker 1: find a digging tool or a glove. What they found
Speaker 1: instead was much stranger than that. One item was a
Speaker 1: child's gas mask from World War Two. They also found
Speaker 1: an old television remote control, yet there had been no
Speaker 1: TV out there at the time. Still, they kept digging,
Speaker 1: hoping defined Viking tools or the foundation of some ancient
Speaker 1: villagers home, something to justify the months they'd spent tearing
Speaker 1: up this poor woman's backyard, and by January. They've done it.
Speaker 1: After months of toiling at Marian Gary's house in buck Haven,
Speaker 1: Spears had in fact made a discovery. All the telltale
Speaker 1: signs were there, the antiquated construction techniques, the depth at
Speaker 1: which the stones had been found, as well as the
Speaker 1: sheer size of the area. Marian Gary's garden had been
Speaker 1: sitting on top of a patio, a sunken patio to
Speaker 1: be exact, one that had been laid down in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties. Spears and the other archaeologists had been so
Speaker 1: obsessed with the possibility of uncovering an ancient Viking settlement
Speaker 1: that they ignored all the evidence that what they had
Speaker 1: spent months unearthing had been nothing more than a place
Speaker 1: to enjoy a cold glass of lemonade. Spears felt like
Speaker 1: a fool for wasting all that time, but Marian thankfully
Speaker 1: wasn't too upset by all of it. After all, she
Speaker 1: now had a new backyard restoration project with which to
Speaker 1: occupy herself, all because she had left no stone unturned.
Speaker 1: It's difficult to believe in things we cannot see. I'm
Speaker 1: sure there are exceptions, like gravity or the wind, but
Speaker 1: we can anchor our belief in them on the way
Speaker 1: that they affect the world around us. Other things, though,
Speaker 1: are a lot more difficult to believe in, unless, of course,
Speaker 1: we managed to capture them on film. Elsie and Francis
Speaker 1: were cousins. Francis and her mother had come to Cottingly,
Speaker 1: a small village in northern England, to live with Francis's
Speaker 1: aunt in nineteen seventeen. Elsie was a bit older than
Speaker 1: her nine year old cousin, but the two often played
Speaker 1: together in a stream close to the property. When the
Speaker 1: girls returned to the house, they usually came back wet
Speaker 1: and with muddy feet. However, they also came back with
Speaker 1: the reason for their frequent trips to the water. They
Speaker 1: were playing with the fairies. Their mothers didn't believe them,
Speaker 1: of course, but Elsie was determined to show them the truth.
Speaker 1: With her father's camera in hand, the girls trudged back
Speaker 1: down to the stream. Half an hour later, they returned
Speaker 1: with that proof. Elsie gave her father back his camera
Speaker 1: and he developed the photographic plate in his private dark room.
Speaker 1: The photo depicted Francis half hidden behind a bush as
Speaker 1: four fairies hovered in the foreground. Elsie's father thought it
Speaker 1: was a joke. Another photo was taken a few months later,
Speaker 1: and this time Elsie was in front of the camera
Speaker 1: and she had her hand extended to a gnome nor
Speaker 1: more than a foot tall. Her father still wrote the
Speaker 1: photograph office at prank, but her mother, Polly, believed them
Speaker 1: to be true. Fairies, you see, were a hot topic
Speaker 1: back then, as was the field of occultism. Polly attended
Speaker 1: a meeting in nineteen nineteen of the Theosophical Society, which
Speaker 1: believed in a secretive group of spiritual masters who were
Speaker 1: more evolved than everyone else. These masters were smarter, lived longer,
Speaker 1: and could even read minds. The meeting that Polly attended
Speaker 1: was about fairy life, and after it was over, she
Speaker 1: showed her daughter's photos to the speaker. From there, they
Speaker 1: quickly went public. They were viewed as proof of the
Speaker 1: girl's higher evolution, since they had manifested the fairies to
Speaker 1: such a degree that they could be photographed by a
Speaker 1: common camera. One of the leaders of the Theosophical Society,
Speaker 1: Edward Gardner, sent both the photos and the original photographic
Speaker 1: plates to an expert who concluded that they were indeed authentic.
Speaker 1: The fair's were not paper cutouts, as Elsie's father had
Speaker 1: originally assumed. Gardner continued to use the photographs in his
Speaker 1: talks and sold prints of them in his lectures. Eventually
Speaker 1: they were noticed by another theosophist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
Speaker 1: the celebrated author behind the most famous detective in the world,
Speaker 1: Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was working on a piece about fairies
Speaker 1: for the Strand magazine. When he learned of the photographs,
Speaker 1: He wrote to Elsie and her father and offered to
Speaker 1: pay for use of them in his article. Her father
Speaker 1: it was only too happy to oblige, but refused to
Speaker 1: accept payments. He believed the photos should remain pure or
Speaker 1: the benefits of the public. Of course, the photos were
Speaker 1: subjected to more scrutiny, this time under the expert eye
Speaker 1: of the Kodak company, who determined that they had not
Speaker 1: been doctored. However, there was no way to determine whether
Speaker 1: the fairies posing with Francis were real. Other experts attempted
Speaker 1: to debunk the photos as fake, but Gardner shrugged them
Speaker 1: off as biased opinions by nonbelievers, and en twenty Gardner
Speaker 1: went to visit the Right family Incottingly for definitive proof
Speaker 1: using his own cameras. He left the cameras, as well
Speaker 1: as two dozen glass plates with Elsie and Francis in
Speaker 1: order for the fairies to come out for their pictures.
Speaker 1: Though the girls had to be alone, so Elsie's mother
Speaker 1: went to her sister's house for tea while Elsie and
Speaker 1: Francis took more photographs in the garden. One picture depicted
Speaker 1: a fairy practically leaping towards Francis's nose, while another had
Speaker 1: a fairy presenting Elsie with a flower. The glass plates
Speaker 1: from a camera were then packed up and sent back
Speaker 1: to Mr Gardner, who wrote to Doyle with some good news.
Speaker 1: Those new photos were eventually published as part of Doyle's article,
Speaker 1: and the public was unsure of how to take them.
Speaker 1: Some believe them to be real, but most laughed, claiming
Speaker 1: the girls had pulled a fast one on Doyle and Gardner. Still,
Speaker 1: there was something to be said for the innocence of
Speaker 1: two children who had not lost their sense of wonder
Speaker 1: as they had grown older. It didn't take long for
Speaker 1: the hype surrounding the Cottingly fairies to die down. For
Speaker 1: many years, Francis and Elsie fell out of the public eye,
Speaker 1: and then in nineteen sixty six, the Daily Expressed newspaper
Speaker 1: in England interviewed Elsie about the photos. She said it
Speaker 1: was possible that they've been nothing but her imagination run
Speaker 1: a muck, but there was also a chance that they
Speaker 1: were real. Twenty years later, the girls came clean. In
Speaker 1: an article for the Paranormal magazine that Unexplained, Elsie and
Speaker 1: Francis confessed that they actually had seen fairies down by
Speaker 1: the streaming coddingly, but the photographs have been faked. The
Speaker 1: fairies had been nothing more than paper cutouts. After they
Speaker 1: took the photos, they tossed the evidence of their deception
Speaker 1: into the water. But there was one photo of the
Speaker 1: women disagreed on. It was the fifth and final picture taken,
Speaker 1: titled Fairies and Their sun Bath, in which one fairy
Speaker 1: enjoys the morning sunshine while the other struggles to wake
Speaker 1: up from her peaceful slumber. Neither Elsie nor Francis are
Speaker 1: anywhere in the photo, only the two fairies. Elsie believed
Speaker 1: it to be a fake, just like the others, but
Speaker 1: Francis maintained until her death in nineteen eighty six that
Speaker 1: the photograph had been real. Her belief was so strong
Speaker 1: that she instilled it in her daughter, who also went
Speaker 1: on television attesting to the authenticity of the photo that
Speaker 1: her mother had taken. For Elsie Rights and Francis Griffith's
Speaker 1: their fairy photos became a worldwide phenomenon, inspiring several books
Speaker 1: and films, turning their story into a real life fairy tale.
Speaker 1: I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
Speaker 1: of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
Speaker 1: more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
Speaker 1: with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
Speaker 1: called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
Speaker 1: and you can learn all about it over at the
Speaker 1: World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay
Speaker 1: curious one