article_snippet: 16-year-old Elsie Wright took a remarkable photograph of 16-year-old Elsie Wright ten-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths, playing with 'fairies' on the banks of a stream which ran behind the garden of Elsie's house.
article_snippet: A few days earlier, in the summer of 1917, Frances had slipped and gone into a stream which ran behind the garden of Elsie's house, later telling Frances mother Frances had fallen into the water while Frances was 'playing with the fairies'.
article_snippet: Elsie suggested the two girls should take a photograph of the fairies' to prove to her mother that Frances had been telling the truth.
article_snippet: the two girls drew some fairies, cut the two girls out and pasted the two girls on to cardboard.
article_snippet: Arthur Wright willingly agreed to lend Arthur Wright daughter Arthur Wright camera and girls set off, blissfully unaware that his camera and girls were about to create one of the most reproduced photographs in history.
article_snippet: his camera and girls arranged the four fairies - three with wings and one playing a piped instrument - in front of Frances, who put flowers in his daughter hair, cupped his daughter chin in his daughter hand and, curiously, stared intently at the camera rather than the fairies when Elsie took the picture.
article_snippet: When Arthur Wright developed the exposed plate a darkroom Arthur Wright asked Elsie what his camera and girls were, and Elsie told Arthur Wright his camera and girls were the fairies that Elsie and Frances played with by the stream - his camera and girls took another photo a month later.
article_snippet: Polly Wright, Elsie's mother, and Polly Wright sister, Annie Griffiths, Frances mother took the  photographs to a meeting of the .
article_snippet: Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle also believed this was photographic evidence of the existence of fairies.
article_snippet: It was only many decades later did they admit that the  photographs were faked and involved cut-out drawings of fairy figures that were fastened to foliage with hatpins.
article_snippet: Frances continued to claim, contrarily, that Frances had seen fairies and that the fifth photograph - the fairy bower - was authentic.