‘I believe in fairies, you should, too’

On a wing and a prayer: a photograph from 1917 of a young girl with some of
the fairies who ‘lived’ in the village of Cottingley.
Photograph: Getty Images

Via theguardian.com by Eva Wiseman

It is 100 years since two girls in Yorkshire helped the world believe in fairies. That glorious story, of Elsie and Frances, and some hatpins and a camera, and the insistence that fairies lived in a suburban village called Cottingley and had very fashionable hairstyles actually, became famous when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the girls’ photographs to illustrate articles and a book about the existence of fairies. “The recognition of their existence,” he wrote, “will jolt the material 20th-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life.” When a psychic visited, he said he’d seen fairies everywhere. And despite the girls in adulthood admitting to faking the photographs, they maintained the fairies themselves had been real.

The photos – basically a paper doll on a pin, but heavy with the sensual weight of illusion – have followed me since I was five, soon after I told my mum I’d seen the tooth fairy. Just the back of its wings, flying off into the tree. It looked a bit like a leaf, and I saw it. These stories (including a personal obsession with the Enfield Poltergeist, and something funny on a school trip to France) told in adulthood lead inevitably to somebody asking, with a raised eyebrow, if I really think fairies, or ghosts, or magic exists. Which I now realise is the wrong question altogether. The question is not “Are they real?” but “Do people see them?” And if so, why? What makes us, intelligent (don’t) grown-ups with GCSEs and ISAs and scars from childbirth hang on to stories of the supernatural? What does it mean to want to believe?


I ask now because, across the western world, young women are leaning towards mysticism in a way that hasn’t been seen since Elsie and Frances’s time. Covens are communities, where witches are seen as the original female rebels. Tarot is big business on Instagram, along with crystals and cleansing sage smudge sticks. Millennials who grew up on Harry Potter and The Craft are embracing witchcraft as an aspirational, inclusive lifestyle choice, complete with high street high priestess designs, and plenty of stars, and moons, and tiny little mirrors to reflect bad energy. Spellcasting is one step on from Facebook affirmations, quotes about positivity in typewriter font. Partly as a replacement for religion, partly, perhaps, an extension of “wellness”, this new mysticism is related to mindfulness, to finding inner-peace, and feels like a reaction to powerlessness.

I read recently about “spirit photography” in the late 19th century, when child mortality was at 20%, and parents would commission ghostly portraits of their dead children beside them. The photographs are small and eerie, and a thousand miles from believable. And yet, when the photographer William Mumler was arrested and tried for fraud, mothers who said they recognised their children in the images came forward to defend him. “The form of my deceased child appeared on the picture,” one of them said in court. “It was never manipulated.” He was acquitted.

When Elsie’s mother took the fairy photos to Bradford’s Theosophical Society, launching them into the world, they were embraced as proof that things were getting better. That the world was evolving towards a kind of perfection. It seems now that rather than images on flat card, photographs like this are spiked with hooks so that people can hang their beliefs from them, whether sentimental, religious or radical – the babies were proof that life continued somewhere else, the fairies were proof of something better to come.

It’s possible to hold two opposing ideas at once. Samuel Johnson, asked why after 5,000 years the existence of spirits was still debated, said: “All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.” It’s possible to hold the knowledge that this is it. That we live like flailing fish, sometimes drowning, sometimes swimming, grasping for food and attention, and then that’s the end. And, also, the thought that there must be more. The stories we tell ourselves to make everything OK, to make us feel like power is possible, shouldn’t always be dismissed as dimness or trickery. The reassurance that comes from ghost stories and fairies is valuable and ancient, if often held up with hatpins.

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