Sherlock Holmes Was Highly Skeptical – if Only His Author Had Been the Same
In December, 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published a cringeworthy article, in which he urged the public to accept that the mythology of fairies was based in fact, and that fairies actually exist. The article opened him to significant ridicule from a press that was equal parts puzzled, and equal parts embarrassed for the respected author. None of that dissuaded Doyle. He followed the first article with a second in 1921, in which he described even more fairy sightings. A year later, in 1922, he capped it off and published his most cringeworthy book, The Coming of the Fairies. As it turned out, Sherlock Holmes’ creator should have been more skeptical.
In 1983, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffith published an article, in which they confessed that the whole thing was 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 to get 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 rolled with it and kept the hoax going, before they finally came clean, six decades later.