Bittersweet Infamy - #49 - The Cottingley Fairies

Episode Date: July 24, 2022

Josie tells Taylor about the photographic hoax that ensnared the author of Sherlock Holmes. Plus: Blucifer, the killer blue mustang, and other oddities of Denver International Airport.

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Wyndham rewards membership may be required. Restrictions apply. Welcome to Bitter Sweden for me. I'm Taylor Basso. I'm Josie Mitchell. On this podcast, you tell the stories that live on in envy, shocking the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. Truth may be bitter, stories are always sweet. Josie. Taylor.

This episode is so jam-packed that it needs a table of contents. It's jammy-packy. It's very true. It's onerously large. It's exhausting. I'm looking at it and I'm thinking people shouldn't even listen to this episode. But here you are. So here's the table of contents. First of all, we've got three quick updates to give about previous stories. We've got an update about our email address, a.k.a. we got some email. Newsworthy.

Newsworthy, and then of course, as always, I will give you the daily dose of the infamous, and I will also tell you how you can vote on the Melty Awards. By the way, Josie and I will be revealing our bittersweetest episode nominees at the end of the very episode you're listening to. So stick around. If you're feeling impatient, you don't want to wait until the end of the episode, you can go to tinyurl.com slash bittersweetinfamy and fill out your ballot now. That's a forward slash, just to be clear.

We want to be clear, because this is our first real attempt at audience interaction. So please help us not flop, please. Yeah, yeah. We're excited. We're putting on a little dog and pony show. It's a big dog, small pony. Just a Saint Bernard and the world's smallest pony. Yeah.

Upends expectations. So Josie, in episode number 42, Moonstruck, you covered the Unification Church, known in infamy as the Moonies. They've made the news recently. It's into some big news, too. Very like global news of global consequence. History book. Remember this date, kids, because it's on the exam kind of thing.

Yeah. So for those who don't know, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, so he had been the Prime Minister of Japan, was no longer in office, was the former Prime Minister. He was assassinated earlier this month. The reason the suspected shooter, Tetsuya Yamagami, gave was that he was upset because he felt that the Unification Church had led to his mother's financial ruin by extracting many donations from her

and that Shinzo Abe had been responsible for the Unification Church, gaining traction in Japan, let's say. Yep, yep. Even though he's not like a confirmed member of the Unification Church? Yeah, I'm not entirely sure. This is at the time of recording. It's very much a developing story, like this just happened. Yeah.

So I'm careful about laying a foot wrong about, you know, I don't want another deep, fake mom situation. True. Let's put it that way. Right. I'm gonna tread lightly here, but definitely something to keep an eye on if you were interested in the conversation that we had in that episode. Yeah, no, totally.

Or if you're like, wait, who the fuck are the moonies? Episode 42. Me, Josie, Mitchell, a lot of alcohol. Holy cow. Alcohol had a big appearance. It's true. The fourth guest in the room. Our next update comes to us from one of our most antique stories,

that being episode 25, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The Antiquest. It's true. A brown sepia over the whole episode. A fine patina all across the land. The titular mountain of that episode, Mount Vesuvius, has just made the news. An American tourist was taken a selfie by the lip of the caldera, which is the big pit of this active volcano.

They climbed up a unmarked path. And then dropped their phone and went in after it. Yeah. It then fell a few hundred feet into the caldera. Thankfully, this person is safe. They were retrieved with a nice long rope, I believe. You know, sometimes the old methods are the best. An antique situation.

Fiber arts, folks. It's important. So, yes, this person was retrieved. All is safe. All is well. Please be careful. I think they did get fined. They had to pay a fine.

Fair enough. That's fair enough. I mean, I don't... Listen, I'm not saying I'm above dropping my phone into an active volcano. This has always been a big fear of mine. Because you remember when I was talking about my sunglasses falling down the well to hell? I think about shit like this constantly. When I'm on bridges, what if my scarf blows off and I try to grab my scarf and I go over the side?

Flexibly. Like, oh no, the scarf. Oh no, I'm on a bridge. Yeah. Yes. You understand exactly. I'm so sorry. And one last update.

I sent you something to watch, but I think you were really busy writing this episode. So, you didn't see it. There is a trailer in an American release date for the Silent Twins movie. Oh shit. Yes. This is a surprise. It releases in the US September 16th of this year, 2022. That's coming up.

Yeah, and you can see that trailer on the Instagram account, the Silent Twins. Does it look good? Like, what's your vibe? I don't know. It's hard to tell from the trailer. It looks like very thoughtfully done, I will say. Okay. It seems like it's going to pay respect to their humanity.

It didn't seem funny at all, which seems a shame because those girls cracked me up. But we'll see. It might be hard to convey via cinema the humor of things. I don't want like a sappy Oscar bait treatment of this. Yeah. I guess my number one concern would be that whatever treatment of it is captures the entire humanity of these girls, both their wonderful creativity and the fact that they were, you know, subjected to all this bullshit that centers on the individuality of their particular

experience, but then also they could be real assholes sometime in the nicest way, like in a way that so thoroughly amused me and endeared me to them. And I would hate to lose that side of them, even though I understand how that might happen in trying to provide a more uplifting treatment of these girls in their lives. Yeah, that's fair. We got email, baby. No. Taylor.

Two whole emails. Taylor. You've got mail. Oh, damn it, Brian. Damn. You got it. You got it. I've got tiny bangs and like textured out hair.

So who do we got mail from? It is technically the first. It is also like a personal friend. Yeah. So I'm not sure. I'm not sure how that goes. Oh, that counts. It's in.

It's in. You're right, Jonathan. You technically got the gold medal here. So he wanted his voice heard for his own personal nominees for the Melty's, and he was riding real hard for episode 11, Jean Webert. Oh, okay. He thought that one was a riot. He pushed it for a bunch of stuff.

He also said that his favorite Memphis was scary Lucy. Oh, that's good. That's cute. That's good. I love how he's just like riding in with it already prepackaged nominations. Beautiful. He has takes, baby. He takes beautiful tastes.

And he said that his favorite guest appearance was my grandmother, Grandma Linda, and I agree, don't tell the others. Oh, teardrop. Jonathan, excellent taste. Goddamn. A fine slate of picks, and he said that the How is this not a movie already award should go to either Jean Webert or Bayou of Picks. So he's doing deep pulls from our early days.

That's how you know he's a real fan. Oh, that's a good-ass category. It is a good-ass category, and yeah, so he says keep up the amazing work, Josie and Taylor, your podcast is always a highlight of my week, so that was our first email. It was a very nice email. Our second email, however, may have been even better. It was such a lovely gift. It was a very nice gift.

E-gift for a little coffee. Tanya bought us some coffees, which is really nice. Thank you. Delicious wake-up juice. That is really kind. That was entirely unexpected and unnecessary, but we're really grateful, and if you want to shoot us an email, we can't respond to this because it will go to the Starbucks dummy account, but we'd love to hear from you.

You're the best. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. What are you going to get, Taylor? What kind of coffee are you going to get? I don't know. So which one of us gets this?

We need to figure it out. Yeah. I'm going to buy... I'm going to buy commemorative Vancouver Starbucks mug, and then I'm going to ship it to you. That's how we'll do it. I hate your guts. I hate your guts.

Okay. If you can have coffee for those of you who are looking for a way to kick some support to the podcast, we may or may not be debuting something along that lines in our next episode. Exactly. During the melties. A way to, an easy way to give a little, give a little change, empty your e-change purse. Since we're doing all of this fan service, the idea for today's Minfamous comes from one of our followers on Instagram.

Oh. Cool. What? We posted an image of Scary Lucy from our episode 40 Minfamous. Yeah. It's a mini-nominee. Check your ballot. tinyurl.com forward slash bittersweetinfo me.

Forward slash. It's Josie's very insistent that you know that it's a forward slash. You never know. So I post, I post this pic of Scary Lucy as you do, and at Buttons and Bootlays, aka Christina posted in the comments, OMG, please do Blucifer. Blucifer? Have you ever been to Denver? Yes.

Is it the bull with the red eyes outside of the airport? It's a horse. It's a horse with red eyes outside of the airport. Yes, that thing. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Is it blue? It's blue. It's Blucifer. Yeah. See? It names itself. It's a bucking bronco. Okay.

At a bull? I don't know why that was in my head. Yes. Maybe because the red eyes, the anger, the rage. The anger is, you know what? Let me just send you an image. Okay. So that's your man right there.

That's big. It's blue. Blucifer. He's 32 feet tall. He's made of bright blue fiberglass. He's rearing on his hind legs. How big do you think his penis is? I can't.

Because rearing on his hind legs, like that is up in your face. Let's cut to this point. I was going to, you know, talk about some of his other features, such as his bright red LED floodlight eyes. But since we've gone right to genitals, let me send you this picture. It asks us to go straight to, oh my, oh. So that is his very anatomically correct and well articulated, vivid, veiny, gooch and asshole situation.

Very up in there. The tail is like, the tail is covering nothing. That ponytail is launching up and giving quite some spatial arc for the viewing. It's quite an arresting piece of public art, wouldn't you say? I would say so. The veins in particular are doing a lot. None of the material that I read talked all that much about the veins, but it's very veiny.

They don't, they don't emphasize enough in written accounts how veiny this is. Yeah. It's roided out. I don't, I've only seen it in the daytime. I haven't seen it lit up like that. It's pretty nuts at night. So I know, I think the Denver airport has a whole bunch of weird little Easter eggs. Like there's gargoyles everywhere and like this is one of many strange features that

are part of Denver International Airport. Put a pin in that. Pinning. Pinning a tail to that one. Okay. Yes, pin a tail on it. My God. So good.

For now, what would you imagine was the public reaction to this 32 foot tall bright blue horse with LED floodlight eyes? You know, I'm going to go with what the fuck. I'll just go with that. That's basically it. The horse, which is the brainchild of New Mexico artist Luis Jimenez has stood on guard on Benia Boulevard outside Denver International Airport in the American state of Colorado since 2008.

As with every piece of controversial art we've ever discussed, it has its haters, its detractors, its frightened children. It had the obligatory Facebook group that popped up demanding its removal. Mothers against Blucifer. Yeah. That kind of vibe. Exactly. Blucifer is indoctrinating our children.

The Facebook group in this case is called DIA's heinous blue Mustang has got to go. Here you can find things like tongue-in-cheek haikus dedicated to the giant horse, which I will sample now. Thank you. Blue body and red eyes. It's ugly enough to kill. Welcome to Denver. Give me another.

Don't look at my eyes. You will die by evil fire and never fly again. Oh, that's good. You want one more? One more. Or more. Any more. All the more.

Nasty blue privates. Deadly glowing evil eyes. It killed its maker. What? Yeah, Josie, you heard that last part right. The story goes that Blucifer is so wild, so untamable, that it killed its very own artist. Oh my god, those privates, they're dangerous. But is this deadly urban legend actually true?

So call me old fashioned, but I like to start a biography with the birth. Okay. Luis Jimenez was born in 1940 and grew up apprenticing at his father's neon sign shop. He went to university where he learned about architecture and fine art. He's a University of Texas grad, and then he learned from the great muralists in Mexico City. Cool. Yeah, he seems like a cool dude.

I watched a little video of him talking about his process. Seems like a nice, interesting guy. He made a lot of work sympathizing with immigrants in the working class. He's described as a master of color and often favored really unapologetically vivid, bright colors in his works, which I do too, so I like that. The statue was originally commissioned in 1992, by which time he'd had 30 years experience in sculpting fiberglass. Different concept sketches of Mustang show it in pink or yellow before Jimenez settled

on the familiar blue design, which incorporates flake, a glittery metallic paint of the type common on little rider cars to give him a little bit of sparkle. Yeah, that little shiny glitter babies. Why blue? The story possibly came up with the name Blue Cipher first and then worked backwards. Although that's not to be clear, the statue is called Mustang, not Blue Cipher. The story, according to Luis's widow Susan Jimenez, goes that the artist woke up one night and was startled to see a pair of eerie eyes piercing into him from the darkness of

his home, and it turned out to be his horse, Black Buck, a blue palomino who had managed to find his way into the house in the night. Oh shit, that's scary. A blue palomino, interesting. I mean, affecting in some way clearly, but also like, es me da estrés. Horses are big and it is dark in this house. How did you get in? What the fuck?

You're a thousand pounds. And they're bigger in smaller spaces too, so woof. Yeah, that's true. And I'll try to get them out and they kick you in the face. Horses are a little large for me to like trust them as a city slicker, as a suburbore, and I guess that's ironic in the context of this like 32 foot horse with red eyes that I actually really like, but I don't know. Susan believes that that incident influenced the horse's distinctive color as well as its

LED eyeballs, which are also a tribute to Luis's lighting pro father. Sadly though, while Black Buck was a friendly horse, Blue Cipher would not be so kind to his master. Ooh. Did he ever figure out how Black Buck got into the house? Was that ever determined? Oh, they left a key under the mat. Is that a good answer?

Are you okay with that? Fuck you. Is that satisfied? In the worst way. No, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

Through the door. Okay, all right. Gotcha. I'm in. I'm on. Fuck you. I'm on. Okay.

Let's go. Construction on the statue with snake bitten in general with many missed deadlines and lawsuits, but never more than in 2006, when Luis Jimenez was working on his creation and a part came loose. It hit him in the leg and it severed an artery and poor Mr. Jimenez did in fact lead to death. Oh my God. Are you kidding me? No, the story is unfortunately true.

It was one of those awful workplace accidents. Because fiberglass could be sharp. Sharp. This is a very large statue that happens in many pieces. Yeah. If you imagine something falling from a great height, like this thing is 32 feet tall. Jesus. Who knows?

Oh my gosh. Yeah, rest in peace. Work continued and installation was completed in 2008, 15 years after the initial commission. Oh my gosh. Despite what I would subjectively call bores who stand against the horse. Yes, okay. It has many fans and it still stands as a tribute to the considerable skills of its late artist. Oh my gosh.

The area of Pena Boulevard where the horse stands is subject to extreme weather, which the horse has withstood. Right, yeah. It's resistant to spray paint and as of 2019, the LEDIs had only ever needed to be changed twice. Holy cow. And it's, I guess, yeah, that fiberglass is resistant to spray paint? That's amazing.

Yeah, it got vandalized and apparently it just like scrubbed right off. Oh my gosh. That, yeah. That's a boon. Totally. The horse was originally contracted to stand for five years, which I gather is just kind of policy in terms of public art and Denver. It's now been more than a decade and there are no signs of Lucifer going anywhere, especially

as it nestles deeper into local lore. Totally. And here is where we chat a bit about Josie. You had some weird things to whisper to me about this airport. Yeah, there's like gargoyles everywhere within the airport that you can like spot. There's spotable gargoyles. There's this, apparently this really intense, I'm spotting a lot of intense art at this airport by the way, which is a hilarious quality for an airport.

But there was this very intense mural at the baggage claim that apparently has attracted a lot of like, I guess what I would just call QAnon style conspiracies about its meaning and what it is cryptically trying to say through. It's like a, it's like a pro piece mural I gather and it involves like, I think it involves like the bones of a dead soldier calcifying it while children like have world peace. It's a very weird mural and people have treated it as such. I don't get the sense that Denver is like as a city has the same reputation for intense art.

It's like just all concentrated in the airport. I hope so. I think that's a fucking whole, again, how hilarious quality in an airport is like, here's the baggage claim where you have to, I don't know, meditate on like the folly of war and then you go out and this horse's big blue ass hole is just fucking staring you in the eyeball. It's pretty cool. You like that one?

You're going to love this one. So the way that Blucifer supposedly factors into this whole mess is it bears a striking resemblance. Allegedly draw your own conclusions to a horse seen by soldiers who were subjected to time travel by the US government as part of the Montauk project. It's true. There's no other explanation. It's true.

Can confirm M soldier? Absolutely. Others link it to Hopi prophecies, theories about aliens and sacred geometry, etc. And of course, you've got your bog standard. This horse is haunted by the ghost of the person it killed. Well, yeah, of course. Yeah, don't leave that one off the table. Damn.

But whether or not it's a haunted time traveling alien horse, it is, in my personal subjective opinion, an incredibly cool and commanding piece of art. And it seems that broadly the population of Denver has warmed to it a bit since the, you know, Facebook backlash days. So Christina, you asked, we answered that is the story of Mustang, aka Blucifer, Denver's killer piece of public art. Christina, thank you so much for the suggestion. This photo of the horse's butt and balls will be embedded in my brain forever.

Thanks for that. It'll be embedded also on our Instagram account if it doesn't get as shadow banned. So yeah, that's the story. Christina, I'm sorry for taking four months to actually do it. And to everyone else, if you want to hear your own favorite infamous or infamous story on this show, you can always drop us a line at bittersweetinfamy.com or follow us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy. Taylor, what do you think the worst antiques roadshow segment has been? Ever?

Yeah. Because I haven't seen the mob. No one has the time. Okay. I would anticipate this is in a very nice answer, but you wanted to hear it. I would imagine panic vomit on like, like a very precious carpet. On an antique, priceless carpet. Yes.

Yes, an heirloom. Okay. I did a little research into the worst antiques roadshow. Sick. And I did not watch them all either. How long has this show been on the air in the 60s? Since 1979. Jinkies.

What a venerable television institution then. Beautiful. Really just a testament. The worst one, at least in my research, a very, you know, personal and non-objective take on the worst antiques roadshow episode has to have been when antiques roadshow when Andy McConnell, an antique glass specialist. Oh no. Oh no, stop. I don't want to hear the end of the sentence.

He was presented with a bottle that he could date back to the 18, some time in the 1800s. And there's liquid in there. And the guy who brings it is pretty sure that it's a vintage port or perhaps a red wine. Oh no. And Andy McConnell. This could go, there's so many ways this could go off. So many ways. Now.

And McConnell. We have layers. Inserts a syringe into the cork and extracts a very small amount and on television tastes it. Oh no, what's he gonna do? It doesn't taste great. He's like, oh no, I know. It's a little rusty tasting. Gross.

So they, they send the bottle off to get like a x-ray and to get the contents of the bottle to be tested to determine what is inside and. Piss. Is it piss? I'm going piss. Don't tell me if it's piss. Keep going. There were detected to be brass pins all dating to the late 1840s.

So he was, he was correct in his dating of the bottle at least. The liquid had the tiniest amount of alcohol, a single human hair and urine, human urine. Yes. Sorry. I'm not happy that the man drank piss, but I called it. So I'm, I'm tracking that up to the worst episode of Antiques Roadshow when the appraiser drinks piss on television. That's all.

That's, you know what? That's as, as graphic and written with like bodily fluid terror as my rug vomit. Yeah. No, yeah, you're right. You're right. There's a little overlap there. That's nice. There's, there's same genre, same genre.

Yeah. Yeah. So you're, you're good. Dang, you're good. I've watched every single episode of Antiques Roadshow. So. Now I'm going to tell you about in my humble opinion, what I think to be the best Antiques Roadshow segment.

Okay. January 2009. Okay. Antiques Roadshow. What's, what's, what's, what's happening? A Single Ladies by Beyonce is on the radio. Yeah. What else are we doing?

I am eating 40 chicken fries a night with Matthew Demera in the basement as we watch Single Ladies and, and Poker Face by Lady Gaga. Oh yeah. Yeah. I am in quarantine with all my best friends, getting way too drunk during a swine flu in Mexico when I was studying abroad. I meet a swine flu. Sounds like my 2009 was better than yours.

Although you studied abroad. I had a good time. I didn't get sick. It was good. I thought I was sick, but I was really hungover. That was it. The nurse was like, uh. That does happen.

But in Belfast, they are filming an episode of Antiques Roadshow and a woman named Christine Lynch brings a series of antique photographs and an antique camera to be appraised. Um, she brings her daughter with her and she tells an expert, Paul Atterbury, that she believes, as her mother had done, that one of these photos depicts real life fairies. The photos were taken by Lynch's mother, who was named Francis Griffiths, along with her cousin, Elsie Wright, took these photographs behind the family house in Coddingley, which is near Bradford in England. The year was 1917 and they had a small, obviously old-fashioned for now, small camera with them.

And they take photos along the small creek that's behind their house. And the results are these photos that Christine Lynch has brought in. So hypothetically, if they test it for fairy dust and it's negative, then that proves it right there, right? Right. They just X-ray it, swipey swoo it. They just have to do, take it to forensics, do a fairy dust test, bog standard, but a bing, but a boom.

Snored it. See how they feel. Do they fly? Yeah, you can lick it. Do you trip out? What's going on? So the appraiser, Paul Atterbury, is very excited because he knows this story. He knows the story of the Coddingley fairies.

He knows about these photographs that were taken in 1917 by this woman's own mother. Oh my gosh, can't believe, received at the same table. He recognizes each photo that she has brought. They depict young girls in a glen with these fairies either floating around their faces or dancing in the grass where they're laying, a diaphanous, beautiful little robes and twinkling little wings. Yeah. Of course, they're black and white images considering the 1917 time, but...

Yeah, the world was in black and white then. It really was. Paul Atterbury is very excited. He appraises them at 25 to 30,000 pounds for the time. Dang. Which is pretty good. But how do you sell something like that? But these photos don't have all fairy dust sprinkle sparkle connotations because the Coddingley

fairy photos got wrapped up in a very widespread debate about the existence of fairies. And this debate was led and spearheaded by British author Arthur Conan Doyle. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes. Welcome back to the podcast, Sir Arthur. First of all, I'm writing a piece of detective work of some kind right now. Stay tuned for that, folks. Murder reporter, murder reporter. But part of my thing has been I want to write a detective who's not like such an asshole,

but it's really hard. Yeah. It's hard to have a character who knows everything or knows enough to make the reader feel secure enough about trusting them without them coming off like a little bit of a smug prick. The good authors can do it, of course, but... You need to go and just watch the fuck out of Colombo. That's the true one. Colombo would be all fucking happy smiles and then you'd turn around and you'd be like,

one more thing. One last thing. Yeah, just put it in. And that's when you knew you were getting the pipe. It was over. Colombo was about to ruin your life. He runs on his coat, doddering, forgetful Colombo. Boom.

Solves the case. It's true. That's a good workaround. Yes. But you're right. There's never a time where someone's like kind and on top of it. You have to obfuscate one way or another. To circle back.

Do you recall Sir Arthur's last appearance on the podcast, Josie? Oh, was it in Bratherians? No, but that sounds very up to Sally. It was, we had a discussion when we were talking about Miss Cleo back in our season premiere, episode 31, we had a discussion about how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini had had this big falling out because Harry Houdini had made it his life's mission to expose fraudulent mediums and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as I'm sure we're about to hear, very into that sort of thing.

I, I'm so glad you said that because I wanted to allude to that episode and not have to talk about it here. So perfect. Okay. Oh, sorry. I should give one last piece of context. I've seen these photographs. I know them.

Oh, you do. Oh, okay. Okay. Yes. I know the entire story, just that I, they're very cool photos. They're lovely. Yeah. If I was a Rube from the turn of the century, I'd buy it.

Dude, happily. And I knew that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was all tied up in it in some way and that he had, you know, he has a history of getting himself into the shenanigans. That's his MO. Yeah. But I'm excited to hear more and I didn't know that they came out by, I didn't know that they had made an appearance on Antiques Roadshow. Yeah.

And no one barfed. No one drank urine. No one barfed. No, no. Clean episode. And finally drink pee. This is a very, uh, crass episode. It's a lot of dick and butt hole and piss and pee.

It's true. Well, we're not sorry. We are talking about fairies, you know, and fairies have kind of like this navish mythical legend vibe where they'll kind of do anything to get anything they want. So it feels fitting. Yes, they're tricksters and petty and they have long memories and so on. Yeah. So we'll talk a little bit about fairies in general.

Um, though I do want to say that the appraiser for Antiques Roadshow, Paul Atterbury, he very sweetly asks Christine Lynch, who is this old woman, she's, you know, grayed hair, big old Coke bottle glasses, and he asks, do you, do you believe in fairies? You said your mother believed that one of these photos is in fact true. Do you believe in fairies? And she says, of course my mother, my mother said until her dying day, she said, I do. And he asks the granddaughter and she says, I do. And he, towards the end, as they come to the end, he's like, you know, I, why not?

Yes, I do too. I really do too. Look at this beautiful place. Of course there you have to be fairies there. Oh my gosh. I love it. I love it. Which is really sweet.

So fairies are a mythical tradition from all over the world. You can trace them in any culture in terms of being kind of a small, a small people. A duende. Oh yeah. Duende is basically a fairy. I'm sure there are differences, but it's a similar vibe, right? Yeah. I think the very loose definition of fairy would be like a magical race that is parallel

to our own, somewhere between like humans and angels if we're kind of in a Western context, but they take on a lot of different, different roles in different cultures. Yes. In ancient Egypt, they were viewed as demons similar to how they were viewed in Greece and Rome, which was spirits of ill omens. We'll concentrate most on the way that fairies were viewed in the UK and Ireland because they do hold a very special place, one, but two, that's also our story takes place in the UK.

So there's a long lineage of fairies across Europe and Northern Europe within the Norse God mythology. There were these delicate beings who lived in caves and under rocks and they were known for being really, really wealthy and for achieving that wealth in any way necessary. Right. And like throughout all types of at least British understandings of fairies, they could it turn be evil when humans kind of needed someone to blame? So my child's dead or there's a curse on this.

Must have been a fairy. Must have been a fairy. Yeah. Jean Webert, you let the fairies in again. Yeah, exactly. Or if there was good fortune or good fortune needed, then the fairies could represent that as well. So they're kind of all over the place.

But so are people. So are humans. So true. There's good stuff and bad stuff. Yeah. In the Irish tradition, the understanding of fairies goes very deep. They're known by a few different names. The Feira, who could have actually been taken from traditions in Persia during the Crusades

as Irish or British soldiers were, you know, fighting for Christ in the Middle East. These cultural elements came back to the British Isles. There's most definitely ways in which Irish fairies in particular are an accumulation of pagan ideas translated into Christianity. So some of their larger godlike elements are kind of diminished and there's more fanciful elements added. Right. They're even seen in one particular way as the she.

They're called the she. And they are spirits of the Toa Denan, which is an early Irish race that disappeared. And they were believed to be partially divine. And this interpretation of fairies, the she, they lived in these beautiful glens and everything was happy. They wore robes of silver. They drank milk and honey and nectar directly from small tiny flowers. They, they also fit that role of like the trickster.

So they would take any form to get anything that they wanted. And again, they were tremendously wealthy, you know, they lived in these hidden palaces made of gold and pearl and emeralds and all this stuff. I like that the things that are important to us in terms of our economy and what we value are also equally like they have also arbitrarily decided that oyster drool is a thing of great value. It's shiny. So I don't know.

You know what? It do be shiny. I can't argue with that. So in the Celtic Renaissance of the 1900s, a national identity started to emerge within idea of fairies. So it entered a lot of Irish literature and that kind of started to roll further east to England as well. And there was similar folklore throughout England, old version of the fairy that I always

think of as the, in Midsummer Night's Dream in the Shakespearean play. Like those. Yeah, sure. Yeah, like that whole world of the fairies, they're like beautiful and sparkly, but they're yeah, they're cheeky, lopsided tricksters and there's, there's curses and spells and everyone's very saucy and everyone's got an ulterior motive and you know, they live among the trees. Yeah.

I mean, which as you said earlier, like all the humans in that Shakespearean play are also doing that, but they are being controlled by the fairies in some way. So there's this element. Yeah. The other thing too is I feel like my concept of fairies is that they're always one step ahead. They're a bit smarter than humans. Yeah.

Yeah. Or at least better at fucking around. They got better street smarts. They've got better strategies. They've had centuries, millennia to lay the shit out. Yeah. Speaking of the centuries and the millennia to lay the shit out, as England and Ireland began to industrialize, there was this sense that perhaps the fairies were being pushed

out. They gentrified out the fairies. Yes. Oh no. But because of that, fairies became more and more popular within the literature and the culture of both England and Ireland. Like in Ireland, it kind of began to, I don't know, there was like a renaissance of it. But this was also during kind of a scientific era.

So what happened with that was that scientific studies began to be conducted and there was all these hypotheses about, you know, fairies. Yes. Oh my God. Old school quack science. Yes. I'm so excited. That Darwinian understanding of evolution, fairies over the millennia have evolved from

butterflies. That makes perfect sense. Doesn't it? It really does. Yes. So yeah, there's a lot of this pseudoscience that gets pumped into fairies as they become popular in this industrialized era, which is where we find ourselves with this, what could best be called an accidental conspiracy?

One of those. So let's check in with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Always a pleasure. He grew up in a Catholic family, but he claimed to have a life-changing interaction with the spirit around 1887. That's when I had mine. We can all trace it back. Good year.

It was a good year for that. A good year. It was also the year that he came out with his first short story about Sherlock Holmes called A Study in Scarlet. It actually wasn't all that popular, but it did get enough traction that he wrote two more novels that featured Sherlock. Also in that same year, 1887, Conan Doyle writes a letter to a spiritualist magazine called Light.

With this. Light magazine. Light magazine. Like this detailed description, come defense of a séance that he had taken part in. And so this is like definite confirmed public record of his interest in what is called spiritualism. Yeah. And as we spoke about before, he blew out like a lifelong friendship over it. Totally.

Yeah. Do you remember spiritualism from that episode? Spiritualism is a little bit spooky. It's when you think that, I don't know, we can make contact beyond the veil and vice versa. And there are spirits among us in a very classic haunted house sense. You know, there's ghosts and we can make contact with them and vice versa. And within that afterlife, they continue to evolve and learn. And so they, with endless amount of time, know more than us.

So there's a sense that we could gather information from them. There's always something to be learned from. Right. Beyond the veil. And another thing that we discussed in that episode was this notion of open eye and closed eye mediums. The sense that there are people who genuinely believe this to be true. And then there are those who are doing this for, you know, money, attention, prestige,

power, whatever. To steal a word from you. So our boy, Conan Doyle, he's getting a lot of attention from us. Getting the toes real wet with spiritualism at the same exact time that he's getting traction with Sherlock, which is kind of interesting because Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character, a fictional detective who is known for being extremely logical, using deductive, inductive reasoning to solve the most heinous or intricate crimes he's not seen at all as an emotional character.

There is no way shape or form that Sherlock can like understand a crime through his empathies. No. He's extraordinarily rational, which is kind of funny to think of the creator of this character being a spiritualist. Yeah, I think that's where a lot of people find some disbelief is like the idea is that if you're able to like, I don't know, to if you're able to so carefully construct this narrative that's also a brain teaser and create this character that puts such an emphasis

on logic combined with that, this must be a reflection of you, Shirley, intelligent, deductive man. And then when you find out that no, he was off with the fairies in the most literal sense. In the very literal sense. 1891, Sherlock, a series of stories about Sherlock gets picked up by The Strand magazine, which is a brand new publication. And the stories are so popular that they launch the magazine into popularity and together The Strand magazine and Sherlock kind of capture the English imagination.

Yes. He starts publishing even more novels that feature Sherlock, different cases, all of this. And this is really like how it gets cemented even into, I mean, I don't know, there's still Sherlock shows all over the place. There was just, I feel like he'll appreciate this, there was just a kind of Sherlock Holmes appearance in a Phoenix Wright video game, which is my favorite series, speaking of detective video games that I really, really love, Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney, Fantastic Series. There's a character in it who's clearly Sherlock Holmes.

And in the Japanese release, he's called Sherlock Holmes, but in order to get around it, they've changed the character's name in the West to Sherlock Holmes. You mean did like get around the licensing or something? Yes, yes. And maybe, and this, this game was stuck in Japan forever and maybe this has something to do with it. But the fucked up thing is this is not the first time this has happened. Back in the day, there was a writer named Maurice LeBlanc, who in the exact same way

and to, to skirt the Sherlock Holmes copyright, did a Arsène-Loupin versus Sherlock Cholmez. Cholmez. Cholmez. I'm like Cholmez. This was back in 1908. There's a long history of people using Sherlock Cholmez as a side-spect to use Sherlock Holmes, but go on, go on. I love it.

I love it. Well, as much as everybody fucking loved Sherlock, Conan Doyle did not. And in 1893, just a few years after the character first debuted, he killed him. He killed Sherlock. Yeah, wonderful. Yeah. And with along with Professor Moriarty, they plummet to there. Ice cold.

Very great. It's interesting to me, and I hope I don't get this way with Myrtle Porter, Myrtle Reporter. Agatha Christie and Poirot, same gig. It turns out that if you write a character to be an insufferable twat who's always right, you don't actually want to spend that much time hanging out with them. Yeah. No matter how much people, other people like them, that's great that you like Hercules

Poirot. You don't got to live with them. Yeah. No, it's true. That's true. Make your long-running detective characters humble. Crumbs on their, on their trench coats. Make them humble.

Boom. That was good. Got him. You're good today. Case closed. Thank you. Well, even though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't like Sherlock, everybody else loved him so much that he comes back from death, which knowing Conan Doyle kind of makes sense.

Apt. Yeah. And in 1901, he publishes the novel The Hounds of Baskerville, which is actually serial ized in The Strand, the magazine The Strand. Also that year, 1901, is born a young girl, Elsie Wright, in West Yorkshire, in Coddingley. She is highly artistic, extremely intelligent, and also very rebellious in her family. In 1917, so when Elsie is 16, her younger cousin, Francis Griffiths, moves in with the family, moves in with Elsie, because Francis' family has needed to come back to England

from Cape Colony in South Africa. What relation is Francis Griffiths to our dear old lady on The Piss Show? Oh, Christine Lynch. It's her mom. Francis is her mom. Her mom. Okay, so this is Christine Lynch's mother. And Francis is considerably younger.

She's only nine. So in 1917, Elsie is 16, and then Francis is nine. So there's kind of an age difference between them. And Francis has moved from South Africa because her dad has been called to go to the front lines in Europe. So Francis and her mom move in with her cousin and Elsie's parents in Coddingley. Being a little bit older, Elsie can sense that her younger cousin, Francis, is like, this is a strange place.

She has never been to England, even though she's English, colonialism, South Africa. There's a whole new landscape for her. Her dad is in a very deadly war, and everything is just like, what is going on? You know, she's adjusting. And so Elsie, the sweet cousin that she is, takes a good effort to befriend her. They hang out. They chill out. They hang out and chill out.

They hang and chill. Damn. Yeah, it's busy summer. She's really putting in the effort. Yeah. Yeah. When Francis came to England, she traveled by boat, and to entertain herself on the long voyage, she had a very popular book at the time called Princess Mary's Gift Book.

It was a charity publication that featured many of the day's popular writers and artists. Rudyard Kipling was in it. So Arthur Conan Doyle was actually featured in it himself. But what Elsie really loved in the book, and what she returned to repeatedly, were a series of illustrations of dancing girls drawn by Arthur Sheperson. So Francis rolls up Coddingley Cottage, 31 Main Street. She shares a bedroom with her older cousin, Elsie, and like I said, they chill and they hang.

Let's do it. Do it. In the house, Elsie's father is an amateur photographer. He's an avid photographer, which, you know, it's 1917. Cameras are pretty new on the scene. He has a quarter plate minge camera, which I don't know, has like that accordion situation on the front. Yeah.

And like you look down. Classic old timey camera. Yeah. And it like takes the photo on a silver plate. It has to be processed in a dark room, which Elsie's father converted an old pantry into one. Okay. Ah, to have a room to spontaneously convert into a dark room.

I know, right? It's, that's really nice. So photography is kind of a known thing. The only Elsie's father really does it. Behind the house, as I mentioned before, there's a small stream. Or because we're in Yorkshire, you would call it a Beck, B-E-C-K. Okay. It is a chill cousin summer.

They are floating in the back. They're taking photos, at least Elsie's dad is. They're playing in the meadows. They're just having a good, friendly time. Elsie's trying to keep things real on the level because Francis is, you know, a little freaked out. Francis loves the backyard, the Beck routinely her and Elsie will go down there and just spend entire days.

Francis, as a result though, comes back home with her wet shoes and her skirts are muddy and her mom freaks out. Her mom is also extremely stressed out. She's moved from South Africa. I was going to say, I see the family resemblance. Her husband is on the western front, most likely not going to make it. Right. That's fair.

Yes, I forget. I forget. And her memoir that she wrote later in life, she does remember that her mom's hair was falling out at this time. She's on fucking edge. And when Francis rolls through with her wet shoes, her mom uncharacteristically is like, what am I going to do with you? You have never misbehaved before.

You're ruining everything. Why do you even want to be down at the Beck anyway? And Francis also uncharacteristically talks back and says, I go to see the fairies. Bitch. Damn. Doesn't say it. Wow. Bitch.

But you know, I'm sure she thinks that. Wait, she didn't say bitch. She didn't say not direct quote, but I think it's like an internal quote. You know? It's implied. The bitch is implied. It's implied. It's implied.

Yeah. In this memoir that Francis wrote later in life, she does say that she saw fairies at this time, but they looked more like troops that were parading around the meadows in the back. She remembers wondering if these. Those are ants. Troop fairies had similar experiences to her father who was in war. So those are ants.

It's ants or you know, it's child psychology 101. She's trying to process her dad being away at war and like this is how this is how she's going to do it. Yeah, that's that's probably more true than ants. Well, or ants, you know, you don't know, you really don't know. We weren't there. 1917. No, we don't know.

It's hard to say. Maybe they were fairies. Who knows? The parents, the all three of them, because it's LC's two parents and then Francis's mom. They break into laughter. They're like the dumbest thing I've ever fucking heard. Wow. And not to her face.

Well, conversely, they're also cross with her. They're like, you're telling lies. Stop it. You know, it's funny, but shut up kind of thing. Oh, no. That's. Wow. Yeah.

Not only is your take ridiculous, but I don't want you to say it ever again. Exactly. Yeah, it's like that's so dismissive for thing. It is kind of a good line though. Like if a kid busted out, I'm fucking going to see the face. You'd be like, okay, you little smart ass. That's true. That's true.

To be fair. Yeah. But like your first response, LC also was like, hey, don't pick on her. She's having a hard ass time. Leave her alone. And she's feeling. My first response was this is ants, but to be honest, yes. That's true.

Your second response. LC took on your second response. You know, maybe she thought ants too. I don't know. Maybe. And so LC feels bad for her little cousin. And so she pipes up and she's like, yeah, I've seen them too. Faries totally.

Down at the back. See him all the time. What a wingman. What? What a man. Right? Just so sweet. So kind.

The thing that is a little different though is that LC is 16. So when a kind of tantruming nine year old said it, it takes on like shut up vibes. But when somebody a little bit older says it. You look like an adult. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I see. Still all the parents mock them both.

They, you know, make fun of all of them, which just, you know, a one parenting right there and LC's response to not only their negative reaction and cruel reaction, I'd say to Francis, but then they're like cruel reaction to her. She's like, fuck this noise. Let's fuck some shit up. So yes. Fabricate. Fabricate.

And the next few days, uh, LC and Francis take the Princess Mary gift book, the one that featured the illustrations of the dancing girls and they trace them out on paper. They add large wings to them so that they look like fairies. They, um, juge them up a little bit. So there's like, you know, they're a little shinier there. You know, these wings are adding a lot. They mount these tracings on hat pins, which nursing hat pin. It's a pretty big, small steel rod.

It could be like up to six inches, strong, not very, not super flexible. They were big hats. And they stuck the pins with the fairies taped to them. They stuck them in the grass or they adhered them to branches in order to pose with them. This is just so amazing to me. So LC asks her dad if she could borrow his camera. It's a very new, fandangled thing. And so her dad is a little reluctant.

She asks specifically like, we're going to go take photos of motherfucking fairies. So I need your camera. So they're like, go nuts. Let's see these fairies. Let's see what you know. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

So the other moms are like, you know what? Arthur, give her the goddamn camera. Well, I'd love to see this. LC, this bitch has never taken a photo before in her goddamn life. The first shot that she takes. That is a very good fake for somebody who's never used a camera before is 16 years old. It's kind of doing this on a whim, et cetera. That's very good.

It's the camera work, but also the set design. Like she traced out these beautiful fairies. She arranged them in the perfect way so that you don't see the hat pins. You don't see any. Can I see this picture? Yes. Let me send it to you. But you have seen them.

Is that correct? Yes. I have seen them before. Okay. So I believe this. Oh yeah. This is the first one. Yeah.

This is LC who is like, there's a beautiful little waterfall in the background and there's some like very lush. It's of course all black and white, but it's like a lush foliage. Her hand is under her chin and her hair is long and her, you know, I imagine her cheeks are rosy and in front of her is like maybe a moss covered log or maybe like a small hill of moss. And on this hill or this log are four fairies. One is playing a little flute.

The others are seemingly dancing. They're having a grand old time. And Francis is, you know, chilling. She's just like, what's up? She's in. She got the invite. Yeah. She totally got the invite, but she's not even looking at the fairies.

She's like looking straight at the camera. Well, she's used to the fairies. She hangs out with them all the time. She sees them all the time and it's like, hey, get the camera out. Cheers. Like let's like have a little photo here. To her, it's not like these are the fairies. She's like, that's Natalie.

Yeah. That's, you know, crystal who later appears in Fern Gully. They take only a few photos with these little fairies. I think the other shot that they take, the fairy is kind of, it looks like it's flying right by Elsie's head up on kind of a tree and another beautiful little robe and tall shapely wings. They take the camera back home. They give it to their dad or, you know, to Elsie's dad.

And of course he has to develop them. There's no other way to see the images. And so he does it immediately. Right. I mean, I love how everyone has just like hung up their day to see who will buckle in this bullshit battle about fairies. This is so wonderfully petty. It was a very, it was a very chill, very hang out oriented summer for the whole family.

Yeah. So let the shit fly. We have the time to go, to go fabricate some fairy photos, to prove a point about listening to children. Get that family drama going. So he develops the photos and the photos, as we discussed, are fucking fly. They look amazing. And of course the parents are like, what?

But they don't believe it. Interesting. They're like, okay, okay, we can't explain it, but okay, whatever. The next day, Elsie and Francis borrow the camera again. This round, Elsie is photographed posing with a goblin. Yes. Expand the repertoire. Mm-hmm.

Why not? Fairies didn't do it. Maybe the goblins. Yeah. Maybe they buy goblins. Exactly. So in this one, she has a cute little hat. I would call it a bucket hat, but it's 1917, so whatever.

It's a bucket hat with a rose on it. Yeah. You got it. Mm-hmm. She is crisscross applesauce in the grass. Her skirt is over her knees and kind of at the edge of her skirt is this little, like, I don't know, two-step-and-goblin, like, ta-ta. Yeah.

He's creepin'. He's tiptoeing. She seems not at all scared. This is friendly, you know, he's got a little pokey hat. So the parents see the photos and they're like, we don't understand how this could happen, but you're dumb. Go behave. What a terrible response.

I would either be like, damn, you kids are so creative. I love this is, this is beautiful work. Oh, yes, bitch, I surrender. There are fairies and you know them. It's something. Or... Shut these kids a bone. You send them to therapy.

Whichever works, you know? Exactly. Which is exactly why the girls stick to their story. They're like, uh-uh, this fucking happened. These are real. Right. Yes. Flash forward.

Three years. We're 1920. Okay. The two girls' mothers, Pauly Wright and Annie Griffiths, they attend a lecture in Bradford in the closest town. They attend a lecture on fairy life at the Bradford Theosophical Society, where a very distinguished scholar, Edward Gardner, is giving this presentation on fairy life. The illuminating lecture on fairy life.

The moms are chatting it up about these photos of fairies that their daughters took. Which of course, Gardner's like, oh, I would, I would love to see those if they're handy. Yeah. And Edward Gardner, this quote unquote expert, he's also the general secretary of the Bradford Theosophical Society. So he's like, he's deep in it. You know what I mean? Deep, deep.

Yes. He's in there. He's in the fairies, hence this lecture series that he gives. Yes. And these women must have come with this specific thing in mind, yes, otherwise very rich for them to be attending a fairy lecture after they very shamed their fucking children. I do, I do like the idea of them being like, we just need to get out of the house, don't we?

And then they arrive and they're like, oh, fairies, let me tell you. Theosophy. Okay. Edward Gardner asks for the two photos, the originals and the negatives. He has them colorized. He mounts them so that he can use them in his lectures in London. It's three years after these photos have been taken, but they are making their way to the big house.

Completely devoid of their original context. Exactly. The further away they travel, I would imagine. Exactly. Edward got out of Gardner's lectures that featured these photos, and it was reported in Light Magazine, which you might remember from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's early letter. Like 40 minutes ago, yeah. About his life-shaking experience at a seance and how true and wonderful all the bullshit

is. And so, Conan Doyle of course sees these photographs. He's deeply interested in what is called spirit photography. And he's even writing an article on fairies for The Strand Magazine, which is what first published and popularized Sherlock Holmes. Arthur Conan Doyle talks to Gardner and he's like, do you think these are real? Gardner's like, I think they are real. And immediately Conan Doyle is like, analysis.

This shit is epic making. We could change the world. Absolutely. Let's get circulating, baby. First, Arthur Conan Doyle has to get permission from the girl's parents to publish the photos. Right. That's respectful adherence to copyright. Yeah, I think so.

I guess they wanted to cover all their tracks, because this was going to change the world. God forbid you fumble the big fairy reveal over you didn't cross the T's and now you look a fool. Exactly. That would be embarrassing. So Conan Doyle, famous author of Sherlock Holmes, the most reason bound character in English literature. To a fault, he spits facts.

All the time. This author writes to the girl's parents asking for the permission. The parents are like, well, Elsie, Francis, what do you think? Do you give permission? Elsie's like, you're stupid, dad. You're stupid, mom. Arthur Conan Doyle wants the photos. Give them to him.

Yes. Elsie's like, reveling in the fact. She's 19 and she's instilled chaos. What's not to be happy about? Yeah. Yeah. Her fake point is getting proven. She's loving it.

I mean, when you get your parents like that, when they say something incorrect or mean, and then you spin it back. Nuclear. It's nuclear. Shouldn't feel as good as it does. Sick burn. An epic burn. A sixth slam.

You catch some parents running down a child once and you're like, I'm going to ruin your fucking life. And you do. That is what happens. So as we're saying earlier, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is a fierce publicly devoted spiritualist and he is so devoted, he feels himself to be a leading and global expert of spiritualism. Okay. Which, you know, we talked about it in kind of these religious terms, a faith system,

a belief system, but there is a political bent to spiritualism at this time. It's post-World War I and there are a lot of people who have lost loved ones in their lives, incomes, spiritualism being like, well, you can still talk to them for a small fee. You can attend this lecture or you can attend the seance and blah, blah, blah. So right. It's seen by opponents to be kind of a predatory practice spiritualism. Yes. Yes.

There's a political push against spiritualism, but it's also an age of reason as well. So there's not only that political don't be mean bent, there's also this, that is not true. As a rationalist, that is not true. Fairies do not exist. The ghost is not featured in that photo, blah, blah, blah. But our guy, Conan Doyle, he thinks himself to be completely skeptical, intelligent enough to determine the authenticity of these things, to be an expert witness on these things.

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But he wrote Sherlock. He got duped by a really good seance one time and like fucking flipped his entire life over for it. I'm sorry. But he also, he wrote Sherlock, the epitome of logic and credibility. He is, you know, like a pinnacle of reason, at least the character is, in English society.

I've written fucking you in a fucking Bolivian prison doing cocaine. That doesn't mean I'm you doing fucking cocaine. It's not how it goes. The people who think themselves the most logical are often the people whose logic doesn't account for the powerful sway that emotion has over the decisions we make, the things that we believe, the fact that this man looked at these photos of this little girl with fairies and thought, this confirms something that I desperately wanted my soul to be true. So I believe that it is.

Yeah. I think another element to bring in, too, is it's 1917 and people are like facts are facts, photos are facts, fairies are facts. We're still having trouble with that one now. Yeah. To be fair. Yeah. That one's still a little hard for us.

Yeah. We're still dealing with that. So skeptical muscles were not even existed in 1917. We might need to work on them now. Yeah. But at the time we didn't even have previous incidents or if there were, there were very few of someone doing something like fabricating a photograph. Exactly.

Yeah. And the camera was seen as a scientific instrument. You know? That's true. That's fair. Cameras don't lie. Yeah. It was meant to capture what was reality, what was in front of you.

Paintings and other art forms were meant to be representational, but photography was exact. The real, real. So Arthur Conan Doyle founds the society for super normal pictures that has the expressed interest of investigating images, investigating spirit photography and photography of any, you know, fairies, elves, all that kind of stuff. Yes. Which, you know, the Coddingley fairies fit into nicely.

This society is made up of a series of photography experts and spiritual experts, all of this. Every single one of them, in order to be within the society, had to sign an article of faith, which meant that a condition of being in the group was that you had to believe in spirits and fairies and elves. So it's a Hippocratic oath for spooky photos, basically. In this war of the rationalists versus the spiritualists, which is nicely displayed in Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tift, in this war, the Coddingley fairies play a very, very important role.

They launch the society for super normal pictures. It becomes kind of this rallying cry for Conan Doyle. At this time, you know, when the photos kind of come out a little bit more, he's in Australia, giving lectures, of course. So he enlists Gardner, the original fairy expert, who pretty much does all the grunt work to investigate the Coddingley fairy photos. He puts together a report that is published in The Strand magazine. You might remember that magazine.

Yeah, of serializing the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's game. And the report is presented as a credible, objective, and highly technical authentication of the photos. Kodak is asked to comment on the photos. Kodak the guy? Is he like? Or the company, like the photo camera company. They're asked to, you know, have an expert weigh in, and they are quote unquote, unwilling

to testify. Fair enough, dude. Don't get dragged into this. Totally. We don't have a corporate stance on the existence of fairies, I'm sorry. As opposed to most companies which only recognize fairies in June, Wafawaka. Whoa. Anyway, go ahead.

No, get in there. Do it. Twist the knife. But the Society for Supernormal Pictures does have a photo expert who is part of their ranks. A man named Snelling, who examines the photos. He says, yeah, thumbs up. Jing you wine. D's be fairies.

Wait, wait, wait. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I object. Objection you're on. Objection? Okay. I have something to say.

Come back. Come. I approach the bench. I'm not going. You can say, I'm sure that it is within the provenance of a, I don't know, an authenticator to say something like, I don't believe these photos have been altered, let's say. Yes. But you can't say that like fairies, fairies conclusively do or don't exist.

I would just be like, okay, well they fabricated it in some way that they didn't actually alter the photographic paper. I mean, put it to you this way. We've been bigging these photos up and for a fucking 16-year-old who never held a camera, they are pretty good, but if you look at them, the characters are a little bit flat. Like you can, it's not, it's not that hard to think that they might be fake. Apparently, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle went on this long tangent about that goblin photo and he was like, see some people are believing that the goblin is a doll, but how could it

be a doll? It has an umbilicus look and it's like, wait, so it has a belly button, so that makes it real? Like what? And it later came out, Frances and Elsie were like, actually that's just where we stuck the hat pin in the drawing. So in the photo, it comes up like a little dot in his center, but it's just the head of the hat pin.

That's so cute. I hope, and I mean, I don't want to step on your story, but I hope this poor man died before they figured out what happened with these photos, because if not, anyway. So Snelling, the photo expert, after he gives a thumbs up in the report, he's then asked to, if you could just simply do a small tech shop of the photo so that we can see the fairies a little bit more clearly for our lecture series. He goes in. Doctor, the photo.

He brightens up Frances's face and one, he removes some foilage and another, he increases the details on some wings. It's just a little like fairy filter that he applies. It's a real photo. Yeah. You vary that. Very Instagram. Mm-hmm.

Very. This report goes out. It hits English society and everyone's like, okay, fairies, cool. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is like really worked up though, and he wants more proof. He wants more photos to prove his point. Bringing me photos of Spider-Man. Right. But with fairies.

Right? Well, it's just like, it's so strange that he's like, bring me photos of fairies instead of bring me motherfucking fairies. Like, I want to see a real fairy. Like, why? He knows. He knows. He knows.

In his heart of heart, he knows. Mm-hmm. He fucking knows that I can't bring you a fairy in a jar, otherwise it would have been done. And the reason is they're such chaotic trickster figures and very wealthy. They get pearlescent and visible and you can't see them in the jar. True. I heard that the umbilicus is the source of their powers.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has the girls sent two fancy cameras, a cameo quarter plate, which is a very expensive piece of equipment. Nice. Swag. And apparently when they're given to the girls, it's like, you know what, this is just a gift. Like, you're so great. You did such good work catching those fairies on film.

We just want to give these as a gift. But it also becomes very clear that it's like, if you were able to take another photo or two. That's a bribe, bitch. That's a bribe. And the parents are like, well, you can't just take that camera and not do something. You know, goddamn manners. Go to the back and take some more photos.

Don't get your shoes wet. Take some more photos with your friends for Mr. Sir Doyle. Yeah. They go in and they go into the back and they take a few more photos. These ones picture kind of a, I would call like a flapper-esque fairy. She's got a little, you know, sleeveless tunic, exactly. And she's like chilling on a leaf, Francis is looking at the little flower that she's passing her.

This is the one that made me think, prior to hearing this story, I thought that they were digitally altered photographs because this looks more like that than if that is actually done all live and in person with just a fake fairy and a camera. That is very cool. Yeah. No, very cool. And okay, are you seeing this image? It's another, it's called the Fifth Coddingly Fairy Photo.

Oh my. This is very pretty. Could you describe this fifth photo for us? I believe we found the nest, if I had to guess. We're down in the grass and there's some kind of wild flowers arcing around the translucent images of these two fairies, which are very much in the style of the other ones. One of them is wearing a very long, pretty gown with a long train that she's holding up.

The other kind of has, there might be a third fairy as well in the back here. There's one of them is a little girl kind of looking out. It's a very, it's a cool photo. It's the kind of thing that's just ambiguous and weird enough that if you want to believe fairies exist, maybe. Yeah, another strange thing about this is like the images of the fairies, the captured images are like kind of behind blades of grass as well, so there's like a depth to them. Yeah, that's a good point.

It also seems like they're see-through in a weird way as well. Yeah. Are you seeing that too? It scans to me that this is from another batch of photos because this photo and the last photo to me look a bit more real, they've upped their game. Once you're in the business, I guess, she's had, she's like 1920 now, she's had three years to sit on if I did the fairy photo scam again, how would I do it better, you know? Yeah.

New ideas, the sequel's always better than the original. So apparently, Elsie and Francis maintained to their dying day that this was not a fabrication. They were chilling out in the meadow by the beck and they saw some kind of shimmering in the grass and Francis set up the camera, it probably took 10 minutes because it's an old-ass camera, she clicked this photo and this is what came out, they didn't set anything up. Interesting. Oh yeah, that's bullshit, it looks like the fourth one.

Yeah. But fun. Real fun. Bullshit but fun. Yeah. It could also be that they had gotten so deep into this lie, not even a lie, but this kind of admission of truth, I'd say, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is invested, very invested. Too invested, some would say.

Yeah, this other Garner guy and they're just like, oh well, you know, if Francis was seeing the fairies as troops, then I don't know why they couldn't see these fairies to make them, maybe not make themselves, but to allow an outlet for them to tell the truth. And I also think that maybe Francis always believed it from the jump and Elsie's entire principle from the whole beginning of the thing was like, sure, me too. Yeah, let's fuck shit up. Maybe that's what it is, maybe it's just one last little sweet lie from a cousin to their younger cousin.

And you know, if you believe a lie long enough, especially if it gets passed around the telephone wires long enough too, you can kind of start to believe it, especially when you hear the lie come back to you and it's from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, you know? Right, yeah, very true, very true. And I did see fairies, okay. The second set of photos is published in another report and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle says, you know, the cry of fake is sure to be made, but this is epic making. Now he has these photos, not just to have like an evaluation of whether the photos are

real or fairies are real, all of that. Just like, here is my failsafe proof that fairies are real. Here's even more photographs. How could you not believe this? This is FACT. That come from the same source as the other photographs, yeah, I don't know. Popular belief at the time, there were some who were utterly convinced by Arthur Conan Doyle, you know, like, oh, he's Sherlock's dad.

Yeah, he knows. Sherlock's dad. Mr. Locke? Sherlock Holmes. Wouldn't it be Mr. Holmes? No, it's for his first name is Sherlock and his last name is Locke. Sure, sure. Holmes is a suffix.

It's like saying Esquire. Oh, cool, cool, cool. There's also a contingency of the public opinion that's like, oh, is he crazy? There's a cartoon that was published in a major paper and it's an image of Sherlock shackled to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's wrist. He's trying to get away from Conan Doyle but Sherlock can't and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's pulling him along and his head is depicted in the clouds, like he's not looking at anything. He's like off in La La Land kind of thing.

This was the Harry Potter's mom hates trans people of its era. Yeah. No, but we really like the books. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't make us do this. It is Harry Potter's mom, yeah. Mrs. Potter.

Yeah. Speaking of books, Arthur Conan Doyle is like, hey, we got all these photos now, let's make a book. You know, who knows? Maybe they'll want to make a movie. I don't know, but I'm going to get half of all the royalties and Gardner and the girls can split whatever's left. Uh-huh.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. This one doesn't pass the sniff test. 1917, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is 2022's Doc Draws. If Doc Draws tells you something, do you believe it? It depends who you are. Yeah. If you're an audience member and a big fan, yeah, you do, even if it's not real.

Are you swept up in the production? Go, baby, go. The book is called The Coming of the Fairies, and it features all the photographs, including the ones which are many, that feature Francis and Elsie. But throughout this whole ordeal, the girls do remain anonymous. They are not named, and in this book they're given fake names. So Francis is Alice, and Elsie is Iris. So this is even more abstract, then.

This abstracts the story from the truth even further. I completely understand and agree that these girls should be kept anonymous, but now they're just some girls somewhere. This one is named Alice Wink, like the story gets even more abstract and even further from its source. Well, and it's not only that they're some girl, they're also from the north of England, Yorkshire, which in London circles is seen as really backwaters, kind of country bumpkin. Oh, okay.

Fucking snobs. In the book itself, in a preface for it, Conan Doyle specifically states, like, I know that these photos will raise the question of fakery. And he said in very clear, strangely clear detail, he's like, how could a little village in the north of England and two girls, two young girls, amateur photographers, how in the world could they produce these photos? They're past the muster of some of the greatest experts in London. Interesting.

Yeah, he didn't really try to code that, but very much to do. How can these dumb idiot girls, mind you, not even men, but girls with a camera, I don't know who let them touch that, and on top of it all, they're from a fucking backwater shit swamp, they're cousins, maybe more, I don't know. It's ridiculous, and yet my friends, I promise it is true, I created Sherlock Holmes. In this description too, or in this passage, she also writes, the only way that this could ever happen is if these were somehow paper cutouts. But again, dear reader, how in the world could two country bumpkins with absolutely no talent,

these amateur girls, how could they have become amazing artists and painted the most beautiful diaphanous images to display these fairies? Highly unlikely. One of all, you cut them out, you can cut out someone else's work. Two of all, even in 1917, women could draw. No. Yeah, even young girls, yeah, and they could certainly trace. Yes.

Yeah. The question, and maybe this will kind of come up, is you've said that these were snipped out of a very commonly read children's book, no? Yeah. Conan Doyle's featured it in himself. He would have had some access to a copy. Could someone not look at one of these images and be like, I recognize this woman playing a clarinet, or whatever it is?

Yeah. That thought occurred to me. The other thing as well that came out from Frances and Elsie was there's one image where a fairy, her kind of arms, her two arms are up, and her legs, one knee is bent, and so like you see her thigh and her knee, and then the other is kind of pointing down. Frances and Elsie were like, yeah, that one actually was a composite of two of the different dancing girl illustrations. If you really look at it.

Very good. The bottom leg wouldn't fall out of the hip like that. She's like, let me fucking school you idiots about basic anatomy principles. But apparently this had come up. Somebody had pointed this out and Frances claims that in an interview she said, I wondered if someone would see that and somebody did, but then somebody reported back saying, well fairies are a mythical race. They're magical.

They don't got femurs like you and me. No, their bones and their skeletons are different from ours. It's a whole different physiognomy. They're the exact same, but the leg comes out at a weird angle. That's the only difference. The one leg. And it occurred to me, by the way. I answered my own question.

Do you know why no one would have recognized these as illustrations from a children's book? Because it would be children, right? They weren't listened to clearly. Yeah, it's not true. Daddy, look, she looks just like the dancer from my very popular children's book. Shut up, you little bastard. Fuck off. No, first let me laugh at you and then I'll tell you to shut up.

First of all, I want you to know that I think you're stupid. Now go away. Poor kids. I'm so glad that they kind of get the last laugh in the story. Well, yeah. Oh, you know, dumb parents, too, the girls did add wings. They were just dancing girls in the book. So maybe that was somebody's like, yeah, but those illustrations, they didn't have wings.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's next missive. To all of you pleb idiots in the audience, maybe you're from up north. I don't know. Keep pointing out that these are children's book illustrations. I would say to you, my dear dumb bitch, do those have wings? No. Fuck off. It was wonderful.

It was beautiful because that pretty much sums up the way that Arthur Conan Doyle felt about these fairies and presented them to the public to his dying day. These were true life fairies because these were true life photos of fairies. Yes. So he did die. He did die. Good for him. He did die.

Good for him. Right? He did like that. He really, he really did a great job on that one. I'm so sorry if any members of the extended Doyle family are listening to this podcast because we were fucking dragging this for them. No, I just meant, I'm glad that he wasn't proven a fool to his own very face perhaps for his sake, for the sake of his pride.

So the girls Francis and Elsie, they said in interviews later, they made the conscious decision to wait until Gardner and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were no longer alive. See, they were thinking along the same lines as me. My first thought was, well, they need to let this man die before they say anything. Yes, yes. But he was just, it was so ingrained into who he was and all of this that they were like, fuck, we can't do anything. Okay, we'll just.

That's so awkward, those poor girls. Well, Elsie, the older one, she loved it. She just thought she enjoyed the whole fucking ride. She, I like Elsie's sense of humor very much. I think she has a very, very dry sense of humor that I enjoy. She's also an excellent artist. I got to give her props. Oh, fantastic.

Yeah, killing it. Dude, you could peddle those now and get some some biters for real. No, exactly. Francis, the younger one, she was not as thrilled with all the developments. She tried to escape from it, but it overshadowed her life. She made one remark when she was like nine years old, huh? And that was it. That was the entire, the entire rest of her life's path dictated.

I think for her, the attention was really painful because she knew that it wasn't a complete truth. Right. You know, they did believe that they saw fairies, at least, you know, in the fifth photograph they proclaimed to, but all the attention was just a reminder that this was not a full truth. Right. Even though all the signs that would point to saying that people thwarted, you know, like, fairies have different skeletal structures. They're just like, you know, what could Francis and Elsie do?

You know what I mean? Yeah. And the whole thing had snowballed so far out of their control that I bet part of that feeling of like, let's just not say anything. Let's just let this puppy ride. Even if we said something, we might get discredited and it might roll back on us in a negative way. They didn't say that.

I'm just, you know, pulling that out of my butt. So in 1983, long after Gardner and Conan Doyle are gone, the word gets out. There are a series of publications, The Times, and Yorkshire television's Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, all these different little entities, they admit that the photos, the majority of the photos, I should say, were faked. Elsie said that she and Francis were just like too embarrassed by the whole thing. She says, direct quote, two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle. Well, we could only keep quiet.

In that same interview, Francis said, I never even thought of it as being a fraud. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. And I can't understand to this day why they were taken in. They wanted to be taken in. Yes. They, yeah, yeah, that's it. They wanted to be taken in. That's it.

Yeah. And as to that first quote, like, I am, what was it? We could only keep quiet. We had gotten one over on Sherlock Holmes. We could only keep quiet. I think like the silent end of that sentence, though, is that you can only keep quiet for so long. And then one, you want to air the shit out. But two, there has to be a little part, the tiniest little part that's proud of having hoodwinked,

you know, a sur who is so nakedly contemptuous of who you are and where you're from. What? Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. According to, at the time, the President of the British Photography Association, he says something to the effect of if you take into consideration the amount of times that those photos were published, the popularity that they achieved, the reproductions that were done of them, the stories built around them, the movies that came out, there are two movies about it, you know, feature-length films about it.

Interesting. There's street names named after the fairies and everything. If you take all of that into consideration, Elsie and Francis could be deemed the most famous photographers of the medium. Yeah, those are the fairy pictures that I think of, yeah. Right, which is kind of like that ass, too. It's like, whoa. Very much so. The photos were theirs and they could get that type of credit, but they never received any financial gain.

Of course, of course. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the recipient of any type of monetary benefit. He sounds like somebody who kind of consciously knew on some level that he was practicing a con because some of his actions lead me to suggest that, but... Yes, yes. To state fully what the actual truth is and then quote-unquote debunk it, yeah, that feels... Yeah, be like, I don't know if you noticed, it has a belly button, so it must be real. It's that deductive...

Reasoning, belly button present, leg wonky, like it's a fairy. That sure space lock reasoning. Yes, that sure space lock reasoning. Coma Holmes. The photos and their negatives and the camera are on display at the National Science and Media Museum, which is located in Bradford, right by Coddingley. Interesting. They are displayed with all of the story exposed, including watercolors of the fairies that Elsie painted

and a nine page letter from Elsie emitting to the hoax. Interesting. Now, which fairy wrote the letter pretending to be Elsie? That was Crystal. Got you, got you, got you. Other copies of the photos have appeared, as we said, Antiques Roadshow. Belfast, baby. Oh yeah, that guy who drank the piss.

Full circle. And that, dear Taylor, is the story of the Coddingley fairies. I love it, I love it. Okay, Josie, it's time for us to nominate five of each other's episodes for the Melty Award for Bitter Sweetest Episode. I have my five, do you have your five? I do have my five, but now I, okay, yeah, I'm ready. I'm ready. We can do this.

Together we can get through this. We've both picked our fave five. I'm gonna give my first pick then, and I'll give you a little bit of a reason why. I like hearing stories where you kind of don't have any background in the source material, and then you have to kind of come and just tackle it and just be like, I have to translate this concept that I don't really know that much about. And I think you actually did a really good job with this one. And the subject was gymnastics, and the story was the story of Alina Mukena, episode 22.

Aw, my first pick for you. Uh-huh. Features a story where, for me, you pleasantly surprised yourself with how gruesome the story kept being. Oh God. It's a mainstay of your party stories, but fully researched on the podcast. It even took you by surprise how many children Jean-Wabère really killed. Number 11. Oh, Jonathan will be so happy.

Jean-Wabère. Jonathan, love you. Love this episode too. Okay, interesting. So that's an old school episode. We got some old school in the next. I'm gonna give you some new school now. It's one of our more recent episodes.

Oh. In the same way that I like Josie challenging herself with something that she doesn't really know that much about. I also love when Josie comes in with what I would consider a classic Josie story that I think that she could do in her sleep. Ha ha! It's very bittersweet. It's got happy and sad, funny and tragic. It's a great story of place, a very affectionate tale of a small Texas town rallying behind its favorite murderer. Going with number 45, the nicest killer around.

Bernie Teta. My next pick for Taylor is one where he dives into some literary history. Taylor, I thought you did some excellent research here and you did such a nice job of allowing us as writers to kind of parse through the story. And kind of keeping check all the facts and all the American history and all the racism. And I'm going with number 37, Go Set a Watchman. I was saying that I really like Josie's story of place and this one is perhaps the bittersweetest of all. There is no more bittersweet combination than adorable bunnies and poison gas. Number 47, also a recent hit, Okunishima Rabbit Island.

Look at those bunnies sniffing on gas. My next pick was a beautiful and very empathetic portrayal of two young girls who were highly misunderstood. Partly because they were speaking a language that they made up. Lucky number 13, Flowers and Hell. Good pick. Good pick. Ok, this is a good, this is competitive. We're going to have a fight here. Not a literal fight. I really don't care who wins. I hope you win. Not that we're in competition with one another because we're dominating the entire episode here, folks.

So you're really voting for both of us. I'm just saying that in case I lose. My fourth nomination is a really endearing telling of the story of the life and death of someone of whom you are a fan. And I like listening to people talk about things that they really love. I'm going to go with episode number 24, Girl Interrupted, about the life and death of the actress, Brittany Murphy. This next nomination, you just brought so much bubbly energy and excitement to this. Also featured in another category, this really shitty piece of art, which turned out to be a very shitty piece of art, filled with sorority sisters and weird crumbly augur men

popping out of bathroom walls. I was like, what are you talking about? I still didn't get it. I'm nominating number 19, Nitra! Nitra! My last pick also comes from this general area, our teens, our teenage years. And I'm picking it because I just remember laughing and laughing and laughing and just having the most wonderful, uproarious laughter when I was listening to the story. It was very, very funny.

I'm going to go with number 17, Dolphin House. The house full of dolphins that someone should have done something about. Okay, here we go. This is my final. This episode came out to two hours long. And I told Taylor, this is too long. You have to shorten it. And you were like, no, the story is too good. This woman deserves all this time and all this recognition and all this research that I gave.

And we kept it at two hours and it bopped into one of our most popular episodes and the work that you did on it. I still think about Vanessa Williams in number 27, D Throne. All right. So that is our slate of 10 on the ballot for you to vote for at tinyurl.com forward slash bittersweetinformation. We should also say, Taylor, that we did not take into account the episodes that were so lovingly and carefully put together by our guest hosts. Not that they were not the bittersweetest episode. We just felt like...

We love all our children equally. We don't want to put them against each other. They're all number one in our eyes. They're all Hall of Famers. But these 10 of our children, where it's just me and Josie, Tetta Tett in a battle of wills trying to wear each other down over, you know, Brittany Murphy and Brittany Teta and what have you. These, these can fight.

It's not a competition, but it is a fight. Yes. So a fight to the death. Perhaps a fight where we don't care who wins. It's more about the act of fighting one another. That's really the important part. Yeah. To celebrate our 50th episode, we just got to rage out.

That's what we're doing. And on that note, the next time we see you, it'll be the Melty's. Till then. What are you going to wear? I'm going to wear shimmering gold. I'm going to wear diaphanous robes. Diaphanous robes is always a good call, in my opinion, in my humble opine. Thanks for tuning in.

If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find podcasts. We usually release new episodes every other Sunday. You can also follow us on Instagram, at bittersweetinfamy. If you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review, or just telling a friend. Stay sweet. I also got the name of Luis Jimenez's horse wrong during the Minfamous. His name is actually Black Jack, not Black Buck. My apologies to that particular horse.

And then, just to follow up, I watched from CNN News 24-Hour Antiques Roadshow Expert Drinks Urine after mistaking it for a vintage port. I read the Wikipedia articles for spiritualism, Coddingly Ferries, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I read the article, Coddingly Ferries, How Sherlock Holmes' Creator Was Fooled by Hoax, published December 5th, 2020 on BBC News. This article features a few of the photos if you want to take a look. Lastly, I listened to a lecture by Dr. Merrick Burrow, guest curator of Leeds University Library Galleries. He was instrumental at creating an exhibition at the Leeds Library called The Coddingly Ferries,

A Study in Deception. That was the name of this lecture, and it was posted June 18th, 2021 on Leeds University Library Galleries YouTube channel. The interstitial music that you heard earlier was written by Mitchell Collins, and the song you're listening to now is Tea Street by Brian Steele. Copyright © 2020 Leeds University Library