For a brief moment after World War One, everyone was obsessed with fairies.
It started with a series of black and white photographs, showing two schoolgirls in Edwardian clothes frolicking in the garden with tiny, winged fairies.
To the contemporary eye, it's no surprise the photos of the Cottingley Fairies were faked. But in 1920, when the camera was still considered a mysterious and scientific instrument, they captured imaginations far and wide.
Even the great writer and intellectual Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame, championed the photos as evidence that his spiritualist inquiries were based firmly in the real world.
The Cottingley Fairies might be the most recognisable example of early-20th-century interest in the 'fair folk', but they are certainly not the only one. There was, in fact, a society of people, some of whom were hugely influential, who met regularly to discuss fairy sightings and hear from people who'd had their own fairy experiences.
During the horrors of World War I, many people sought comfort via all manners and mediums of supernatural practice. And fairies, being as they were conveniently located at the bottom of the garden, were particularly popular.
Simon Young, a British historian and expert in folklore and accounts of the supernatural, gives a frank account of the original Fairy Investigation Society.
He says it was "an organisation that was set up in the United Kingdom in the 1920s by a bunch of bohemian eccentrics in London"...<<<Read More>>>...
