7 - Fairies, Phantoms, Fantastic Photographs

The Cottingley Fairies

On 17 July 1972 a most mysterious lot went under the hammer at Sotheby's salerooms in Bond Street, London. At first glance, there was nothing particularly impressive about its contents. There were a couple of old cameras, five old photographs, and a letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, to a girl from a country village in the north of England.

Yet, although the sale contained other, far more obviously desirable lots (five previously unknown letters by the American poet Walt Whitman, original manuscripts by the Victorian artist and poet William Morris, and even a painting by D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley's Lover), it was this strange and rather scruffy collection of objects which stole the limelight. For on offer that Monday morning was a dossier on a case which had first intrigued, then baffled and finally frustrated psychical researchers for more than half a century: the strange tale of the Cottingley Fairies.

The five photographs lay at the heart of the mystery, for they purported to show real fairies dancing beside a stream at Cottingley in Yorkshire. The pictures were taken between 1917 and 1920 by two young girls. Did they really prove that fairies exist?

At least one influential figure believed they did. By 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most celebrated literary figures in the world, thanks to his Sherlock Holmes novels and stories; and his support for the Boer War and other causes of the age had earned him the respect of the British public. So when the 1920 Christmas number of the monthly Strand Magazine appeared, emblazoned with the headline, FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED. AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY A. CONAN DOYLE, there was a sensation.

With the article, the great man published two of the photographs (the others followed later in the March 1921 edition) and asserted in terms which, despite some slight show of scepticism, did not really invite much in the way of contradiction. 'Should the incidents here narrated, and the photographs attached, hold their own against the criticism which they will excite, it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought.'

The story Conan Doyle had to tell did indeed appear remarkable. In the summer of 1917 a little girl often called Frances Griffiths was staying with her cousin, Elsie Wright, then aged fifteen. They used to while away the days in a wild patch of countryside just below Elsie's garden, known as Cottingley Glen.

A stream ran through the middle and on its mossy banks, the girls asserted, they regularly saw fairies. When the grown-ups did not seem to believe them, Elsie and Frances appeared surprised, and when scepticism gave way to teasing, the girls were outraged. They would, they announced, provide proof.

Elsie's father, Arthur Wright, was an amateur photographer, keen enough to have established his own darkroom in the scullery cupboard. Neither girl had ever taken a photograph before, but Elsie persuaded her father to lend her his camera, a popular box-type called a Midg, which he had bought from his uncle for 7s. 6d. The Midg took photographs on a series of individual plates, and Arthur loaded just one of them into the camera before the girls set off for their 'rendezvous' with the Cottingley fairies.

Before long they were back, excited and eager for the photograph to be developed. Arthur Wright took the plate into the darkroom. Elsie, who had acted as photographer, went too. Under the safelight, the image on the plate began to look very odd indeed. Arthur could make out Frances's face and her right arm and shoulder, but what were those weird white blobs that surrounded her?

Next day, after the picture had been laboriously printed, came the answer. It showed Frances looking thoughtful, her chin leaning on her right hand. In the foreground, the grasses and wild flowers of Cottingley Glen provided a leafy frame, while the background was indistinct. But, astonishingly, the white blobs which had puzzled Arthur Wright turned out to be four captivating fairies, dressed in swirling gowns.

One was playing a musical instrument, while the others, arms upraised and legs elegantly pointed, danced joyfully to the music. Every detail came out sharply: the veins of their wings, their silken tresses, the fingers of the fairies' tiny hands. Arthur Wright, though by all accounts impressed by the quality of his daughter's first attempt at photography, was apparently amused but unconvinced. Despite the 'evidence' so speedily furnished, tales of fairies at the bottom of the garden continued to be greeted with raised eyebrows by the grown-ups.

A few weeks later, the girls again borrowed the camera. This time it was Frances's turn to be the photographer. The picture she took was even more remarkable than the first, for it apparently showed Elsie greeting a grotesque little gnome on a bank at the top of the glen. The creature was conventionally dressed, for a gnome, in black tights; he also wore a jersey through which his wings poked, and on his head was a little pointed cap. He certainly seemed alive, as though he had just rushed out of the long grass to greet his human friend. But once again, Arthur Wright was apparently more impressed by the children's skill as photographers than by their claims to have proved the existence of fairies.

And there the matter might have rested if Elsie's mother, Polly Wright, had not gone to a lecture in nearby Bradford, where she happened to mention that she had a couple of photographs of fairies at home. The lecturer asked to see them and, when they arrived, she passed them on to a friend in London, Edward L. Gardner, a confirmed believer in the existence of fairies. Gardner, in his turn, asked to see the original negatives; when they reached him, he bicycled from his home in Harlesden to consult an expert photographer, Mr H. Snelling, who pronounced the pictures genuine and furnished Gardner with a letter guaranteeing their authenticity:

These two negatives are entirely genuine unfaked photographs of single exposure, open-air work, [they] show movement in the fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures etc. In my opinion, they are both straight untouched pictures.

Soon, Conan Doyle had become involved, and after Gardner had visited the Wrights in Yorkshire and pronounced himself satisfied that the pictures had not been faked, the famous author wrote his article for the Strand Magazine.

As Conan Doyle had predicted before the magazine was published, his revelations did indeed stimulate controversy. While he and Gardner defended the girls against any imputation that they had perpetrated a hoax upon their trusting elders, the sceptics set about trying to discover how the photographs could have been faked.

Meanwhile Frances and Elsie had come up with three more remarkable pictures, this time taken with cameras of their own which Gardner had given them. These were published in the Strand Magazine in March 1921. The first showed Frances apparently staring at a leaping fairy. Elsie featured in the next one alongside a fairy who was offering her a posy of flowers. Finally, there was the strangest photograph of all, which became known as the 'fairy bower'. Gardner offered this interpretation of it:

This is especially remarkable as it contains a feature quite unknown to the girls. The sheath or cocoon appearing in the middle of the grasses had not been seen by them before, and they had no idea what it was. Fairy observers of Scotland and the New Forest, however, were familiar with it and described it as a magnetic bath ...

In the face of Conan Doyle's repeated assertions that the pictures were genuine, and his contention that two young girls would not have been capable of faking such remarkable photographs, the sceptics made little headway. Some, like Miss Dot Inman, a Yorkshire photographer, produced 'fairy photographs' of their own to demonstrate that fraud was possible: her most charming effort showed the little creatures soaring above the domes of Bradford's Alhambra Theatre.

Others, assuming that the girls had modelled their fairies upon those in a painting or drawing, searched for the source of their inspiration: an advertisement for Price's nightlights was deemed the most likely candidate. The public, however, was amused, and while Gardner and Conan Doyle toured the world lecturing about the Cottingley fairies, the girls themselves kept silent.

As the years passed, the story surfaced from time to time. In 1971 Elsie appeared on a BBC news magazine programme, Nationwide. Four years later, she and Frances were interviewed in Woman magazine, and in 1977 they revisited Cottingley for a Yorkshire Television film. Despite persistent questioning from the reporters, they stuck to their story.

The revival of interest in the case attracted the attention of a new generation of sceptics. In 1973 Professor Stuart Sanderson discussed the Cottingley mystery in his Presidential Address to the Folklore Society. Having begun his speech by declaring his scepticism about the genuineness of the photographs, he went on to raise a list of pertinent questions. Why, for example, had the girls been unable to photograph fairies when a third party was present? He also pointed out that Elsie might, after all, have been able to produce fakes, for not only was she a talented artist, and had been known to paint fairies, but she had also worked in a photographer's studio.

Four years later, Fred Gettings, a researcher well-versed both in art and the paranormal, came across an important clue. He was leafing through a copy of Princess Mary's Gift Book, a compilation of stories, pictures and poems sold in aid of charity and a bestseller in 1915, two years before the Cottingley fairy photographs were taken. One contribution was a poem by Alfred Noyes called 'A Spell for a Fairy', illustrated by Claude A. Shepperson. The final vignette on page 104 of the Gift Book stopped Gettings in his tracks. He recognized it as:

without doubt, the original picture from which the fairies of the first Cottingley picture were constructed. The remarkable thing is that the girl who copied this (presumably Elsie, as she was the older and more artistically talented of the two) actually made no significant change to the individual figures of the fairies in the Shepperson drawing - they merely appear in the photograph in a different order. Elsie's drawing is clumsier, and she added butterfly wings to the figures.

At least one other person might have been expected to have reached the same conclusion more than fifty years earlier, for on page 23 of the Gift Book begins a story called 'Bimbashi Joyce'. Its author? None other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!

In 1980 arch-sceptic James 'the Amazing' Randi devoted a chapter of his book Flim-Flam, to the debunking of the photographs. Randi revealed that the latest 'computer enhancement' techniques, designed to bring out the smallest details of satellite photographs, had 'put a very large nail of doubt in the already well-sealed coffin of the Cottingley Fairies'. The computer had been asked whether the fairy figures were three-dimensional.

No, they weren't, it replied. The conclusion was obvious: the fairies were cardboard cut-outs. In a second test, the computer searched for threads or supports which could have been used to prop up the figures. It found something suspiciously like a thread in the fourth picture, although Randi was less convinced by this than by the earlier finding. He concluded:

The Cottingley fairies were simple fakes made by two little girls as a prank, in the beginning. Only when supposedly wiser persons discovered them were they elevated to the status of miracles, and the girls were caught up in an ever-escalating situation that they wanted out of but could not escape.

For the sceptics, the case of the Cottingley fairies was frustrating. They were certain the pictures were faked, yet they had no absolute proof and, as the years passed, there seemed little prospect of obtaining any. 'Quite how they were faked,' mused Stuart Sanderson in his 1973 address to the Folklore Society, 'we shall probably never know.'

Yet we now do know, and indeed would have done so a few months before Sanderson's speech if Sotheby's experts had looked with greater understanding at a letter which Elsie had sent with her Cottingley memorabilia for sale in 1972. It contained a detailed explanation by Elsie of how the two girls had hoaxed the world. But because the letter was obviously recently written and the sale was of antique literary documents only, the experts returned it to Elsie; and unwittingly delayed the final solution of the mystery for another decade.

The Cottingley Mystery solved

The breakthrough came when two investigators, independently of each other, took a fresh look at the case in the 1980s. One was Geoffrey Crawley, editor of the prestigious British Journal of Photography; the other was Joe Cooper, a sociologist who had long been interested in the paranormal. Crawley's investigation, which began its serialization in the BJP on Christmas Eve 1982, was exhaustive and fascinating but also quite technical - exactly what might be expected of a top photographic expert.

One of Crawley's first decisions was to examine not only the five pictures but also the cameras used by the girls. Fortunately, the Midg camera that Elsie had borrowed from her father was still in existence: it had been one of the mementoes she had sent for sale at Sotheby's in 1972. Crawley borrowed it, took a few test photographs, and noticed something that all the other investigators had apparently missed.

The lens of the Midg camera could not possibly have provided a photograph of the depth and clarity of the first published fairy picture. The implication was clear: the picture of Frances and the dancing fairies (Crawley labelled it Photograph A), which had been accepted for more than sixty years as the original, had been heavily retouched and then re-photographed. The same went for Photograph B (Elsie and the gnome).

Then Crawley had the kind of luck that comes to the diligent researcher. A different version of Photograph A turned up in Cottingley itself. It was far less sharp than the one originally published: Frances's face and hair have a washed-out look, the fairies are little more than white blobs, and the foliage in the foreground is indistinct. It was exactly the type of photograph Crawley would have expected from a novice like Elsie using an unsophisticated camera like a Midg.

Crawley next turned to Photograph B. Although he was unable to trace an authentic first print of it, a close examination of what had always been held to be the original negative, kept in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University, revealed a telling detail. A photograph taken with a Midg camera always showed certain marks, yet there were none on the 'original'.

The sheath in which each plate was held would also have imprinted its shape on to the image, yet there was no trace of it on Photograph B. Another clue was that the colour of the 'original' prints was wrong. Surviving family photographs show that Arthur Wright, like most amateur photographers of his day, used daylight printing paper.

He always fixed the negative to the paper and left it out in the sun to develop. The resulting prints were sepia-coloured. But the published fairy pictures were all a rich blue-black which could only have been achieved in a darkroom.

By looking at the negatives of the improved photographs, Crawley was even able to tell how the pictures had been retouched. But who had been responsible? The most likely candidate was Edward Gardner's friend Mr Snelling, who had guaranteed the authenticity of the photographs in the first place. Snelling was an acknowledged expert in the technique of improving photographs - an art more widely practised in the first two decades of this century than it is today.

While Crawley's revelations did not prove that the girls had faked the original photographs, they did increase his suspicions about their authenticity, and his examination of the last three pictures reinforced his doubts. He concluded that each of them was a superimposition, difficult to achieve with a Midg but easy with the new Cameo cameras the girls had been given.

In photographs C and D, Crawley suggested, a cut-out fairy was first photographed indoors; the plate was then re-exposed down in Cottingley Glen. One clue supporting this theory is that in the finished photographs neither of the girls manages to look directly at the fairy. The final picture, Crawley believed, was an accidental double-exposure. He agreed with another photographic expert, Brian Coe, who suggested that the girls had tried to take two separate photographs of some cut-out figures in the grass, but had managed to mix up the plates so that both images appeared on the same one.

Meanwhile Joe Cooper had been to see Elsie and Frances. Both were old ladies, and Frances, then seventy-five, finally broke her long silence. She admitted that the first four fairy photographs were fakes, and that she had always felt guilty about the first one, in particular. 'My heart always sinks when I look at it,' she said. 'When I think of how it's gone all round the world - I don't see how people could believe they're real fairies. I could see the backs of them and the hatpins when the photo was being taken.' She confirmed that the fairy figures had indeed been cut-outs. Elsie had drawn them, and the dancing figures in the first photograph had been copied from Princess Mary's Gift Book, as Fred Gettings had deduced. But there had been nothing fake about the fifth photograph, she claimed. It had been of the real fairies that lived in the glen. According to Cooper, 'Elsie, on the other hand, insists that all five photographs are of cut-outs.'

Elsie then wrote to Geoffrey Crawley, who had sent her some sections of his series in advance. Her letter was, he realized, 'the authentic document confirming that the so-styled "Cottingley fairy photographs" taken in 1917 and 1920 were not of paranormal phenomena'.

Dear Mr Crawley [the letter began],

Thank you for your letter revealing so much depth and understanding of the pickle Frances and I got ourselves into on that day back in 1916 [sic] when our practical joke fell flat on its face, when no one would believe we had got pictures of real fairies. Just imagine (if they had) the joke would have ended there and then, when we would have told all, when I was 15 years old, and Frances was 8 [sic] years old.

Over the months that followed, the cousins gradually owned up to a prank which had started innocently but had soon got out of hand. This is the story that emerged.

In the summer of 1917, when the two girls used to play by Cottingley beck, Frances would talk of seeing fairies along its leafy banks. All too often the younger girl fell into the water and returned home to the Wrights' house with soaking wet shoes, stockings and knickers. One night, Frances recalled, matters came to a head. Her mother was furious, not simply because Frances had wet clothes but because neither she nor Elsie's mother could understand why the girls were so keen on playing by the beck.

She said that she and Aunt Polly had been up the beck and they'd found nothing. They couldn't see anything at all. It was just trees and water and ferns and what-have-you. You could have that anywhere. You didn't have to go right up the beck to see that. I don't know why, but I'd had enough, and I blurted out 'I go up to see the fairies'. At that time Uncle Arthur had come in and Elsie had come in, and Aunt Polly was there. They all stood round looking at me and my mother got annoyed and she said 'Well that beats the lot! You've started telling lies on top of being naughty all the time and getting wet and ruining all your good shoes.' And then she stopped and she turned round and said to Elsie, 'Have you seen these fairies?' And Elsie, she stuck up for me, and she said 'Yes.'

Inevitably, the grown-ups began to tease the girls about their fairy friends. Their gentle sarcasm maddened Elsie, the protective elder cousin. She resolved to do something to stop it. Sixty-seven years later, Frances recalled how Elsie revealed her plan:

One night, as we were getting ready for bed, she said, 'I've been thinking, kid (she was a real cinema-goer, was Elsie), what about if I draw some fairies and cut them out in cardboard and we'll stick them up in the grass and see if Dad will lend us the camera and we'll take a photograph. If they see them they'll have to believe. It'll stop all this joking.'

So the girls talked a reluctant Arthur Wright into lending them the Midg camera, after promising not to drop it into the water, and set off up Cottingley Glen.

Elsie had her fairies down her bosom [Frances remembered]. We went up the beck and wandered round and decided on this little bank beside the beck because I could get behind it and there were toadstools growing there and it was pretty and in the sunlight. She stuck the fairies in artistic places, one on top of a toadstool standing on one toe, which she was very proud of, and took the photograph.

That first picture, and the second one of the gnome, certainly stopped the teasing, but since the grown-ups did not believe the fairies were real, the girls never had the chance to explain how they faked the photographs. Then Conan Doyle and Edward Gardner pronounced them to be genuine. Why didn't the girls confess the truth?

It was all very embarrassing [Elsie recalled]. We were two village kids with a brilliant man like Conan Doyle. Well, we could only keep quiet. We'd have hurt him terribly to do a thing like that. It would have been like two kids taking the mickey out of him. And Frances didn't want me to tell because the schoolkids were giving her an awful time at school and, she says, it'll just bring it on worse.

Frances, in her turn, had promised Elsie never to reveal their secret.

Elsie had said to me after the first one, 'Now look, you don't tell anybody about this. Promise?' And I promised. And I got this silly idea that a promise was a promise and I couldn't break it. Later on I didn't want to, I just wanted to forget it. I didn't want anybody to know. I thought if I don't say anything it'll die a natural death, but it didn't. It was as simple as that.

Almost three-quarters of a century after the two young cousins took that first famous photograph, the story was still making headlines. When Frances died in July 1986 she still maintained to the end that although the first four photographs had been fakes, the fifth really had captured the hidden fairy kingdom she had found as a child in Cottingley Glen. When the obituary writers questioned Elsie, she took the opportunity once again to set the record straight about the long-running 'fairy tale'. 'The joke,' she said, 'was to last two hours, and it has lasted seventy years.'

The Spirit Photographers

The fashion for spiritualism was less than fifteen years old - the Fox sisters had begun it in 1848 - when a few enterprising photographers announced that, for a suitable fee, they could capture the images of dead people on photographic plates. Grieving parents, widows and widowers queued up to pose and were rewarded by the discovery of a strange, if often blurred figure hovering beside them on the developed picture, which many of them unhesitatingly declared to be a consoling likeness of their departed loved-ones.

One of the first of the spirit photographers was an American called William Mumler, who set up shop in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1860s. He had been plying his weird trade for only a few months, however, when he was caught out by several of his more sceptical sitters and run out of town. Apparently some of the 'spirits' - or 'extras', as they were known - bore more than a passing likeness to living people.

Yet he was soon in business again, and a few years later could boast a list of famous clients, including Mrs Lincoln, wife of the assassinated President. Mrs Lincoln is said to have visited Mumler under an assumed name and with her face heavily veiled, but when a figure looking very much like the recently departed Abe appeared on the finished portrait, the First Widow apparently broke down and confessed her true identity. Mumler's career took another dive in 1869 when he was put on trial for fraud. The Mayor of New York, suspecting Mumler of trickery, ordered one of his men, Marshal J.H. Tooker, to investigate. Tooker assumed a false name and went to have his picture taken.

When a 'spirit' appeared on the processed plate, Mumler assured the marshal that it was the image of his dead father-in-law. Tooker, however, saw no resemblance whatsoever, and promptly arrested Mumler. But the evidence produced at the trial at Tombs Police Court, New York, was flimsy, and although Justice Bowling indicated that he believed 'trick and deception had been practised by the prisoner', he had to conclude that there was no case to answer.

Other 'spirit photographers' flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, relying for their lucrative pickings upon a combination of public ignorance of the new-fangled art of photography and the desperate desire of the bereaved to contact their dead loved-ones. They, too, were frequently caught cheating. For example, Jean Buguet, French high society's favourite 'spirit photographer', was put on trial in 1875, and the court was told that many of the 'extras' in his pictures had been cardboard heads and elegantly draped dummies, spirited on to the plate by double-exposure.

The sceptics were hard-pressed to keep up with all the techniques used by fraudulent 'spirit photographers' - at least 200 methods have been identified. Most used double-exposures of one kind or another. In the shadows of the studio or the gloom of the darkroom it was easy to switch plates provided by the sitter for a set with ghostly images already imprinted upon them.

An American investigator, Joseph H. Kraus, discovered some even more elaborate tricks. One medium, Madame Eva, amazed her sitters by apparently producing a bright halo across her chest when she was photographed. According to Kraus, however, she had merely dipped the piece of gauze she wore to conceal her cleavage in luminous paint which glowed under the photographer's lights. Others, using sleight-of-hand, slipped prepared transparencies into the lens or concealed doctored plates in secret compartments in their camera cases - a method Kraus's fellow-sceptic, the conjuror Joseph Dunninger, was fond of demonstrating.

Hidden slide projectors, chemicals secretly dripped through the ceiling on to developing trays, walls painted with fluorescent paints invisible to the naked eye but which could be illuminated for the camera with ultra-violet lights, even radium plates and X-ray machines were all used by the unscrupulous tricksters. So many 'spirit photos' were taken at the height of the craze that the methods of some of the charlatans have only recently been exposed.

One of the most colourful and successful of the British 'psychographers' was Dr T. d'Aute Hooper, a one-legged faith-healer and medium from Birmingham - a man, according to his supporters, who was 'far above trickery and any sordid dealing'. One day, one of Hooper's patients, who happened to be staying with him, returned from a walk and said, 'Doctor, I feel so queer, I feel as if there is someone with me; will you get your camera and take a snap-shot of me?' Hooper wrote:

I got the camera and before I exposed the plate I told him I saw a beautiful child with him. I put a dark table-cloth over the door in the drawing-room to form a background and then exposed the plate. The gentleman himself took the plate to the dark room and developed it; and there appeared the beautiful spirit form of a little girl with a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a roll of paper in the other. The exclamation of the gentleman was, 'Good heavens! It's my daughter, who died thirty years ago.'

Dr Hooper, who obviously regarded this picture as a first-class advertisement for his powers, kept a copy, and it was published in 1919. Over the next sixty years it reappeared frequently in books and articles, and was often cited as proof that spirits could be photographed.

In the 1980s, however, one of the periodic flurries of interest in psychic photography coincided with the reprinting (for greeting cards and a poster) of a picture called 'For You' by Charles T. Garland. Painted in 1879, it had been used to advertise Pears soap around the turn of the century.

When they saw the reproductions in the shops, several researchers realized that the little girl in Garland's picture was identical to the 'spirit' which had appeared in Hooper's photograph. Wrote one: 'The clairvoyant photograph is, I think, just a clever double-exposure. Another ghost "laid" I fear.'

So how was it that Hooper's patient recognized the girl in the picture as his dead daughter? Perhaps, in his grief, he had been clutching at straws, a victim of understandable self-delusion. As one expert on psychic photographs wrote scathingly in 1875: 'Some people would recognize anything. A broom and a sheet are quite enough to make up a grandmother for some wild enthusiasts who ... see what they wish to see.' It was a wish that the 'spirit photographers' exploited to the full.

'Ghost' Photographs

Frances and Elsie, and 'spirit photographers' like Mumler and Dr Hooper, claimed to be able to produce psychic pictures on demand, but some of the weirdest images of all have simply turned up on photographs taken by people who later claim to have seen nothing extraordinary through their view finder at the time of pressing the button. Many can simply be explained away as double-exposures. One example is the famous 'Raynham Hall ghost'.

The picture was taken in September 1936 by a fashionable London photographer who claimed to have seen 'an ethereal, veiled form coming slowly down the stairs' of the great house. The resulting picture was indeed eerie, yet at least one modern expert is unconvinced, pointing to the number of double images that can be made out of it. For example, there is a pale line above each stair-tread, indicating that one picture has been imprecisely super-imposed over the other; a patch of reflected light at the top of the right-hand banister appears twice.

Other 'ghost' photographs have proved more difficult to explain, and in 1984 some of the most puzzling examples were analyzed by two experts, Dr Steve Gull and his colleague, Tim Newton. They used a computer programme designed to enhance photographic images and bring out hidden detail. One of the pictures subjected to their rigorous scrutiny was taken by a solicitor in a church in Arundel in the south of England in 1940. It shows a strange luminous figure in front of the altar.

The computer quickly revealed the truth. The picture was in fact not one but a whole series of images. The experts' attention had been caught by the weird bright streak to the left of the figure. The computer showed that it was made up of a series of 'bumps', ending up at one of the altar candles. Significantly, when they measured the intervals between the 'bumps', Gull and Newton found they corresponded to the height of each step. Further investigations revealed that the figure had legs and was wearing a skirt.

The answer was then obvious: the Arundel solicitor had managed to compress a whole sequence of events into one picture. What it showed was a woman walking up the altar steps carrying a taper which she had then used to light the altar candles.

In July 1964 Gordon Carroll, a clerk at a shoe factory in Northampton, spent his summer holiday touring local villages and photographing the scenery and architecture. One afternoon he set up his Ilford Sportsman Rangefinder camera on a tripod in St Mary's Church, in the village of Woodford, and took a photograph of the east window, the altar and choir stalls. Months later, when he was going through his slides, he noticed that there appeared to be a transparent figure kneeling on the altar steps. And yet he was sure the church had been empty when he had taken the picture.

He considered the other possibilities. A double-exposure was unlikely, for the camera had a device to prevent this. Could it have been a trick of the light? Was the 'figure' just a reflection from a window? This again was hardly possible: the angle of the sun would not have produced one in the right place at that time of the afternoon. Gordon Carroll concluded that only one chilling possibility remained: had he photographed a ghost?

The forensic computer's analysis produced a more mundane explanation. It revealed that Gordon Carroll's picture, like that of the Arundel solicitor, contained a whole sequence of images. When these had been separated, Dr Gull announced that the 'ghost' seemed to be a cleaning lady brushing the altar steps with a dustpan beside her. 'What seems to have happened here is that somebody in a very long exposure picture in a very dark church has been cleaning the step and moved several times during the course of the exposure.'

Gordon Carroll, it must be said, vigorously disputes this suggestion. On learning of the computer's findings, he said:

I was the only person in the church and there is no way a cleaner could have rushed in and out again without me noticing. At the time I even went up to the altar to the point where the figure showed up on the photograph, and took another picture of the other end of the church. There was definitely no one else there.

Finally, the computer examined a celebrated 'ghost' photograph taken in 1959 by a Suffolk woman, Mrs Mabel Chinery. It shows her husband Jim sitting in the driving seat of his car. Behind him, in the back, there appears to be an old lady wearing glasses and a scarf. According to Mrs Chinery, the lady looks just like her mother. Yet Mrs Chinery's mother had died before the picture was taken: in fact, it was the last frame of a film on which Mabel had photographed the old lady's grave.

Mabel was certain that only Jim had been in the car: 'When I looked through the viewfinder all I saw was Jimmy in the car and snapped it and that was that.' So when the pictures had been processed and she recognized the distinctive features of her mother, Mabel was shocked: 'I felt dreadful, I really did. I had to have a week off work. I couldn't believe it. I just couldn't believe it.'

As they pondered the mystery, Jim recalled his mother-in-law's words to him on the night before she died. Now they seemed eerily prophetic. 'The last thing she said to me when I went out of the room was, "Jim," she said, "you'll never come to any harm." She said, "I shall still be with you."'

The computer, however, had only the internal evidence of the photograph to work on, and it discerned several unusual features surrounding the mysterious old lady. Firstly, the light on the figure seemed to be coming from a different direction to that which illuminated the rest of the picture. Furthermore, her spectacles appeared to reflect more light than would have been available inside the car. Thirdly, the old lady did not seem to fit properly into the vehicle.

For example, her shoulder could be seen to stretch beyond the pillar between the two windows, making her unnaturally broad. The experts therefore concluded that the picture was an accidental double-exposure, made up of the snapshot of Jim in his car and another very short exposure of Mabel's mother taken earlier.

Of course computers, like cameras, can lie, but the sad fact is that, although strange images on a few photographs are difficult to explain, not a single picture taken in 150 years of photography offers convincing proof of the existence of supernatural beings. The charming saga of the Cottingley fairies hoax and the more sinister exploits of the 'spirit' photographers tell us much about human credulity. The absence of unequivocal evidence from the millions upon millions of photographs taken since the invention of the camera may tell us even more about the nature of ghosts.

Arthur C. Clarke comments:

Photography has been one of my major hobbies for more than fifty years; indeed, I lost my amateur status a long time ago, as half a dozen of my books have been illustrated by photographs I've taken above and below water. So the subject of this chapter is of particular interest to me. Though I've never captured a ghost on film, I have faked UFOs for a television programme, just to show how easily it can be done. And, by a coincidence so extraordinary I can still hardly believe it, I have two unfaked images on successive frames of 35-millimetre film of a most convincing UFO -hovering above the Apollo 11 launch vehicle on the morning of 16 July 1969!

I've never bothered to have them analyzed because it seemed unlikely that my camera alone, out of the several hundred thousand focused on that piece of Florida skyline, would have captured an inquisitive alien - though one would have been well-advised to keep an eye on humanity at that particular moment. (The images are almost certainly lens 'flares' caused by reflections from the sea of cars in the foreground.)

The story of the 'Cottingley fairies' is a tragi-comedy which, very conveniently, was resolved just in time for this book. The comic elements speak for themselves; the tragedy is that a man of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's talents could so combine genius and utter stupidity, wasting time on an obvious hoax when he should have been more usefully employed in Baker Street. And the story proves once again the truth of the old saying: 'Cameras can't lie - but liars can photograph.'

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