January 7, 2020 • 11 mins
A lot of things are too good to be true. Sometimes they turn out to be fake, while other times they reveal something no one expected. Today's tour through the Cabinet should acquaint you with both.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the cabinet of curiosities. So much of history
(00:29):
has been buried. Colonialism takes quite a bit of the blame,
as does nature itself, which has swallowed the remains of
entire civilizations over the years. That's why archaeologists travel all
over the world trying to fill in the missing pages
of the historical record, one dig site at a time.
In two thousand four, a new dig site was unearthed,
(00:49):
and in the most unusual of places, Marian Gary's backyard.
Gary lived in buck Haven, a small town in Fife
on the eastern coast of Scotland, residing along the North Sea,
just across from Norway and the Netherlands. It wasn't completely
out of the question for Vikings to have landed along
Scottish shores hundreds of years earlier. In fact, from the
eighth to the fifteen centuries, Vikings and Norwegians did colonize
(01:13):
parts of Scotland. This period of time is known as
Scandinavian Scotland, and there is evidence of their presence still
around today. For example, on the island known as the
Brof of birth Say, there are archaeological remains of an
entire Norse village, but unfortunately we know very little about
this period. Written records were stolen or destroyed, and the
records that do exist tend to be biased depending on
(01:35):
which culture wrote them. English or Irish. Carved ruins are
still present, though having been etched into large stones and
rocks that have lasted to this day. What remains, though,
is often found in remote areas of Scotland or on
uninhabited islands, areas easily preserved due to lack of population
and construction activity. Nobody, including Mary and Gary, would have
(01:59):
imagined finding a settlement right in her backyard. Her home
had been built in the nineteen thirties, and surely someone
would have found something when the foundation was poured. But
while she was digging in her garden in the summer
of two thousand four, Gary uncovered smooth stones beneath the soil.
Stones she hadn't put there in the first place. She
had recently watched the television program about valuable artifacts discovered
(02:22):
in public places and believed these stones were evidence that
she had also found something valuable herself, so she reached
out to her local town council for their advice, and
they contacted chief archaeologist Douglas Spears. Spears came to the
house and examined the stones. He believed Gary was in
fact sitting on a major historical discovery. He called in
(02:43):
his team, who immediately trucked in specialized equipment as they
took over her backyard and established the dig site. As
they worked, they uncovered more stones, as well as a
few odd artifacts. The team didn't think too much of them, though,
considering this was someone's function in backyard, a digging tool
or gardening glove would be an expected thing to find
(03:05):
in such a location. However, Spears and his team didn't
find a digging tool or a glove. What they found
instead was much stranger than that. One item was a
child's gas mask from World War Two. They also found
an old television remote control, yet there had been no
TV out there at the time. Still, they kept digging,
(03:25):
hoping defined Viking tools or the foundation of some ancient
villagers home, something to justify the months they'd spent tearing
up this poor woman's backyard, and by January. They've done it.
After months of toiling at Marian Gary's house in buck Haven,
Spears had in fact made a discovery. All the telltale
signs were there, the antiquated construction techniques, the depth at
(03:49):
which the stones had been found, as well as the
sheer size of the area. Marian Gary's garden had been
sitting on top of a patio, a sunken patio to
be exact, one that had been laid down in the
nineteen forties. Spears and the other archaeologists had been so
obsessed with the possibility of uncovering an ancient Viking settlement
(04:10):
that they ignored all the evidence that what they had
spent months unearthing had been nothing more than a place
to enjoy a cold glass of lemonade. Spears felt like
a fool for wasting all that time, but Marian thankfully
wasn't too upset by all of it. After all, she
now had a new backyard restoration project with which to
occupy herself, all because she had left no stone unturned.
(04:46):
It's difficult to believe in things we cannot see. I'm
sure there are exceptions, like gravity or the wind, but
we can anchor our belief in them on the way
that they affect the world around us. Other things, though,
are a lot more difficult to believe in, unless, of course,
we managed to capture them on film. Elsie and Francis
were cousins. Francis and her mother had come to Cottingly,
(05:08):
a small village in northern England, to live with Francis's
aunt in nineteen seventeen. Elsie was a bit older than
her nine year old cousin, but the two often played
together in a stream close to the property. When the
girls returned to the house, they usually came back wet
and with muddy feet. However, they also came back with
the reason for their frequent trips to the water. They
(05:29):
were playing with the fairies. Their mothers didn't believe them,
of course, but Elsie was determined to show them the truth.
With her father's camera in hand, the girls trudged back
down to the stream. Half an hour later, they returned
with that proof. Elsie gave her father back his camera
and he developed the photographic plate in his private dark room.
(05:49):
The photo depicted Francis half hidden behind a bush as
four fairies hovered in the foreground. Elsie's father thought it
was a joke. Another photo was taken a few months later,
and this time Elsie was in front of the camera
and she had her hand extended to a gnome nor
more than a foot tall. Her father still wrote the
photograph office at prank, but her mother, Polly, believed them
(06:10):
to be true. Fairies, you see, were a hot topic
back then, as was the field of occultism. Polly attended
a meeting in nineteen nineteen of the Theosophical Society, which
believed in a secretive group of spiritual masters who were
more evolved than everyone else. These masters were smarter, lived longer,
and could even read minds. The meeting that Polly attended
(06:32):
was about fairy life, and after it was over, she
showed her daughter's photos to the speaker. From there, they
quickly went public. They were viewed as proof of the
girl's higher evolution, since they had manifested the fairies to
such a degree that they could be photographed by a
common camera. One of the leaders of the Theosophical Society,
Edward Gardner, sent both the photos and the original photographic
(06:55):
plates to an expert who concluded that they were indeed authentic.
The fair's were not paper cutouts, as Elsie's father had
originally assumed. Gardner continued to use the photographs in his
talks and sold prints of them in his lectures. Eventually
they were noticed by another theosophist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
the celebrated author behind the most famous detective in the world,
(07:17):
Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was working on a piece about fairies
for the Strand magazine. When he learned of the photographs,
He wrote to Elsie and her father and offered to
pay for use of them in his article. Her father
it was only too happy to oblige, but refused to
accept payments. He believed the photos should remain pure or
the benefits of the public. Of course, the photos were
(07:39):
subjected to more scrutiny, this time under the expert eye
of the Kodak company, who determined that they had not
been doctored. However, there was no way to determine whether
the fairies posing with Francis were real. Other experts attempted
to debunk the photos as fake, but Gardner shrugged them
off as biased opinions by nonbelievers, and en twenty Gardner
(08:01):
went to visit the Right family Incottingly for definitive proof
using his own cameras. He left the cameras, as well
as two dozen glass plates with Elsie and Francis in
order for the fairies to come out for their pictures.
Though the girls had to be alone, so Elsie's mother
went to her sister's house for tea while Elsie and
Francis took more photographs in the garden. One picture depicted
(08:23):
a fairy practically leaping towards Francis's nose, while another had
a fairy presenting Elsie with a flower. The glass plates
from a camera were then packed up and sent back
to Mr Gardner, who wrote to Doyle with some good news.
Those new photos were eventually published as part of Doyle's article,
and the public was unsure of how to take them.
Some believe them to be real, but most laughed, claiming
(08:45):
the girls had pulled a fast one on Doyle and Gardner. Still,
there was something to be said for the innocence of
two children who had not lost their sense of wonder
as they had grown older. It didn't take long for
the hype surrounding the Cottingly fairies to die down. For
many years, Francis and Elsie fell out of the public eye,
and then in nineteen sixty six, the Daily Expressed newspaper
(09:08):
in England interviewed Elsie about the photos. She said it
was possible that they've been nothing but her imagination run
a muck, but there was also a chance that they
were real. Twenty years later, the girls came clean. In
an article for the Paranormal magazine that Unexplained, Elsie and
Francis confessed that they actually had seen fairies down by
the streaming coddingly, but the photographs have been faked. The
(09:30):
fairies had been nothing more than paper cutouts. After they
took the photos, they tossed the evidence of their deception
into the water. But there was one photo of the
women disagreed on. It was the fifth and final picture taken,
titled Fairies and Their sun Bath, in which one fairy
enjoys the morning sunshine while the other struggles to wake
up from her peaceful slumber. Neither Elsie nor Francis are
(09:53):
anywhere in the photo, only the two fairies. Elsie believed
it to be a fake, just like the others, but
Francis maintained until her death in nineteen eighty six that
the photograph had been real. Her belief was so strong
that she instilled it in her daughter, who also went
on television attesting to the authenticity of the photo that
her mother had taken. For Elsie Rights and Francis Griffith's
(10:16):
their fairy photos became a worldwide phenomenon, inspiring several books
and films, turning their story into a real life fairy tale.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
(10:41):
The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay
curious one
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the cabinet of curiosities. So much of history
(00:29):
has been buried. Colonialism takes quite a bit of the blame,
as does nature itself, which has swallowed the remains of
entire civilizations over the years. That's why archaeologists travel all
over the world trying to fill in the missing pages
of the historical record, one dig site at a time.
In two thousand four, a new dig site was unearthed,
(00:49):
and in the most unusual of places, Marian Gary's backyard.
Gary lived in buck Haven, a small town in Fife
on the eastern coast of Scotland, residing along the North Sea,
just across from Norway and the Netherlands. It wasn't completely
out of the question for Vikings to have landed along
Scottish shores hundreds of years earlier. In fact, from the
eighth to the fifteen centuries, Vikings and Norwegians did colonize
(01:13):
parts of Scotland. This period of time is known as
Scandinavian Scotland, and there is evidence of their presence still
around today. For example, on the island known as the
Brof of birth Say, there are archaeological remains of an
entire Norse village, but unfortunately we know very little about
this period. Written records were stolen or destroyed, and the
records that do exist tend to be biased depending on
(01:35):
which culture wrote them. English or Irish. Carved ruins are
still present, though having been etched into large stones and
rocks that have lasted to this day. What remains, though,
is often found in remote areas of Scotland or on
uninhabited islands, areas easily preserved due to lack of population
and construction activity. Nobody, including Mary and Gary, would have
(01:59):
imagined finding a settlement right in her backyard. Her home
had been built in the nineteen thirties, and surely someone
would have found something when the foundation was poured. But
while she was digging in her garden in the summer
of two thousand four, Gary uncovered smooth stones beneath the soil.
Stones she hadn't put there in the first place. She
had recently watched the television program about valuable artifacts discovered
(02:22):
in public places and believed these stones were evidence that
she had also found something valuable herself, so she reached
out to her local town council for their advice, and
they contacted chief archaeologist Douglas Spears. Spears came to the
house and examined the stones. He believed Gary was in
fact sitting on a major historical discovery. He called in
(02:43):
his team, who immediately trucked in specialized equipment as they
took over her backyard and established the dig site. As
they worked, they uncovered more stones, as well as a
few odd artifacts. The team didn't think too much of them, though,
considering this was someone's function in backyard, a digging tool
or gardening glove would be an expected thing to find
(03:05):
in such a location. However, Spears and his team didn't
find a digging tool or a glove. What they found
instead was much stranger than that. One item was a
child's gas mask from World War Two. They also found
an old television remote control, yet there had been no
TV out there at the time. Still, they kept digging,
(03:25):
hoping defined Viking tools or the foundation of some ancient
villagers home, something to justify the months they'd spent tearing
up this poor woman's backyard, and by January. They've done it.
After months of toiling at Marian Gary's house in buck Haven,
Spears had in fact made a discovery. All the telltale
signs were there, the antiquated construction techniques, the depth at
(03:49):
which the stones had been found, as well as the
sheer size of the area. Marian Gary's garden had been
sitting on top of a patio, a sunken patio to
be exact, one that had been laid down in the
nineteen forties. Spears and the other archaeologists had been so
obsessed with the possibility of uncovering an ancient Viking settlement
(04:10):
that they ignored all the evidence that what they had
spent months unearthing had been nothing more than a place
to enjoy a cold glass of lemonade. Spears felt like
a fool for wasting all that time, but Marian thankfully
wasn't too upset by all of it. After all, she
now had a new backyard restoration project with which to
occupy herself, all because she had left no stone unturned.
(04:46):
It's difficult to believe in things we cannot see. I'm
sure there are exceptions, like gravity or the wind, but
we can anchor our belief in them on the way
that they affect the world around us. Other things, though,
are a lot more difficult to believe in, unless, of course,
we managed to capture them on film. Elsie and Francis
were cousins. Francis and her mother had come to Cottingly,
(05:08):
a small village in northern England, to live with Francis's
aunt in nineteen seventeen. Elsie was a bit older than
her nine year old cousin, but the two often played
together in a stream close to the property. When the
girls returned to the house, they usually came back wet
and with muddy feet. However, they also came back with
the reason for their frequent trips to the water. They
(05:29):
were playing with the fairies. Their mothers didn't believe them,
of course, but Elsie was determined to show them the truth.
With her father's camera in hand, the girls trudged back
down to the stream. Half an hour later, they returned
with that proof. Elsie gave her father back his camera
and he developed the photographic plate in his private dark room.
(05:49):
The photo depicted Francis half hidden behind a bush as
four fairies hovered in the foreground. Elsie's father thought it
was a joke. Another photo was taken a few months later,
and this time Elsie was in front of the camera
and she had her hand extended to a gnome nor
more than a foot tall. Her father still wrote the
photograph office at prank, but her mother, Polly, believed them
(06:10):
to be true. Fairies, you see, were a hot topic
back then, as was the field of occultism. Polly attended
a meeting in nineteen nineteen of the Theosophical Society, which
believed in a secretive group of spiritual masters who were
more evolved than everyone else. These masters were smarter, lived longer,
and could even read minds. The meeting that Polly attended
(06:32):
was about fairy life, and after it was over, she
showed her daughter's photos to the speaker. From there, they
quickly went public. They were viewed as proof of the
girl's higher evolution, since they had manifested the fairies to
such a degree that they could be photographed by a
common camera. One of the leaders of the Theosophical Society,
Edward Gardner, sent both the photos and the original photographic
(06:55):
plates to an expert who concluded that they were indeed authentic.
The fair's were not paper cutouts, as Elsie's father had
originally assumed. Gardner continued to use the photographs in his
talks and sold prints of them in his lectures. Eventually
they were noticed by another theosophist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
the celebrated author behind the most famous detective in the world,
(07:17):
Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was working on a piece about fairies
for the Strand magazine. When he learned of the photographs,
He wrote to Elsie and her father and offered to
pay for use of them in his article. Her father
it was only too happy to oblige, but refused to
accept payments. He believed the photos should remain pure or
the benefits of the public. Of course, the photos were
(07:39):
subjected to more scrutiny, this time under the expert eye
of the Kodak company, who determined that they had not
been doctored. However, there was no way to determine whether
the fairies posing with Francis were real. Other experts attempted
to debunk the photos as fake, but Gardner shrugged them
off as biased opinions by nonbelievers, and en twenty Gardner
(08:01):
went to visit the Right family Incottingly for definitive proof
using his own cameras. He left the cameras, as well
as two dozen glass plates with Elsie and Francis in
order for the fairies to come out for their pictures.
Though the girls had to be alone, so Elsie's mother
went to her sister's house for tea while Elsie and
Francis took more photographs in the garden. One picture depicted
(08:23):
a fairy practically leaping towards Francis's nose, while another had
a fairy presenting Elsie with a flower. The glass plates
from a camera were then packed up and sent back
to Mr Gardner, who wrote to Doyle with some good news.
Those new photos were eventually published as part of Doyle's article,
and the public was unsure of how to take them.
Some believe them to be real, but most laughed, claiming
(08:45):
the girls had pulled a fast one on Doyle and Gardner. Still,
there was something to be said for the innocence of
two children who had not lost their sense of wonder
as they had grown older. It didn't take long for
the hype surrounding the Cottingly fairies to die down. For
many years, Francis and Elsie fell out of the public eye,
and then in nineteen sixty six, the Daily Expressed newspaper
(09:08):
in England interviewed Elsie about the photos. She said it
was possible that they've been nothing but her imagination run
a muck, but there was also a chance that they
were real. Twenty years later, the girls came clean. In
an article for the Paranormal magazine that Unexplained, Elsie and
Francis confessed that they actually had seen fairies down by
the streaming coddingly, but the photographs have been faked. The
(09:30):
fairies had been nothing more than paper cutouts. After they
took the photos, they tossed the evidence of their deception
into the water. But there was one photo of the
women disagreed on. It was the fifth and final picture taken,
titled Fairies and Their sun Bath, in which one fairy
enjoys the morning sunshine while the other struggles to wake
up from her peaceful slumber. Neither Elsie nor Francis are
(09:53):
anywhere in the photo, only the two fairies. Elsie believed
it to be a fake, just like the others, but
Francis maintained until her death in nineteen eighty six that
the photograph had been real. Her belief was so strong
that she instilled it in her daughter, who also went
on television attesting to the authenticity of the photo that
her mother had taken. For Elsie Rights and Francis Griffith's
(10:16):
their fairy photos became a worldwide phenomenon, inspiring several books
and films, turning their story into a real life fairy tale.
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
(10:41):
The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay
curious one
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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