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The Legend:
In July 1917, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 10-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths were tired of being chided by Elsie's father over their claims of seeing fairies... so they took a photograph of some to prove their existence.
The girls lived together in Cottingley, on the outskirts of Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. They often played together in the small wooded creek behind Elsie's home, and this is where they saw the fairies. On a day in July, Elsie, tired of her father's dismissive attitude to her and Frances' claims, borrowed her father's camera to take a picture. When the film was developed later in her father's dark room, Elsie's parents were in for a surprise; the picture that she had taken was of Frances... with a troop of fairies dancing in front of her.

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Elsie's parents were flabbergasted; but her father wasn't convinced. So, a month later, Frances took a picture of Elsie which clearly showed her playing with a gnome. Mr. Wright still wasn't convinced, and there the matter settled. The girls showed the pictures to their friends, but no particular interest was ever raised by them... at least, not until two years had past.
Elsie's mother had developed an interest in things supernatural, and took the pictures to share with a Theosophist meeting in Bradford one evening. In no time at all, the pictures were the center of attention and argument. Of the people who believed the fairies were real, the most prominant and vocal was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur printed the first two pictures in Strand Magazine in 1920 to help support his argument for the existance of fairies; this article made the story a worldwide sensation.
In 1920, Sir Arthur arranged for Elsie and Frances to once again be given a camera and left on their own in the small creek. The results were three more photos of the fairies; the last to be made, for shortly after Elsie and Frances moved away from one another and stopped seeing fairies. Sir Arthur later printed these three pictures in a sequel to his earlier article, and, in 1922, he expanded the two articles into a book, The Coming of the Fairies.

The three pictures taken in 1920 for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
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The Rest of the Story...
While the legend of the Cottingley Fairies as told in a number of popular magazines and children's books over the years may end here, there is some more to be added to the situation now.
the controversy over the pictures continued to rage into the 1960's, when new techniques for examining the photos brought them more into question. Elsie's position on the matter became vague. In 1966 she was quoted as saying she had photographed "figments of my imagination," and in 1971 on BBC TV in England she said that she just wanted to leave the subject "open." [quotes are according to Jenny Randles in Strange & Unexplained Mysteries of the 20th Century.] In 1976 during an YTV 'Calendar' interview, Frances (now 69) and Elsie (now 75) were asked, "Did you in any way fabricate those photographs?" Elsie answered firmly: "Of course not." Frances' answer was interesting: "You tell us how she could do it... and then we'll tell you. ... Remember, she was sixteen. And I was ten."
In 1982, Geoffrey Crawley, then the editor of the British Journal of Photography, published an article detailing his examination of what was believed to be the original negatives of the Cottingley photographs in the Brotherton Collection of Leeds University. His argument was simple; the 'Midg' style camera that was used by the girls to take the first two photographs was, by design, incapable of producing negatives as clearly defined as the negatives that were in the Brotherton Collection. Amazingly, he managed to find what appears to be an original print of the first photo in Cottingley; a comparison of this original to a print made from the Brotherton negatives is startling.
The original is muddy and fuzzy; Frances face can just be made out, and the "fairies" are just splotches of white -- and, as Crawley says in Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, "...exactly the type of, shall we say, less lively image that you would expect from a camera of this type." A closer examination of the negatives in the Brotherton Collection revealed evidence of airbrush retouching to make the fairies more defined, and of burnishing to help drop Frances' face into the background. The popular version of the photos that was being presented in the press and books were fradulent.
In an article in the Times of London for March 18, 1983, 76-year-old Frances Griffiths admitted the first four pictures were faked; now 82-year-old Elsie Wright Hill at first refused to comment, but in a second article on April 4 she confirmed the hoax. They had cut out figures drawn on bristol board by Elsie, and stood them up with hat-pins. The fairies in the first photo were traced from an illustration of dancing girls that came from page 104 of a copy of "Princess Mary's Gift Book."
But the two disagreed on the fifth picture; mainly each woman claimed to have been the one to take it. Frances stated that it was the only genuine photo, and Elsie claimed "it was all done with my own contraption and I had to wait for the weather to be right to take it."
This last seeming controversy was quickly given a logical explaination by none other than Geoffrey Crawley. In a letter to the Times on April 9, 1983, Crawley pointed out the the fifth and last photo, called "Fairies and Their Sun-Bath" by Sir Arthur, was previously studied in 1972 by Brian Coe, Curator of the Kodak Museum. Coe concluded it was a double exposure of fairy cutouts in grass, which explains why both women were convinced they had taken the photo... both had.