Folks, this one is off the beaten path. If you don't know me in real life, hi, I'm Nancy and I'm a big fan of classic and contemporary detective stories. Call me basic, but I love Sherlock Holmes. To put it in perspective, I don't love Sherlock Holmes as much as somepeopledo (thought I aspire to this level of eccentric obsession), but I love Sherlock enough to watch/read pretty much anything the character appears in. Yes, I watched Guy Ritchie's Young Sherlock. It, uh, really took some big swings on Sherlock's origin story.
Once this story was top of mind for me again, I knew I would write a Wonder Work essay about it.
So, Watson, I would be very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your pocket; wonder is afoot!
The Small Idea: Motivated Belief
The Spark: Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford, "Photographing Fairies," rebroadcast on December 25, 2025.
What happens when the person best equipped to spot a fake is the one who most needs it to be real?
Nancy Martira
Clew Strategy
In May 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — creator of Sherlock Holmes, knight of the realm, one of the most famous men in the English-speaking world — opened a letter that contained two photographs. They had been taken three years earlier by two cousins in the Yorkshire village of Cottingley: 16-year-old Elsie Wright and her 9-year-old cousin Frances Griffiths. In one, Frances stares calmly into the camera while a small troupe of fairies dances in front of her face. In the other, Elsie smiles down at a tiny prancing gnome. The "fairies" were paper cutouts, held up with hatpins.
Yet Doyle — a trained physician, man of science, and advocate for vaccinations — was fully convinced by the school-girl prank that genuine wood sprites had been captured on film. He wrote a sellout article in Strand Magazine (founded in 1890 and still publishing today after a brief forty-eight-year hiatus) then a book, “The Coming of the Fairies,” making the case with what economist and journalist Tim Harford calls "the stance of a logical man explaining every clue like Sherlock Holmes himself."
A newspaper headline of the time put it more bluntly: “Has Conan Doyle gone mad?”
Well, I suppose that depends on your understanding of madness. Doyle took a piece of media and, with the full force of an exceptional intellect, used it to confirm something he already, desperately needed to be true. Under that definition, who among us isn't mad?
He took a piece of media and, with the full force of an exceptional intellect, used it to confirm something he already, desperately needed to be true.
By 1920, Conan Doyle had been in mourning for most of a decade. His first wife, Louisa, died of tuberculosis in 1906 after thirteen years of decline. His son Kingsley, gravely wounded at the Battle of the Somme, died of pneumonia in October 1918, two weeks before the Armistice. His brother, Innes, died of pneumonia four months later. Two brothers-in-law — one of them E.W. Hornung, creator of the Gentleman Thief Raffles — and two nephews followed. By the time Doyle was writing his essay on fairies, his beloved mother had also died.
The 1920s and 1930s were considered the "Golden Age" of Detective Fiction. The genre flourished under the shadowy zeitgeist. The combined horrors of the First World War and the 1918 influenza pandemic had hollowed out a generation. Spiritualism — the belief that the dead could communicate with the living through mediums, automatic writing, and séances — became a kind of mass technology to address grief. Ouija boards sold out. Mediums booked tours. People needed somewhere to put the love that had nowhere else to go. Doyle was far from alone in his quest to prove that life as we know it continued on mysterious planes.
So, let's not judge these people. If half of all the people you loved had died within a decade, you too might be willing to entertain the idea that the widow on the next block could excrete paranormal goo while in a trance state.
The first of the five photographs, taken by Elsie Wright in 1917, shows Frances Griffiths with the alleged fairies. Are you convinced? Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was. Photo by Elsie Wright (1901–1988).
The Ego that Locked the Door
By the time the Cottingley photographs reached him, Doyle was no longer a spiritualist in private. He was the most famous public defender of spiritualism in the British Empire. He had given lectures, written essays, picked fights with skeptics in the pages of major newspapers. He had staked something far more valuable than money on the proposition that the dead could speak to the living: he had staked his name.
So the photos arrived at precisely the perfect moment. Here, finally, was physical evidence of spiritual life beyond our realm: visual, reproducible evidence, for logical scrutiny. Doyle threw himself at the verification process with the relish of his own most famous character. He had the photographs examined by experts. He cited testimony. He published his findings, "I have convinced myself that there is overwhelming evidence for the fairies."
What Doyle could not do was take seriously the possibility that he was wrong. By 1920, admitting the artifice behind spiritualism wouldn't just be an intellectual defeat for the man, it had a very tangilbe financial, professional, and personal cost. During this time, Doyle had abandoned writing fiction. In the place of the great detective, Doyle put all of his energy behind building a public identity on the proposition that another world was reaching toward this one. If the fairies were fake, the case for that world would diminish. And if the ideas behind spiritualism were fake, what had all the horrors, loss, and tragegy been for?
There's a further complicating wrinkle. Doyle's own father, Charles Altamont Doyle spent the last years of his life confined to the Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum, where he filled sketchbooks with sorrowful drawings of fairies, one of them inscribed “I have known such a creature.” As Tony Wolf suggests in the “Ghost Racket Crusade” episode of Phoebe Judge’s Criminal podcast, the Cottingley photographs may have appeared to Doyle as vindication of his father's mental afflictions, a family inheritance he had spent his life half-disowning and half-defending.
That isn't ego in the petty sense. It's the way love, grief, and reputation can fuse into a single belief that cannot be questioned without the whole structure coming down.
That isn't ego in the petty sense. It's the way love, grief, and reputation can fuse into a single belief that cannot be questioned without the whole structure coming down.
What Houdini Saw that Doyle Couldn't
It would be neat to put Houdini on the other side of this story as the skeptic, the rationalist, the man immune to wanting. He wasn't. Houdini lost his mother and was, by his own admission, "absolutely bereft." He attended séances with a hope that the trick would, just this once, turn out to be real.
The difference wasn't that Houdini didn't want to believe. The difference was that his expertise pointed the other way. He had spent decades inside the mechanics of stage illusion. To believe a medium was real, he would have had to deny everything his trained eyes saw: the palmed bell, the phosphorescent gloves, the cold reading lifted from newspaper archives and graveyard inscriptions. His professional identity required him to see through the gaff. Doyle's professional identity required him not to.
Two intelligent, successful men wanted to believe. Doyle had confidence that his expertise gave him insights into the unseen world, but Houdini had the self-awareness to recognize that his real expertise was finding the seam where illusion and fakery are stitched together We do not, it turns out, see with our eyes. We see with whatever we have already trained ourselves to look for.
Most of us walk around with a sense of our own truth: a position we're known for, a set of beliefs we've staked some part of our identity on, a way of being right that we've practiced for years. When new evidence shows up, we don't evaluate it from a neutral position, we evaluate it with tools finely calibrated to reinforce our existing beliefs.
We do not, it turns out, see with our eyes. We see with whatever we have already trained ourselves to look for.
The difference wasn't that Houdini didn't *want* to believe. The difference was that his expertise pointed the other way. Photo by Colton Sturgeon on Unsplash
Here are two small experiments to try:
Your Arthur Conan Doyle Moment
Pick a specific belief you held confidently within the last year that turned out to be wrong. Maybe it was about a person’s intentions, a project’s prospects, a piece of news, or a deal you were sure would close. Spend ten minutes writing down not what you got wrong but what you got out of believing it. Was it comfort? A reason not to act? A version of yourself that you preferred? The hoax we fall for is rarely about the quality of the evidence, it's about what we need to believe is true.
I Might Be Wrong ...
Take a current position you’d defend confidently if challenged about at over dinner tonight. Ask: if I turned out to be wrong about this, what specifically would I lose? Not the abstract embarrassment, the concrete cost. A relationship? A self-image? An hour of admitting it to someone? Notice whether the size of the cost makes the belief feel more sturdy — or just more expensive to question.
Here is the part of the story of the Cottingley Fairies that interests me the most: it’s not that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was hoodwinked; it’s that Elsie Wright kept the secret for 65 years.
Once the joke escaped her Yorkshire garden — once it reached Edward Gardner and then Doyle and then the public — Elsie understood something the historical record makes very clear: telling the truth would humiliate two men who had publicly tied their reputations to her photographs. So she waited. Then her mother got caught up in the story, and the cost of confessing kept rising until it was no longer a confession the girls could make casually. Elsie waited for Conan Doyle to die. He did, in 1930. She waited for Edward Gardner to die. He lived until 1969. By the time she finally wrote her letter to the British Journal of Photography, in 1983, she was 82 years old. She and Frances had been carrying on with the hoax for two-thirds of a century.
That’s the thing about hoaxes; they often make for strange co-conspirators. Two bored cousins took some photographs. A retoucher polished them. A spiritualist saw what he was already looking for. A grieving country wanted to believe that life doesn’t end at death. Elsie and Frances probably got tired of this deception shortly after they created it. But instead of unwinding the lie, their unwillingness to humiliate a famous man in mourning kept it intact well past the natural expiration date. In life, sometimes the line between deceiving someone and protecting them is thinner than the veil between worlds.
I hope you’ll agree that the moral of this story is not to be more skeptical. The lesson is that falling for things is not usually a failure of intelligence. Believing in the unbelievable can be an act of love, of identity, of need, of mercy. We are not fools to believe; only foolish not to examine the motivations behind our beliefs.
The Question
What are you currently believing because the cost of changing your mind would be paid in something you can't bear to lose?
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(or buy me a coffee.) Meet Nancy Martira. I'm a brand strategist and communications consultant who brings endless curiosity to every project. If you've got a challenge that needs a fresh, unexpected perspective, let's talk!
Communications consultant, brand strategist, & Wonder Work creator. Curious about everything from terrible orchestras to happiness algorithms. Feed your curiosity; starve the doom — one small idea at a time. Let's wonder!