Frances Griffiths and her cousin Elsie Wright had been teased about their stories of playing with fairies, but in 1917 all this changed. In the Cottingley Beck, close to their home, the Yorkshire schoolgirls produced two of the oddest pictures anyone had ever seen. Borrowing her father’s camera, Elsie set out one afternoon with her younger cousin for a romp in the nearby woods. When Mr. Wright developed the picture later that evening he would get a shock. There in the frame, dancing around his ten-year-old niece were the forms of four female fairies! He confronted the girls, who claimed nonchalantly that they often played with fairies in the beck. A month later another slide produced a picture of sixteen-year-old Elsie sitting in conversation with a gnome.

Do You Believe in Fairies? Evidence from Cottingley Beck

There is no protection, though, against the wicked Greentoothed Woman once you are within her grasp. Like the tale of Jenny Greenteeth, all these superstitions are messages used by our ancestors to warn us against the danger of water.

Jenny Greenteeth

Before scientists conceived of the periodic table, with its 116 elements, scientists taught that the earth and everything therein was made of four basic elements: water, air, fire and earth. Paracelsus, a fifteenth century alchemist, took the idea one step further, theorizing that each element was composed of nature spirits called elementals. These creatures, made of unique ethereal substances, could live only in the element to which they were born. As the guardians of all nature, they lived and acted as humans, although they had no souls.

Enchanting Elementals