In England, two girls produced photos of themselves with 'fairies' that fooled Arthur Conan Doyle and others. The hoax, using cutouts, persisted until 1980s confession, reflecting Edwardian spiritualism amid WWI grief.

The Cottingley Fairies photographs of 1917 sparked a wave of fairy-themed poetry and children's literature, influencing writers like W.B. Yeats. This event not only critiqued the belief in the supernatural but also highlighted the tension between reality and imagination in modernist poetry.