Photograph of a Fairy [culture]

[frameacloud]

Trigger warnings for this article: none that I can think of. Work-safe.

Reported Sept. 8, 2009, in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid est. 1896: One night in 2007, Phyllis Bacon, a 55-year-old woman living in New Addington, near Croydon in South London, casually took a photograph of her garden without looking into the camera.  To her surprise, the photograph—shown in this news article—looks as though the flash has illuminated a fairy.  The light shape looks like a small creature flying through the air, with wings, legs, and a head with antennae.  Either it has awfully long arms, or it’s carrying something crosswise.¹

To me, the fairy in this photograph looks like it’s not real… but not an intentional fake, either.  It’s probably just a blur caused by a slightly shaky camera and a long exposure.  Compare another photo with a similar apparition, where a winged angel seems to be standing beside a girl on stage, analyzed by the skeptical blog Forgetomori.²  There are other floating white dots in the “Croydon Tinker Bell” photo, and one of them has a double-image look to it, suggesting that the fairy is indeed an artifact of long-exposure blur.

I wonder what these motes are?  Insects, perhaps, or cottonwood, or snowflakes.  The photographer didn’t say what time of the year it was, and that would make a difference.  

That said, this “fairy” is a pretty neat-looking example of an accidental film artifact.  I’m impressed at just how fairy-shaped it is.  I’d sure be tickled to see one of my photos come out with a fun surprise in it like this.

Years ago, I remember happening across a website about artifacts that mysteriously appear in photos.  (Unhelpfully, I have no idea of the site’s name, or where to look for it now.)  Most of them looked an awful lot like dust on the lens or the flash, or a hair hanging into the frame… rather boring.  None of them looked so intriguing as this one!  The people running the website believed that these motes represented paranormal activity, or that a spirit had been present at the time when the photo was taken.  I suppose they would look at this photo and say, “Yes, there are indeed ‘motes’ in this photo, but they are fairies, too, and not cottonwood at all.”

- O. Scribner

Sources

1. Rebecca English. “Croydon Tinker Bell… are there fairies at the bottom of the garden?” Daily Mail Online. September 8, 2009. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1211845/Croydon-Tinker-Bell--fairies-the-garden.html
2. Kentaro Mori. “Blurred by an angel.” Forgetomori. September 5, 2009. http://forgetomori.com/2009/skepticism/blurred-by-an-angel/