Page 106 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 106/206
Frances Griffiths: from the ‘Cottingly Fairies’ set 1917
Conan Doyle had joined the Society for Psychical Research as early as 1893. When his eldest son and his brother and other close relatives were killed in the Great War, this reinforced his belief in spirit communications, and perhaps made him less sceptical of these ‘fairy photographs’. The odd thing is that they weren’t ‘professional’ fakes - the girls - Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright had simply it seems (according to James Randi), cut out pictures from the 1915 children’s book Princess Mary’s Gift Book and hung them in their favourite play area - on the banks of their local stream, near Cottingly.
I speak from experience here - in the 1960s, I lived in a flat in Marmion Road, Southsea, where my neighbours Peter and Suzie Burt, once showed me a photo - a 2x3 inch black and white landscape- format snapshot, taken of Suzie’s mum and herself, with her dog, sometime in the early 1950s. To the