In the summer of 1917, two girls in a village in Yorkshire cut fairy figures out of a book, propped them up with hatpins in the grass beside a stream, and took a photograph. The photograph eventually reached Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the most famously rational fictional detective in the history of literature, who announced publicly, in the Christmas issue of The Strand Magazine, that it was the most important photographic evidence of supernatural phenomena ever produced. He staked his considerable reputation on it. He was wrong. He would not discover he was wrong for years.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: Frances Griffiths, newly arrived from South Africa and homesick in an English village, and her older cousin Elsie Wright, the girl who knew how to use a camera. The specific grief of a world at war that made mi ...