Like the great detective Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a brilliant writer and committed spiritualist, investigates in this book the story of photographs of fairies taken in the first decades of the 20th century. two girls from a remote English village. The mystic and theosophist E. Gardner becomes his faithful Watson. Sparing no effort, they follow the trail, collecting evidence of the existence of fairies and other spirits of nature - elementals, guardians of plants. This book cost Conan Doyle the friendship and respect of many people. More than sixty years later, the Cottingley cousins' hoax was exposed, but even then they continued to insist that they saw tiny winged creatures near the village stream. The incredible story of the Cottingley fairies intertwined spiritualism and theosophy, folk beliefs and popular culture, mixed with the occult sensibility of the late Victorians and scientific progress. The first complete and annotated translation into Russian of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most scandalous book.