The rise of spiritualism influenced an interest in the West with all things mystical from ghosts and seances, tarot (Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn), to fairies.
The disillusionment of World War One continued to fuel the rise of spiritualism which correlates to the establishment and growth of the Fairy Investigation Society.
During World War One two young cousins from Cottingley, England, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, took photographs of themselves with cardboard cutouts of fairies in their garden.
They then gained the attention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series and notable member of the Fairy Investigation Society.
Included in the book were ten short stories describing tales of fairy encounters through reports of the society, which monitored fairy-human relations.
[1] During the late 1950s there were well over a hundred members, including famous individuals such as author Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, Ithell Colquhoun,[2] Leslie Alan Shepard,[6] RAF commander Sir Hugh Dowding, Victor Purcell, Walter Starkie (of gypsy lore fame), Naomi Mitchison and animator Walt Disney.
Craufard, for instance, was a pioneer of wireless technology with the Royal Navy who believed he had established communication with marsh elves on the outskirts of London, and that on one occasion they had told him where to dig for treasure.
[7] A 1960 newspaper article in the Sunday Pictorial ridiculed Marjorie Johnson,[8] who began to withdraw from her role in the society.
The society was only semi-active under her successor Leslie Shepard, based in Blackrock, Dublin, Ireland, finally closing down in the early 1990s.
[7] The main objective of the society was to compile evidence in the form of anecdotes, letters, and popular accounts of fairy sightings.
[5] It was believed that seeing fairies was a clairvoyant ability, and that these beings could "connect us to nature and open the human soul to a higher metaphysical world.