It fluttered into her life and left a little bit of fairy dust.

But no matter how hard Phyllis Bacon scours her garden, she can find no trace of her silver-winged visitor. All she has is this picture.

And as she examines the photo of the tiny glowing creature darting around above her lawn, she finds herself believing in fairies.

Fairies who frolic at the bottom of gardens in New Addington, near Croydon in South London.

Mrs Bacon, 55, said she was not even looking through the camera at the time she took the picture.

Instead she simply clicked the button while holding it at arm's length out of the back door while chatting with relatives in her kitchen after dinner.

Astonished by what she saw when she glimpsed at the picture, she has spent months seeking a rational explanation.

But after scouring the internet for pictures of butterflies, moths and beetles that might match it, she has drawn a blank.

'I think it must be a fairy,' she said yesterday as she made the picture public for the first time.

'No one I've shown the photos to has come up with any plausible explanation as to what the figure is.' The photo reminds some of the Cottingley fairies, photographed in a West Yorkshire garden in 1917.

At the time, Elsie Wright, 16, and her ten-year-old cousin, Frances Griffiths, claimed to have captured images of themselves playing with tiny winged creatures.

Only many decades later did they admit that the photographs were faked and involved cut-out drawings of fairy figures that were fastened to foliage with hatpins.

Mrs Bacon insists her photograph, taken in 2007, involved no sleight of hand.

She said she had been reluctant to show it off widely for fear of being branded 'nutty'.

'I used to like fairy stories as a child, but I can't claim to have ever seen one before or since,' she said.

'Looking back, I think there was a fungi fairy ring in the garden at the time I took the picture, but I don't really know what to make of it all.

'To be honest, I don't know what it is and I'm keen to listen to anyone's suggestions. But until someone can tell me otherwise I'm going to go on thinking it's a fairy.'

Experts and the simply sceptical will no doubt point to explanations involving reflections, flashes or technical glitches.

But then, that's just taking all the magic out of it.