COCK LANE

Opening

In January 1762 a house in Cock Lane, by Smithfield market in London, began to knock and scratch around the bed of Elizabeth Parsons, the young daughter of Richard Parsons, a parish clerk. Through a code of one knock for yes and two for no, the noises claimed to be the ghost of Fanny Lynes, a former lodger, and accused her partner, William Kent, of poisoning her with arsenic.

London came to listen. Crowds made the lane impassable, Methodist clergy took up the case, and Horace Walpole arrived with the Duke of York. On 1 February a committee including Samuel Johnson heard nothing when the girl was watched. By July five people stood convicted of conspiracy, and Parsons was sentenced to the pillory.

Timeline

About 1759William Kent, a widower from Norfolk, and Fanny Lynes, his late wife's sister, lodge with Richard Parsons in Cock Lane, calling themselves Mr and Mrs Kent. Canon law barred a man from marrying his deceased wife's sister. Kent lends Parsons 12 guineas. While Kent is away at a wedding, Fanny shares a bed with Elizabeth Parsons and both report scratching and rapping. James Franzen, landlord of the nearby Wheat Sheaf, says he saw a white figure on the stairs.

January 1760The couple move out. Fanny, pregnant, falls ill on 25 January at temporary lodgings, is moved to Bartlet's Court in Clerkenwell, and dies there of smallpox on 2 February. She is buried in the vault of St John's, Clerkenwell. Her estate goes to Kent, which her family resents.

1761 to January 1762Parsons has not repaid the loan and Kent sues him, recovering the money by January 1762, just as the noises in Cock Lane start again. A later lodger, Catherine Friend, had already moved out because of them. John Moore, assistant preacher at St Sepulchre's, works out the knocking code with Parsons. The Methodist Thomas Broughton visits on 5 January and leaves convinced. The Public Ledger starts printing accounts and Kent falls under public suspicion of murder.

12 January 1762Kent attends a sitting with Fanny's two physicians. Asked whether he will be hanged, the knocking answers once for yes.

Mid to late JanuaryElizabeth is moved between houses and the noises tend to follow her. The St. James's Chronicle, the London Chronicle, and Lloyd's Evening Post pick up the story. On 23 January the Lord Mayor, Sir Samuel Fludyer, refuses to arrest anyone and orders that the girl be tested. On 30 January Walpole visits with the Duke of York and others and leaves disappointed.

1 February 1762At the house of the Reverend Stephen Aldrich in Clerkenwell, a committee including Johnson watches Elizabeth in bed. Knocks and scratches are reported while the men are downstairs; once she is told to keep her hands outside the bedclothes, nothing. At about one in the morning members go down into the St John's vault, where the spirit had promised to knock on Fanny's coffin. Silence.

February 1762Further tests in the Strand and Covent Garden. Told that if no noises came by Sunday 21 February she and her father would be sent to Newgate, Elizabeth is seen by maids hiding a small board, about six by four inches, in her clothing. The observers conclude she made the noises under pressure from her father. On 25 February Kent has Fanny's coffin opened in the vault to disprove a rumour that the body had been removed. Moore publishes a retraction.

10 July 1762Richard Parsons, his wife, Mary Frazer, John Moore, and a tradesman, Richard James, are tried at Guildhall before Lord Mansfield for conspiring against Kent's life. The trial runs from 10 a.m. to about 9:30 p.m. The jury takes about 15 minutes to convict all five.

February to April 1763Moore and James pay Kent £588 and are released after a reprimand. Mrs Parsons gets a year's imprisonment and Frazer six months in Bridewell. Richard Parsons is sentenced to two years in prison and three spells in the pillory: 16 March, 30 March, and 8 April, once at the end of Cock Lane.

Key figures

Elizabeth Parsons, born in 1749 according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, was about twelve in January 1762, and was described in a contemporary account as a "little artful girl". The noises centred on her. Investigators concluded she produced them under duress from her father, and she was not among those tried.

Richard Parsons, clerk at St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, owned the house, owed Kent money, and was known locally as a drinker. He protested his innocence throughout.

William Kent was the accused. He went to sittings to face the knocking, enlisted Fanny's doctor and apothecary, opened her coffin, and brought the prosecution.

John Moore, a clergyman with Methodist leanings, ran the questioning and gave the case its religious charge before retracting in February.

Samuel Johnson sat on the 1 February committee and wrote its account, which ended up in Boswell's Life of Johnson.

Physical and documentary trail

For a 1762 haunting the record is unusually full: daily newspaper reports from mid-January, Parsons' own notice in the Public Ledger of 26 January, Johnson's report of 1 February, Moore's printed retraction, an illustration of the board Elizabeth hid, the trial record, and accounts in the Annual Register and The Gentleman's Magazine. Douglas Grant's 1965 book The Cock Lane Ghost and Paul Chambers' 2006 study work from these.

It is, therefore, the opinion of the whole assembly, that the child has some art of making or counterfeiting a particular noise, and that there is no agency of any higher cause.

What the record does not contain is any inquest or medical evidence that Fanny was poisoned. Her physician, Dr Cooper, and apothecary, James Jones, testified to her illness, and they signed an affidavit for Kent on 8 February.

Things you might not know

• "Thou art a lying spirit" was Kent's line. It came at the 12 January sitting, after the knocking said he would hang, not at the trial.
• The crowd paid Parsons. Instead of pelting him in the pillory, onlookers took up a collection for him.
• One investigator came armed. Captain Wilkinson attended a sitting with a pistol to shoot the source of the knocking and a stick to make his escape. The ghost stayed quiet.
• Visitors were charged. Parsons took an entrance fee from people who wanted to "talk" to the ghost.
• The Archbishop's letter went unread. At the trial Moore produced a letter from Archbishop Thomas Secker on his behalf. Mansfield put it in his pocket unopened.
• Fanny's maid shamed the ghost. On 19 January the former servant Esther "Carrots" Carlisle told the knocking spirit it ought to be ashamed of itself, as she had never hurt her mistress. The sitting ended there.
• Hogarth used it twice. The ghost appears in Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762) and in The Times, Plate 2.

Competing explanations

Fraud from start to finish. This is what the 1762 court found, and the board hidden in February is the closest thing to a caught hand. It explains the noises that followed the girl from house to house and the silence whenever her hands were watched. It leaves open who began it and why the first raps in 1759 happened at all.

A genuine disturbance later exploited. Some noises predate the debt quarrel, and Fanny herself reported hearing them in 1759, before any motive against Kent existed. On this reading something odd happened in the house and was then turned into an accusation. Nothing in the record tests the early raps independently; they rest on the household's word and Franzen's.

A feud dressed as a haunting. The money dispute between Kent and Parsons, Moore's suspicions about the unmarried couple, and the Lynes family's resentment over the will all point the same way as the knocking did. This is less an alternative than a motive for the fraud the court found.

Later life of the case

The ghost became shorthand for credulity. Oliver Goldsmith is thought to have written the pamphlet The Mystery Revealed in February 1762, Charles Churchill mocked Johnson in his satire The Ghost, and David Garrick's The Farmer's Return from London made comedy of it. Charles Dickens mentions it in Nicholas Nickleby, A Tale of Two Cities, and Dombey and Son. It also fed the 18th-century quarrel between Methodists and Anglicans over whether ghosts proved an afterlife.

Finding

Settled: from January 1762 the noises in Cock Lane centred on Elizabeth Parsons, stopped whenever she was properly watched, and were caught being faked with a hidden board in February. A London jury convicted five people of conspiracy against William Kent, and no evidence that Fanny Lynes was poisoned was ever produced. With the board found and the convictions recorded, hoax is the fair word for the 1762 campaign.

What still will not resolve: the first raps in 1759, which Fanny herself heard before anyone had a motive to frame Kent. No one outside the household logged them, so they can't now be tested either way.