October 29, 2012 • 25 mins
In the early 1760s, the so-called Cock Lane Ghost haunted a London home, communicating through knocks. The ghost accused her former partner of poisoning her. However, as more details emerged people wondered if the haunting was an act of earthly revenge.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast, and
I'm deplte a chrucate boarding and we've focused a lot
on ghost stories this month for our Spooky Halloween Theories
(00:21):
and all said, though, I think the ghosts have been
a pretty diverse crowd, ranging from socialite Madame La Lourie
to headless Anne Boleyn to the real life false stuff.
But so far, all the ghosts we've talked about have
just kind of been there. They've been haunting, They've been
making their noises, doing things like hovering over babies, creepily,
(00:42):
taking headless carriage rides, washing laundry. Kind of aimless. I'd
almost say, well, washing laundry isn't exactly aimless, But okay,
I get your poor ghost, I get your point right,
there's no real agenda. Today's ghost, however, who is the
cock Lane ghost see to have had a mission, and
that was revenge, something that, according to Andrew Lang's book
(01:07):
on Hauntings and Hoaxes, tended to be fairly common in
the eighteenth century, which was an age where it wasn't
unusual to believe in ghosts at all. I mean it
does make sense. After all, a manufactured haunting could be
a pretty simple, if creative way to settle your earthly disputes,
you know, your unpaid loans, your feuds. Laying sums it
(01:28):
up pretty well with a quote from his book when
he writes about William Kent, this podcast unfortunate subject. He says,
accused by a ghost, he had no legal remedy. So recently,
in the Salem witch trials we talked about spectral evidence.
I think this is kind of the ultimate in spectral evidence.
Good point. When a ghost said that you murdered somebody. Actually,
(01:50):
when the ghost says that you murdered it, what are
you supposed to do? But before we get into all
of that, we need to go back to the beginning.
The cock Lane ghost wasn't initially out for blood. Its
first appearance was actually pretty pretty harmless. Yeah, this ghost
wasn't out for blood at least at first. It's initial
appearance came in seventeen fifty nine at this tiny house
(02:13):
on cock Lane, a road which the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography describes as quote an obscure turning near St
Paul's Cathedral in London. So the home belonged to Richard Parsons,
who was the deputy parish clerk of St Sepulcher's Church
and also a landlord, an alcoholic, and a man pretty
deeply in debt. The year before though, he'd taken in
(02:37):
William Kent of Norfolk as a tenant. And Kent was
of an independently wealthy man, but he had a bit
of a family secret of his own. He was living
with his dead wife's sister. The arrangement had started pretty
innocently back in Norfolk, when Fannie Lyons, who was the
sister in law, moved in to help care for Kent's
(02:58):
motherless child. His wife had died during childbirth, but after
the baby died to the couple continued to live together,
eventually as a husband and wife, even though they weren't
legally allowed to marry. So finally they moved to London,
posing as a husband and wife still. But the unconventional
living arrangement proved to be a bit of a liability,
(03:21):
especially because Kent tended to make loans to his landlords,
maybe a bad policy already, but to make things worse,
he actually expected that he'd get the money repaid. This,
of course, gave any sort of vindictive landlord, especially one
who knew that he was living with his dead wife's sister,
fodder for eviction and a way out of the loan potentially,
(03:44):
So it must have seemed lucky when Kent met Parsons
at St. Sepulchri's church and was offered rooms to rent.
So Mr and Mrs Kent, as they thought she was anyway,
gone on well with Parsons, his wife, and his two
daughters for a little while, But then things started to
head south when the naive Kent admitted to Parsons that
(04:05):
he wasn't actually married after all. He also loaned Parsons
a good bit of money, and then, as you mentioned,
and as he had done in the past, he started
to follow up on repayment fell into that same old trap. Still,
though the ghosts didn't appear until Kent was out in
the country on business and Fanny asked Richard parsons little
(04:28):
eleven year old daughter, Elizabeth known as Betty, if she
wanted to sleep in in her room and in her
bed while Kent was gone. So that night, where when
Betty and Fanny were in bed together, they started to
hear strange noises wrappings, scratches, taps. Mrs Parsons must have
been pretty rationally. She explained away the noises as the
(04:52):
nearby cobbler who might have been working late at night.
But when the noises were heard again on a Sunday,
the family started to wonder what was really going on. Fanny,
for one, seemed completely convinced that the sounds weren't from
a cobbler, weren't from any human making noise. They came
from a ghost, and a specific ghost at that. Yeah,
(05:14):
she thought that they came from the ghost of her
dead sister who had come to shame her and warn
her of her own death. So pretty serious stuff. Richard
Parsons investigated the house, even stripping the wainscoating off the
wall to see if something was rattling around behind it,
but he had no luck. The nightly wrappings just got louder,
(05:35):
and it sometimes described as the sound of a cat
scratching a wicker chair, just to give you an idea.
But it wasn't long before the neighbors started gossiping about
the ghost that lived there as well and the secret
history between Mr Kent and his wife, For as they
previously thought his wife well and that the ghost was
her dead sister, and so with all this gossip going on,
(05:59):
the cup bowl did finally move out of the house.
At that point, the noises stopped, and according to Patrick
Collins in The Forty Times, this probably would have been
a good time for Kent to just throw in the towel,
cut his losses, forgive the twelve guinea debt that he
had lent to Parsons instead, though he threatened to sue
(06:21):
and um. At this point, the timeline gets a little hazy,
and it's understandable a lot of these a lot of
the stories we talked about in October have some sketchy
details about them, but depending on the sourci look at,
either several months go by or up to a year
and a half goes by until we catch up again
(06:41):
with the Kent family. At this point, Fanny was heavily pregnant,
died of smallpox, and the sound started again in the
house back on cock Lane and and this time they
seemed to come specifically from Elizabeth parsons bedside, and the
Little Girl Office started to suffer from fits, and according
(07:03):
to Charles Wild's Elliott's book, Mysteries or Glimpses of the supernatural.
Little Betty described even seeing an apparition of a quote
woman surrounded by a blazing light. So it's not just
these knocks that could be mistaken for a cobbler anymore.
It seems something much more. Richard Parsons called a medium
(07:24):
who interrogated the ghost, asking questions and receiving answers in
the form of knox one that yes and two men no.
This is very reminiscent of the Fox sisters story and
the way that they communicated with the ghosts, or supposedly
communicated with ghosts, depending on what you believe. But maybe
we should act this one out the end of I
think we should. So. One of the first questions the
(07:48):
that was asked of the ghost was are you the
wife of Mr? Kent? Are you Kent's wife's sister? Did
you die naturally by poison? Was anyone but Kent responsible
(08:09):
for the poisoning? Will it ease your mind if the
man be hanged? Oh? Man, Yeah, that's bad news for Kent.
There the single knock meaning yes. So the ghost, who
was now revealed, of course, to be the murdered Fanny
(08:30):
Lions picked up a nickname Scratching Fanny, which an unfortunate
another element to the titles of this podcast. But um,
she started to give even more information, you know. This
interrogation went on even further and began to provide numerous
details on her death, the type of poison that had
(08:51):
been given her it was arsenic, how it was administered
through a drink called pearl, how many hours it took
two to three hours, um, All sorts of details. Although interestingly,
some information was apparently incorrect, I mean, aside from the
fact that this lady died of smallpox clearly, but some
of the details that the real Fannie Lions would have
(09:13):
known were also incorrect. Parsons, though, was interested in in
legitimizing this, seen the situation going on in his house,
the haunting, the haunting, and called in John Moore, who
was the assistant preacher at St. Suplker's, to get to
the bottom of things, and and more believed that there
truly was a spirit present and called on a fellow minister,
(09:36):
Thomas Broughton, for confirmation. And after these two guys were
on board with the idea of a haunting, other esteemed
men started to visit to which lended a lot of
legitimacy to the the entire premise. The public ledger even
wrote up the story, and crowds began to form at
the house every night, So it was something of a spectacle,
(09:58):
and the public began to truly believe that Kent was
a murderer. So this guy who they've never heard of before,
who nobody suspected of murdering his wife up until this
point his wife quotes, uh, suddenly is being accused of murder,
like pretty seriously. So as interests grew, Parsons could begin
(10:19):
to charge admittance to these seances that would be conducted
at his home by his relative Mary Fraser. And the
best members of society, of course, got bedside views. I mean,
this was a real attraction. Wasn't just something you'd read
about in the paper. You'd go out and experienced this yourself.
But if you were one of the better members of society,
(10:39):
you would get to pack in right next to little
Betty's bed and watch and wait while she slept and
see if the ghost visited. It's all. It adds an
extra element of disturbing um scenes to this whole story.
It's just wild to me. I mean, I have to wonder,
how did she even sleep? Well, these people standing around you.
(11:01):
You wonder how, Yes, an eleven or twelve year old
girl got a full night's sleep with all these people
in her house every day, but the just as an
example of the kind of people these sciances did attract.
The Duke of York even attended at one point. Um
Eliott's book, though, has a really good account of one
of the sciences. It is from a skeptics perspective, but
(11:22):
it gives you a sense of what it must have
been like coming into this tiny house, into this tiny room,
and watching this kid sleep, hoping a ghost would appear. Yeah.
Horace Walpole, a master of Gothic horror and author of
The Castle of a Toronto, visited one night with friends
after the opera. He wrote of the ghost in seventeen
(11:42):
sixty two. He said, quote, a drunken parish clerk set
it on foot out of revenge. The Methodists have adopted it,
and the whole town of London think of nothing else.
He then described the house on Cock Lane when we
opened the chamber, in which were fifty people with no
light but one Hello candle. At the end, we tumbled
over the bed of the child, to whom the ghost
(12:04):
comes and whom they are murdering by inches in such
insufferable heat and stench, we heard nothing. He stayed until
one thirty am, but was told that the ghosts might
not come until seven, when, as Walpole put it, only
prentices and old women would still be about. So he
was very dismissive. And and this tactic too, seemed to
(12:24):
be a common one, you know, delaying the ghosts. Oh,
it's it's not gonna be here until seven, So if
you want to stick around all night, be my guy.
He's already paid admittance, or just throwing off the crowd entirely.
One description of a seance has Frasier putting Betty to
bed and then about an hour later, running around asking
Fanny to to emerge, to show herself or make herself heard. Then,
(12:48):
when nothing happened, more than the minister told the crowd
that they were just too loud. They needed to quiet down,
They needed to step out for about ten minutes and
just collect themselves. Of course, when they came back, sure enough,
scratching Fanny was also there, the ghost making her her
presence known. So these little tactics of tricking or delaying
(13:12):
or distracting the crowd that had come to see the ghost.
So finally, with the situation that has come out of
people believing in this ghost so much, I mean, on
one hand, you have the mob which is spoiling for
Kent's punishment, and you have the crowds also gathering outside
the Parsons home, and both of these things together drive
the Lord Mayor to order a special investigation. Reverend Aldrich
(13:35):
of St John's Clerk Andwell assembled a company at his
home where Elizabeth had been moved. At ten, she was
put to bed by a group of women, and a
bit after eleven, that group, which included Dr Samuel Johnson,
came to her bedside and waited for the spirit. The
little girl said she could feel the spirit, but no
noises came, and so Dr Johnson declared that the whole
(13:56):
thing was a hoax, wrote an account of it, published
that in the Gentleman's Magazine. And it was really the
beginning of the end for this idea of of a ghost.
And poor Betty, of course, wasn't off the hook though.
Of Elizabeth um she was moved again, put through all
sorts of tests. She was at one point strung up
in a hammock with her feet and hands drawn away
(14:17):
from her body, you know, to prove she wouldn't be
able to make any sounds. And after scratching Fanny, the
ghost failed to make an appearance. Several nights in a
row after these tests, Betty was threatened pretty clearly that
her father would go to prison if she could not,
um call up the ghost. And that did the trick.
(14:40):
I mean, that night the girl was caught smuggling aboard
under her clothes and trying to make noises with it
in an attempt to save her family to stop her
father from going to prison. UM which, after that point
clearly the ghost hoax was over. Although one interesting note,
A lot of people who had heard the earlier noises
(15:01):
said that the ones that Betty had made with the
board under her clothes, which were clearly manufactured, were entirely different.
The two sounds were entirely different from each other. UM,
either suggesting a ghost had been making the first ones
and poor Betty had just been pressured this final time
into trying to save her family when the ghost wouldn't
(15:23):
really show up, or more likely, UM Betty had had
some other means of manufacturing the sound earlier. She was
right to be scared though, because her family did end
up being pretty uh strongly punished for for what had happened.
Right in July sev sixty two, Richard Parsons, his wife,
(15:43):
and Mary Fraser were all tried and convicted of conspiracy.
More the clergyman, as well as a tradesman named James,
who was believed to have assisted in this deception, were
also convicted, although they got off with reprimands and the
order to pay kent to settle meant Fraser and Mrs
Parsons received hard labor and Mr Parson's got two years
(16:04):
in prison and three appearances in the pillory. So it's
a testament to how many people still believed in the ghosts,
though that the crowd at the pillory was unusually quiet
each time, and the public actually raised a subscription for
the family. And I was surprised by this because I
would think that the public, having bought into this idea
(16:24):
of a ghost so thoroughly, would be maybe embarrassed and
angry at this guy for tricking them and for trying
to profit. But the more I thought about it, the
more I thought, well, if you if you admit that
you've been fooled by this hoax, then you look like
a fool. If you consider this guy as a poor,
unfortunate soul who's being unfairly punished when there really was
(16:46):
a ghost in his home, then I guess you're something
else entirely. But you can kind of get yourself off
the hook that way. The ghosts really did stick around
in the public's imagination to the Oh. It kind of
like the Mary Toft bunny birth hooks that we talked
about on an earlier podcast, and which was about a
(17:06):
generation or so before this became real shorthand for gullibility, uh,
just falling for things too easily. And um, I guess
while we're talking about Mary Mary tofton you mentioned the
Sister's Fox earlier. It does. It's so reminiscent of the
Sister's Fox story with the tappings and the wrappings and
the girls playing tricks on people. Um, but I kind
(17:31):
of think of it more in the spirit of the
Merry Tought bunny births because the Sister's Fox one is
so it's the beginning of that spiritualist movement of the
nineteenth century. It's kind of a different era than this.
This is really in the hoax generation on the um
and and like I said, you know, with the public
(17:51):
being interested in it, people found opportunities to benefit from
it as well, in a satirical sort of way. Charles
Churchill wrote a satire local poem about it called The Ghost.
William Hogarth, who was a famous illustrator, engrave the scene
of a seance at Elizabeth's bedside so people could indulge
in something like this, indulge in a hopes knowing that
(18:14):
it wasn't true. That was part of the fun, being
able to say, how could anybody fall for this? I
sure didn't. One of the other things that's very reminiscent
of the Sister's Fox story is that it's still unclear
exactly what was making these knocking or rapping sounds. Uh.
Some suggest that it was ventriloquism, And of course later
(18:36):
there was the board that was introduced, so maybe that
played a part in it. I guess. Probably the only
one who knows for sure, at least about the board
part of it is Elizabeth Parsons, but little is known
about her later life. She probably got married twice, the
second time to a gardener, but we don't know much
of the detail. I mean, what a ridiculous childhood. She right,
I'm imagining maybe she'd be eager to put that behind
(19:00):
after so much, after the crowd, the Duke of York
at your bedside when you're eleven, trying to wait for
ghosts to appear, that she probably got a lot better sleep.
She probably spent most of her later life catching up
on sleep. We can we can think of it that way.
One thing I came across while while looking into this story,
(19:21):
it sounds like it might be sort of the Madame
Lo Loori equivalent in London. So you know, we talked
about that being the quintessential ghost story you hear if
you go on like a ghost tour of New Orleans.
So I'd really like to hear from our London listeners
or anybody who's even just visited and taking a ghost tour.
Is this something that is still a big deal there?
(19:43):
Because I hadn't heard of this ghost until pretty recently. Neither.
It's it's an interesting one and one that does tie
in pretty clearly to a lot of our other shows though,
and Scratching Fanny. I think Scratching Fanny makes a fun
addition to this little family of ghosts that we've collected
this month. So far, it sounds like it would be
(20:03):
a good um like humorous band or something. What would
you call it, like a parody parody musician or something.
Maybe I also really like accused by a ghost. If
we're going to talk about band name, I think accused
by a ghost you could do all novelty Halloween music.
Maybe that's what we'll be doing next year, to novelty
(20:25):
Halloween music, Halloween music all month long, promising. Alright, so
what do we have for listener mail this week? Sarah?
We have turn up themed mail. I'm sure that's intriguing
to you because you don't know what I'm talking about. No,
I haven't no idea what you're talking about. That is true.
(20:47):
So Kristen and I, as you know, did an episode
on the history of trick or treating and probably my
favorite fact from that episode was that before people carved
pumpkin into jack lantern, they carved turn up and we
yes and difficult to carve. We speculated over that being difficult,
and sure enough we did hear from a few listeners
(21:10):
confirming our suspicion. The first one is Derek in Dublin, Ireland.
He wrote, uh, He wrote in an email and said,
greetings from Ireland. I'm a big fan of the podcast
after discovering it over the summer and raiding the massive
archives to keep me awake on long drives. I was
also delighted when you covered the history of Halloween on
a recent episode, not least because you looked at the
(21:33):
tradition of using turnips as jack lantern. A couple of
years ago, my father in law decided to revive this tradition,
much to his family's amusement. There are a few pros
and cons he learned to using a turnip. First of all,
it takes a lot more effort to carve a face
into the turnip he was whittling away for at least
a couple hours. Also, over the course of the night,
(21:54):
it actually cooked from the heat of the candle. That
was really funny too. On the plus side, this made
it look genuinely scary in the window. By midnight it
looked rather like a head hunter trophy with a little
bit of smoke for extra creepiness. I asked him for
any advice to pass on to your listeners. He said
would be turn up. Listeners should get a big round
(22:17):
E one quote and be prepared for some tough carving,
so that was good practical information. We also got a
note though from David. This was actually a Facebook comment.
I thought it would be fun to throw one of
those in. He was also writing in on turn ups
and he said you mentioned that in the past people
holid out turn ups instead of pumpkins and speculated that
(22:39):
it must have been tough. I can confirm that they
are incredibly difficult to hollow out. Growing up in England
in the nineteen seventies, pumpkins were exotic and expensive items,
so most children hollowed out turn ups. There were lots
of injured hands from the knife flipping on the incredibly
tough flesh of the turnip. It took hours to hollow
out and craft good turnip head. Oh my gosh. Many
(23:02):
years later, when I hollowed out my first pumpkin, I
couldn't believe how easy it was. It was like a
light went on thing. Now this is how it's supposed
to be Nowadays in England, children hollow up pumpkins for Halloween.
They don't know how lucky they are. So I thought
that both of these messages from Derek and from David
were pretty hilarious. Makes you appreciate pumpkins a lot. I
(23:25):
know it makes me appreciate my life of carving pumpkins
and working with gourds instead of tough root vegetables. Yeah,
especially if you're like me and you have a lot
of mess ups or you end up forgetting and wait
too long to carve your pumpkin and then you have
to come up with a lot of pumpkin recipes. Sounds
better to me than having to come up with a
lot of turn up recipes. I like turn up, I
(23:47):
like them, but I definitely prefer pumpkins if I'm going
to go all out. Turn ups are good when they
are small. And I'm guessing, as the advice that we
got from Derek's father in law, that would not make
a good carving turn up. So if you just for
to carve your turnips one year tough black well, if
you have any more helpful advice for us on how
(24:07):
to use our fall vegetables or you know Halloween traditions
in your area of the world, please write us where
at History podcast at Discovery dot com, or you can
look us up on Facebook and we're also on Twitter
at this in History. Also, if you want to learn
a little bit more about ghosts or ghostbusters. I think
Didlina almost cracked up a few times because I said
lines that sounded a little bit like they could be
(24:28):
out of Ghostbusters. We do have articles on boat. We do.
We have how ghost work and how Ghostbusters work, and
you can look them up by visit your homepage at www.
Dot how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot Com didn't take
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, welcome to the podcast, and
I'm deplte a chrucate boarding and we've focused a lot
on ghost stories this month for our Spooky Halloween Theories
(00:21):
and all said, though, I think the ghosts have been
a pretty diverse crowd, ranging from socialite Madame La Lourie
to headless Anne Boleyn to the real life false stuff.
But so far, all the ghosts we've talked about have
just kind of been there. They've been haunting, They've been
making their noises, doing things like hovering over babies, creepily,
(00:42):
taking headless carriage rides, washing laundry. Kind of aimless. I'd
almost say, well, washing laundry isn't exactly aimless, But okay,
I get your poor ghost, I get your point right,
there's no real agenda. Today's ghost, however, who is the
cock Lane ghost see to have had a mission, and
that was revenge, something that, according to Andrew Lang's book
(01:07):
on Hauntings and Hoaxes, tended to be fairly common in
the eighteenth century, which was an age where it wasn't
unusual to believe in ghosts at all. I mean it
does make sense. After all, a manufactured haunting could be
a pretty simple, if creative way to settle your earthly disputes,
you know, your unpaid loans, your feuds. Laying sums it
(01:28):
up pretty well with a quote from his book when
he writes about William Kent, this podcast unfortunate subject. He says,
accused by a ghost, he had no legal remedy. So recently,
in the Salem witch trials we talked about spectral evidence.
I think this is kind of the ultimate in spectral evidence.
Good point. When a ghost said that you murdered somebody. Actually,
(01:50):
when the ghost says that you murdered it, what are
you supposed to do? But before we get into all
of that, we need to go back to the beginning.
The cock Lane ghost wasn't initially out for blood. Its
first appearance was actually pretty pretty harmless. Yeah, this ghost
wasn't out for blood at least at first. It's initial
appearance came in seventeen fifty nine at this tiny house
(02:13):
on cock Lane, a road which the Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography describes as quote an obscure turning near St
Paul's Cathedral in London. So the home belonged to Richard Parsons,
who was the deputy parish clerk of St Sepulcher's Church
and also a landlord, an alcoholic, and a man pretty
deeply in debt. The year before though, he'd taken in
(02:37):
William Kent of Norfolk as a tenant. And Kent was
of an independently wealthy man, but he had a bit
of a family secret of his own. He was living
with his dead wife's sister. The arrangement had started pretty
innocently back in Norfolk, when Fannie Lyons, who was the
sister in law, moved in to help care for Kent's
(02:58):
motherless child. His wife had died during childbirth, but after
the baby died to the couple continued to live together,
eventually as a husband and wife, even though they weren't
legally allowed to marry. So finally they moved to London,
posing as a husband and wife still. But the unconventional
living arrangement proved to be a bit of a liability,
(03:21):
especially because Kent tended to make loans to his landlords,
maybe a bad policy already, but to make things worse,
he actually expected that he'd get the money repaid. This,
of course, gave any sort of vindictive landlord, especially one
who knew that he was living with his dead wife's sister,
fodder for eviction and a way out of the loan potentially,
(03:44):
So it must have seemed lucky when Kent met Parsons
at St. Sepulchri's church and was offered rooms to rent.
So Mr and Mrs Kent, as they thought she was anyway,
gone on well with Parsons, his wife, and his two
daughters for a little while, But then things started to
head south when the naive Kent admitted to Parsons that
(04:05):
he wasn't actually married after all. He also loaned Parsons
a good bit of money, and then, as you mentioned,
and as he had done in the past, he started
to follow up on repayment fell into that same old trap. Still,
though the ghosts didn't appear until Kent was out in
the country on business and Fanny asked Richard parsons little
(04:28):
eleven year old daughter, Elizabeth known as Betty, if she
wanted to sleep in in her room and in her
bed while Kent was gone. So that night, where when
Betty and Fanny were in bed together, they started to
hear strange noises wrappings, scratches, taps. Mrs Parsons must have
been pretty rationally. She explained away the noises as the
(04:52):
nearby cobbler who might have been working late at night.
But when the noises were heard again on a Sunday,
the family started to wonder what was really going on. Fanny,
for one, seemed completely convinced that the sounds weren't from
a cobbler, weren't from any human making noise. They came
from a ghost, and a specific ghost at that. Yeah,
(05:14):
she thought that they came from the ghost of her
dead sister who had come to shame her and warn
her of her own death. So pretty serious stuff. Richard
Parsons investigated the house, even stripping the wainscoating off the
wall to see if something was rattling around behind it,
but he had no luck. The nightly wrappings just got louder,
(05:35):
and it sometimes described as the sound of a cat
scratching a wicker chair, just to give you an idea.
But it wasn't long before the neighbors started gossiping about
the ghost that lived there as well and the secret
history between Mr Kent and his wife, For as they
previously thought his wife well and that the ghost was
her dead sister, and so with all this gossip going on,
(05:59):
the cup bowl did finally move out of the house.
At that point, the noises stopped, and according to Patrick
Collins in The Forty Times, this probably would have been
a good time for Kent to just throw in the towel,
cut his losses, forgive the twelve guinea debt that he
had lent to Parsons instead, though he threatened to sue
(06:21):
and um. At this point, the timeline gets a little hazy,
and it's understandable a lot of these a lot of
the stories we talked about in October have some sketchy
details about them, but depending on the sourci look at,
either several months go by or up to a year
and a half goes by until we catch up again
(06:41):
with the Kent family. At this point, Fanny was heavily pregnant,
died of smallpox, and the sound started again in the
house back on cock Lane and and this time they
seemed to come specifically from Elizabeth parsons bedside, and the
Little Girl Office started to suffer from fits, and according
(07:03):
to Charles Wild's Elliott's book, Mysteries or Glimpses of the supernatural.
Little Betty described even seeing an apparition of a quote
woman surrounded by a blazing light. So it's not just
these knocks that could be mistaken for a cobbler anymore.
It seems something much more. Richard Parsons called a medium
(07:24):
who interrogated the ghost, asking questions and receiving answers in
the form of knox one that yes and two men no.
This is very reminiscent of the Fox sisters story and
the way that they communicated with the ghosts, or supposedly
communicated with ghosts, depending on what you believe. But maybe
we should act this one out the end of I
think we should. So. One of the first questions the
(07:48):
that was asked of the ghost was are you the
wife of Mr? Kent? Are you Kent's wife's sister? Did
you die naturally by poison? Was anyone but Kent responsible
(08:09):
for the poisoning? Will it ease your mind if the
man be hanged? Oh? Man, Yeah, that's bad news for Kent.
There the single knock meaning yes. So the ghost, who
was now revealed, of course, to be the murdered Fanny
(08:30):
Lions picked up a nickname Scratching Fanny, which an unfortunate
another element to the titles of this podcast. But um,
she started to give even more information, you know. This
interrogation went on even further and began to provide numerous
details on her death, the type of poison that had
(08:51):
been given her it was arsenic, how it was administered
through a drink called pearl, how many hours it took
two to three hours, um, All sorts of details. Although interestingly,
some information was apparently incorrect, I mean, aside from the
fact that this lady died of smallpox clearly, but some
of the details that the real Fannie Lions would have
(09:13):
known were also incorrect. Parsons, though, was interested in in
legitimizing this, seen the situation going on in his house,
the haunting, the haunting, and called in John Moore, who
was the assistant preacher at St. Suplker's, to get to
the bottom of things, and and more believed that there
truly was a spirit present and called on a fellow minister,
(09:36):
Thomas Broughton, for confirmation. And after these two guys were
on board with the idea of a haunting, other esteemed
men started to visit to which lended a lot of
legitimacy to the the entire premise. The public ledger even
wrote up the story, and crowds began to form at
the house every night, So it was something of a spectacle,
(09:58):
and the public began to truly believe that Kent was
a murderer. So this guy who they've never heard of before,
who nobody suspected of murdering his wife up until this
point his wife quotes, uh, suddenly is being accused of murder,
like pretty seriously. So as interests grew, Parsons could begin
(10:19):
to charge admittance to these seances that would be conducted
at his home by his relative Mary Fraser. And the
best members of society, of course, got bedside views. I mean,
this was a real attraction. Wasn't just something you'd read
about in the paper. You'd go out and experienced this yourself.
But if you were one of the better members of society,
(10:39):
you would get to pack in right next to little
Betty's bed and watch and wait while she slept and
see if the ghost visited. It's all. It adds an
extra element of disturbing um scenes to this whole story.
It's just wild to me. I mean, I have to wonder,
how did she even sleep? Well, these people standing around you.
(11:01):
You wonder how, Yes, an eleven or twelve year old
girl got a full night's sleep with all these people
in her house every day, but the just as an
example of the kind of people these sciances did attract.
The Duke of York even attended at one point. Um
Eliott's book, though, has a really good account of one
of the sciences. It is from a skeptics perspective, but
(11:22):
it gives you a sense of what it must have
been like coming into this tiny house, into this tiny room,
and watching this kid sleep, hoping a ghost would appear. Yeah.
Horace Walpole, a master of Gothic horror and author of
The Castle of a Toronto, visited one night with friends
after the opera. He wrote of the ghost in seventeen
(11:42):
sixty two. He said, quote, a drunken parish clerk set
it on foot out of revenge. The Methodists have adopted it,
and the whole town of London think of nothing else.
He then described the house on Cock Lane when we
opened the chamber, in which were fifty people with no
light but one Hello candle. At the end, we tumbled
over the bed of the child, to whom the ghost
(12:04):
comes and whom they are murdering by inches in such
insufferable heat and stench, we heard nothing. He stayed until
one thirty am, but was told that the ghosts might
not come until seven, when, as Walpole put it, only
prentices and old women would still be about. So he
was very dismissive. And and this tactic too, seemed to
(12:24):
be a common one, you know, delaying the ghosts. Oh,
it's it's not gonna be here until seven, So if
you want to stick around all night, be my guy.
He's already paid admittance, or just throwing off the crowd entirely.
One description of a seance has Frasier putting Betty to
bed and then about an hour later, running around asking
Fanny to to emerge, to show herself or make herself heard. Then,
(12:48):
when nothing happened, more than the minister told the crowd
that they were just too loud. They needed to quiet down,
They needed to step out for about ten minutes and
just collect themselves. Of course, when they came back, sure enough,
scratching Fanny was also there, the ghost making her her
presence known. So these little tactics of tricking or delaying
(13:12):
or distracting the crowd that had come to see the ghost.
So finally, with the situation that has come out of
people believing in this ghost so much, I mean, on
one hand, you have the mob which is spoiling for
Kent's punishment, and you have the crowds also gathering outside
the Parsons home, and both of these things together drive
the Lord Mayor to order a special investigation. Reverend Aldrich
(13:35):
of St John's Clerk Andwell assembled a company at his
home where Elizabeth had been moved. At ten, she was
put to bed by a group of women, and a
bit after eleven, that group, which included Dr Samuel Johnson,
came to her bedside and waited for the spirit. The
little girl said she could feel the spirit, but no
noises came, and so Dr Johnson declared that the whole
(13:56):
thing was a hoax, wrote an account of it, published
that in the Gentleman's Magazine. And it was really the
beginning of the end for this idea of of a ghost.
And poor Betty, of course, wasn't off the hook though.
Of Elizabeth um she was moved again, put through all
sorts of tests. She was at one point strung up
in a hammock with her feet and hands drawn away
(14:17):
from her body, you know, to prove she wouldn't be
able to make any sounds. And after scratching Fanny, the
ghost failed to make an appearance. Several nights in a
row after these tests, Betty was threatened pretty clearly that
her father would go to prison if she could not,
um call up the ghost. And that did the trick.
(14:40):
I mean, that night the girl was caught smuggling aboard
under her clothes and trying to make noises with it
in an attempt to save her family to stop her
father from going to prison. UM which, after that point
clearly the ghost hoax was over. Although one interesting note,
A lot of people who had heard the earlier noises
(15:01):
said that the ones that Betty had made with the
board under her clothes, which were clearly manufactured, were entirely different.
The two sounds were entirely different from each other. UM,
either suggesting a ghost had been making the first ones
and poor Betty had just been pressured this final time
into trying to save her family when the ghost wouldn't
(15:23):
really show up, or more likely, UM Betty had had
some other means of manufacturing the sound earlier. She was
right to be scared though, because her family did end
up being pretty uh strongly punished for for what had happened.
Right in July sev sixty two, Richard Parsons, his wife,
(15:43):
and Mary Fraser were all tried and convicted of conspiracy.
More the clergyman, as well as a tradesman named James,
who was believed to have assisted in this deception, were
also convicted, although they got off with reprimands and the
order to pay kent to settle meant Fraser and Mrs
Parsons received hard labor and Mr Parson's got two years
(16:04):
in prison and three appearances in the pillory. So it's
a testament to how many people still believed in the ghosts,
though that the crowd at the pillory was unusually quiet
each time, and the public actually raised a subscription for
the family. And I was surprised by this because I
would think that the public, having bought into this idea
(16:24):
of a ghost so thoroughly, would be maybe embarrassed and
angry at this guy for tricking them and for trying
to profit. But the more I thought about it, the
more I thought, well, if you if you admit that
you've been fooled by this hoax, then you look like
a fool. If you consider this guy as a poor,
unfortunate soul who's being unfairly punished when there really was
(16:46):
a ghost in his home, then I guess you're something
else entirely. But you can kind of get yourself off
the hook that way. The ghosts really did stick around
in the public's imagination to the Oh. It kind of
like the Mary Toft bunny birth hooks that we talked
about on an earlier podcast, and which was about a
(17:06):
generation or so before this became real shorthand for gullibility, uh,
just falling for things too easily. And um, I guess
while we're talking about Mary Mary tofton you mentioned the
Sister's Fox earlier. It does. It's so reminiscent of the
Sister's Fox story with the tappings and the wrappings and
the girls playing tricks on people. Um, but I kind
(17:31):
of think of it more in the spirit of the
Merry Tought bunny births because the Sister's Fox one is
so it's the beginning of that spiritualist movement of the
nineteenth century. It's kind of a different era than this.
This is really in the hoax generation on the um
and and like I said, you know, with the public
(17:51):
being interested in it, people found opportunities to benefit from
it as well, in a satirical sort of way. Charles
Churchill wrote a satire local poem about it called The Ghost.
William Hogarth, who was a famous illustrator, engrave the scene
of a seance at Elizabeth's bedside so people could indulge
in something like this, indulge in a hopes knowing that
(18:14):
it wasn't true. That was part of the fun, being
able to say, how could anybody fall for this? I
sure didn't. One of the other things that's very reminiscent
of the Sister's Fox story is that it's still unclear
exactly what was making these knocking or rapping sounds. Uh.
Some suggest that it was ventriloquism, And of course later
(18:36):
there was the board that was introduced, so maybe that
played a part in it. I guess. Probably the only
one who knows for sure, at least about the board
part of it is Elizabeth Parsons, but little is known
about her later life. She probably got married twice, the
second time to a gardener, but we don't know much
of the detail. I mean, what a ridiculous childhood. She right,
I'm imagining maybe she'd be eager to put that behind
(19:00):
after so much, after the crowd, the Duke of York
at your bedside when you're eleven, trying to wait for
ghosts to appear, that she probably got a lot better sleep.
She probably spent most of her later life catching up
on sleep. We can we can think of it that way.
One thing I came across while while looking into this story,
(19:21):
it sounds like it might be sort of the Madame
Lo Loori equivalent in London. So you know, we talked
about that being the quintessential ghost story you hear if
you go on like a ghost tour of New Orleans.
So I'd really like to hear from our London listeners
or anybody who's even just visited and taking a ghost tour.
Is this something that is still a big deal there?
(19:43):
Because I hadn't heard of this ghost until pretty recently. Neither.
It's it's an interesting one and one that does tie
in pretty clearly to a lot of our other shows though,
and Scratching Fanny. I think Scratching Fanny makes a fun
addition to this little family of ghosts that we've collected
this month. So far, it sounds like it would be
(20:03):
a good um like humorous band or something. What would
you call it, like a parody parody musician or something.
Maybe I also really like accused by a ghost. If
we're going to talk about band name, I think accused
by a ghost you could do all novelty Halloween music.
Maybe that's what we'll be doing next year, to novelty
(20:25):
Halloween music, Halloween music all month long, promising. Alright, so
what do we have for listener mail this week? Sarah?
We have turn up themed mail. I'm sure that's intriguing
to you because you don't know what I'm talking about. No,
I haven't no idea what you're talking about. That is true.
(20:47):
So Kristen and I, as you know, did an episode
on the history of trick or treating and probably my
favorite fact from that episode was that before people carved
pumpkin into jack lantern, they carved turn up and we
yes and difficult to carve. We speculated over that being difficult,
and sure enough we did hear from a few listeners
(21:10):
confirming our suspicion. The first one is Derek in Dublin, Ireland.
He wrote, uh, He wrote in an email and said,
greetings from Ireland. I'm a big fan of the podcast
after discovering it over the summer and raiding the massive
archives to keep me awake on long drives. I was
also delighted when you covered the history of Halloween on
a recent episode, not least because you looked at the
(21:33):
tradition of using turnips as jack lantern. A couple of
years ago, my father in law decided to revive this tradition,
much to his family's amusement. There are a few pros
and cons he learned to using a turnip. First of all,
it takes a lot more effort to carve a face
into the turnip he was whittling away for at least
a couple hours. Also, over the course of the night,
(21:54):
it actually cooked from the heat of the candle. That
was really funny too. On the plus side, this made
it look genuinely scary in the window. By midnight it
looked rather like a head hunter trophy with a little
bit of smoke for extra creepiness. I asked him for
any advice to pass on to your listeners. He said
would be turn up. Listeners should get a big round
(22:17):
E one quote and be prepared for some tough carving,
so that was good practical information. We also got a
note though from David. This was actually a Facebook comment.
I thought it would be fun to throw one of
those in. He was also writing in on turn ups
and he said you mentioned that in the past people
holid out turn ups instead of pumpkins and speculated that
(22:39):
it must have been tough. I can confirm that they
are incredibly difficult to hollow out. Growing up in England
in the nineteen seventies, pumpkins were exotic and expensive items,
so most children hollowed out turn ups. There were lots
of injured hands from the knife flipping on the incredibly
tough flesh of the turnip. It took hours to hollow
out and craft good turnip head. Oh my gosh. Many
(23:02):
years later, when I hollowed out my first pumpkin, I
couldn't believe how easy it was. It was like a
light went on thing. Now this is how it's supposed
to be Nowadays in England, children hollow up pumpkins for Halloween.
They don't know how lucky they are. So I thought
that both of these messages from Derek and from David
were pretty hilarious. Makes you appreciate pumpkins a lot. I
(23:25):
know it makes me appreciate my life of carving pumpkins
and working with gourds instead of tough root vegetables. Yeah,
especially if you're like me and you have a lot
of mess ups or you end up forgetting and wait
too long to carve your pumpkin and then you have
to come up with a lot of pumpkin recipes. Sounds
better to me than having to come up with a
lot of turn up recipes. I like turn up, I
(23:47):
like them, but I definitely prefer pumpkins if I'm going
to go all out. Turn ups are good when they
are small. And I'm guessing, as the advice that we
got from Derek's father in law, that would not make
a good carving turn up. So if you just for
to carve your turnips one year tough black well, if
you have any more helpful advice for us on how
(24:07):
to use our fall vegetables or you know Halloween traditions
in your area of the world, please write us where
at History podcast at Discovery dot com, or you can
look us up on Facebook and we're also on Twitter
at this in History. Also, if you want to learn
a little bit more about ghosts or ghostbusters. I think
Didlina almost cracked up a few times because I said
lines that sounded a little bit like they could be
(24:28):
out of Ghostbusters. We do have articles on boat. We do.
We have how ghost work and how Ghostbusters work, and
you can look them up by visit your homepage at www.
Dot how stuff works dot com for more on this
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot Com didn't take
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