Speaker 1: Happy Saturday, everybody. We have one last October Saturday classic.
Speaker 1: Earlier this week, we talked about the Greenbrier Ghost and
Speaker 1: we mentioned our show's previous episode on the Cocklane Ghost,
Speaker 1: so we're going to share that episode today. This episode
Speaker 1: is from back in October twelve by previous hosts Sarah
Speaker 1: and Babuina. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello,
Speaker 1: welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deplete
Speaker 1: A Chuck reboarding, and We've focused a lot on ghost
Speaker 1: stories this month for our Spooky Halloween series. And all said, though,
Speaker 1: I think the ghosts have been a pretty diverse crowd,
Speaker 1: ranging from socialite Madame La Lourie to headless Anne Boleyn
Speaker 1: to the real life fall stuff. But so far, all
Speaker 1: the ghosts we've talked about have just kind of been there.
Speaker 1: They've been thing, They've been making their noises, doing things
Speaker 1: like hovering over babies, creepily, taking headless carriage rides, washing
Speaker 1: laundry kind of aimless. I'd almost say, well, washing laundry
Speaker 1: isn't exactly aimless, but okay, I get your poor ghost.
Speaker 1: I get your point right, there's no real agenda today's ghost, however,
Speaker 1: who is The cock Lane ghost seemed to have had
Speaker 1: a mission, and that was revenge, something that, according to
Speaker 1: Andrew Lang's book on hauntings and hoaxes, tended to be
Speaker 1: fairly common in the eighteenth century, which was an age
Speaker 1: where it wasn't unusual to believe in ghosts at all.
Speaker 1: I mean, it does make sense, after all, a manufactured
Speaker 1: haunting could be a pretty simple, if creative way to
Speaker 1: settle your earthly disputes, you know, your unpaid loans, your feuds.
Speaker 1: Lang sums it up pretty well with a quote from
Speaker 1: his book when he writes about William Kent this podcast
Speaker 1: unfortunate subject. He says, accused by a ghost, he had
Speaker 1: a legal remedy. So recently in the Salem witch trials
Speaker 1: we talked about spectral evidence. I think this is kind
Speaker 1: of the ultimate inspectral evidence. A good point. When a
Speaker 1: ghost said that you murdered somebody. Actually, when the ghost
Speaker 1: says that you murdered it, what are you supposed to do?
Speaker 1: But before we get into all of that, we need
Speaker 1: to go back to the beginning. The cock Lane ghost
Speaker 1: wasn't initially out for blood. Its first appearance was actually
Speaker 1: pretty pretty harmless. Yeah, this ghost wasn't out for blood,
Speaker 1: at least at first. It's initial appearance came in seventeen
Speaker 1: fifty nine at this tiny house on cock Lane, a
Speaker 1: road which the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes as
Speaker 1: quote an obscure turning near St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
Speaker 1: So the home belonged to Richard Parsons, who was the
Speaker 1: deputy parish clerk of St Sepulcher's Church and also a landlord,
Speaker 1: an alcoholic, and a man pretty deeply in debt. The
Speaker 1: year before though, he'd taken in William Kent of Norfolk
Speaker 1: as a tenant, and Kent was of an independently wealthy man,
Speaker 1: but he had a bit of a family secret of
Speaker 1: his own. He was living with his dead wife's sister.
Speaker 1: The arrangement had started pretty innocently back in Norfolk, when
Speaker 1: Fannie Lyons, who was the sister in law, moved in
Speaker 1: to help care for Kent's motherless child. His wife had
Speaker 1: died during childbirth, but after the baby died to the
Speaker 1: couple continued to live together, eventually as a husband and wife,
Speaker 1: even though they weren't legally allowed to marry, so finally
Speaker 1: they moved to London, posing as as husband and wife. Still,
Speaker 1: but the unconventional living arrangement proved to be a bit
Speaker 1: of a liability, especially because Kent tended to make loans
Speaker 1: to his landlords, maybe a bad policy already, but to
Speaker 1: make things worse, he actually expected that he'd get the
Speaker 1: money repaid. This, of course, gave any sort of vindictive landlord,
Speaker 1: especially one who knew that he was living with his
Speaker 1: dead wife's sister, fodder for eviction and a way out
Speaker 1: of the loan potentially. So it must have seemed lucky
Speaker 1: when Kent met Parsons at St. Sepulchri'sh church and was
Speaker 1: offered rooms to rent. So Mr and Mrs Kent, as
Speaker 1: they thought she was anyway, gone on well with Parsons,
Speaker 1: his wife, and his two daughters for a little while,
Speaker 1: But then things started to head south when the naive
Speaker 1: Kent admitted to Parsons that he wasn't actually married after all.
Speaker 1: He also loaned Parsons a good bit of money, and then,
Speaker 1: as you mentioned, and as he had done in the past,
Speaker 1: he started to follow up on repayment fell into that
Speaker 1: same old trap. Still though the ghost didn't appear until
Speaker 1: Kent was out in the country on business and Fanny
Speaker 1: asked Richard parsons little eleven year old daughter, Elizabeth known
Speaker 1: as Betty, if she wanted to sleep in in her
Speaker 1: room and in her bed while Kent was gone. So
Speaker 1: that night where when Betty and Fanny were in bed together,
Speaker 1: they started to hear strange noises, wrappings, scratches, taps. Mrs
Speaker 1: Persons must have been pretty rationally. She explained away the
Speaker 1: noises as the nearby cobbler who might have been working
Speaker 1: late at night. But when the noises were heard again
Speaker 1: on a Sunday, the family started to wonder what was
Speaker 1: really going on. Fanny, for one, seemed completely convinced that
Speaker 1: the sounds weren't from a cobbler, weren't from any human
Speaker 1: making noise. They came from a ghost, and a specific
Speaker 1: ghost at that. Yeah, she thought that they came from
Speaker 1: the ghost of her dead sister, who had come to
Speaker 1: shame her and warn her of her own death. So
Speaker 1: pretty serious stuff. Richard Parsons investigated the house, even stripping
Speaker 1: the wainscoating off the wall to see if something was
Speaker 1: rattling around behind it, but he had no luck. The
Speaker 1: nightly rappings just got louder, and it sometimes described as
Speaker 1: the sound of a cat scratching a wicker chair, just
Speaker 1: to give you an idea. But it wasn't long before
Speaker 1: the neighbors started gossiping about the ghost that lived there
Speaker 1: as well and the secret history between Mr Kent and
Speaker 1: his wife, for as they previously thought his wife well
Speaker 1: and that the ghost was her dead sister. And so
Speaker 1: with all this gossip going on, the couple did finally
Speaker 1: move out of the house. At that point, the noises stopped,
Speaker 1: and according to Patrick Collins in the Forteen Times, this
Speaker 1: probably would have been a good time for Kent to
Speaker 1: just throw in the towel, cut his losses, forgive the
Speaker 1: twelve guinea debt that he had lent to Parsons instead,
Speaker 1: though he threatened to sue and um. At this point,
Speaker 1: the timeline gets a little hazy, and it's understandable a
Speaker 1: lot of these a lot of the stories we talked
Speaker 1: about in October have some sketchy details about them, But
Speaker 1: depending on the sourci look at, either several months go
Speaker 1: by or up to a year and a half goes
Speaker 1: by until we catch up again with the Kent family.
Speaker 1: At this point, Fanny was heavily pregnant, died of smallpox,
Speaker 1: and the sound started again in the house back on
Speaker 1: cock Lane and and this time they seemed to come
Speaker 1: specifically from Elizabeth parsons bedside, and the little girl also
Speaker 1: started to suffer from fits, and according to Charles Wild's
Speaker 1: Elliott's book Mysteries or Glimpses of the Supernatural, little Betty
Speaker 1: described even seeing an apparition of a quote woman surrounded
Speaker 1: by a blazing light. So it's not just these Knox
Speaker 1: that could be mistaken for a cobbler anymore. It seems
Speaker 1: something much more. Richard Parsons called a medium who interrogated
Speaker 1: the ghost, asking questions and receiving answers in the form
Speaker 1: of Knox. One meant yes and two meant no. This
Speaker 1: is very reminiscent of the Fox sisters story and the
Speaker 1: way that they communicated with the ghosts are supposedly communicated
Speaker 1: with ghosts, depending on what you believe. But maybe we
Speaker 1: should act this one out. I think we should so.
Speaker 1: One of the first questions the that was asked of
Speaker 1: the ghost was are you the wife of Mr Kent?
Speaker 1: Are you Kent's wife's sister? Did you die naturally by poison.
Speaker 1: Was anyone but Kent responsible for the poisoning? Will it
Speaker 1: ease your mind if the man be hanged? Oh man, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's bad news for Kent. There the single knock meaning yes.
Speaker 1: So the ghost who has now revealed, of course, to
Speaker 1: be the murder heard. Fanny Lions picked up a nickname
Speaker 1: scratching Fanny, which an unfortunate another element to the titles
Speaker 1: in this podcast. But um, she started to give even
Speaker 1: more information, you know. This interrogation went on even further
Speaker 1: and began to provide numerous details on her death. The
Speaker 1: type of poison that had been given her it was arsenic,
Speaker 1: how it was administered through a drink called pearl, how
Speaker 1: many hours it took two to three hours, um. All
Speaker 1: sorts of details, although interestingly, some information was apparently incorrect,
Speaker 1: I mean, aside from the fact that this lady died
Speaker 1: of smallpox clearly, but some of the details that the
Speaker 1: real Fanny Lions would have known were also incorrect. Parsons, though,
Speaker 1: was interested in in legitimizing this, seeing the situation going
Speaker 1: on in his house, the haunting, the haunting, and called
Speaker 1: in John Moore, who was the assistant preacher at St.
Speaker 1: Sepulcher's to get to the bottom of things, and and
Speaker 1: Morey believed that there truly was a spirit present and
Speaker 1: called on a fellow minister, Thomas Broughton, for confirmation. And
Speaker 1: after these two guys were on board with the idea
Speaker 1: of a haunting, other esteemed men started to visit to
Speaker 1: which lended a lot of legitimacy to the the entire premise.
Speaker 1: The public Ledger even wrote up the story, and crowds
Speaker 1: began to form at the house every night, so it
Speaker 1: was something of a spectacle, and the public began to
Speaker 1: truly believe that Kent was a murderer. So this guy
Speaker 1: who they've never heard of before, who nobody suspected of
Speaker 1: murdering his wife up until this point his wife quotes uh,
Speaker 1: suddenly is being accused of murder, like pretty seriously. So
Speaker 1: as interests grew, Parsons could begin to charge admittance to
Speaker 1: these seances that would be conducted at his home by
Speaker 1: his relative Mary Fraser, and the best members of society
Speaker 1: of course got bedside view. Is I mean this was
Speaker 1: a real attraction. Wasn't just something you'd read about in
Speaker 1: the paper. You'd go out and experience this yourself. But
Speaker 1: if you were one of the better members of society,
Speaker 1: you would get to pack in right next to little
Speaker 1: Betty's bed and watch and wait while she slept and
Speaker 1: see if the ghost visited. It's all. It adds an
Speaker 1: extra element of disturbing um scenes to to this whole story.
Speaker 1: It's just wild to me. I mean, I have to wonder,
Speaker 1: how did she even sleep well these people standing around you.
Speaker 1: You wonder how, yes, an eleven or twelve year old
Speaker 1: girl got a full night's sleep with all these people
Speaker 1: in her house every day. But the just as an
Speaker 1: example of the kind of people these sciences did attract.
Speaker 1: The Duke of York even attended at one point um
Speaker 1: Elliott's book That has a really good account of one
Speaker 1: of the sciences. It is from a skeptics perspective, but
Speaker 1: it gives you a sense of what it must have
Speaker 1: been like coming into this tiny house, into this tiny room,
Speaker 1: and watching this kid sleep, hoping a ghost would appear. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Horace Walpole, a master of Gothic hor and author of
Speaker 1: the Castle of Ottranto, visited one night with friends after
Speaker 1: the opera. He wrote of the ghost in seventeen sixty two.
Speaker 1: He said, quote, a drunken parish clerk set it on
Speaker 1: foot out of revenge. The Methodists have adopted it, and
Speaker 1: the whole town of London think of nothing else. He
Speaker 1: then described the house on cock Lane when we opened
Speaker 1: the chamber, in which were fifty people with no light
Speaker 1: but one tell candle. At the end, we tumbled over
Speaker 1: the bed of the child, to whom the ghost comes,
Speaker 1: and whom they are murdering by inches in such insufferable
Speaker 1: heat and stench, we heard nothing. He stayed until one
Speaker 1: thirty am, but was told that the ghost might not
Speaker 1: come until seven, when, as Walpole put it, only prentices
Speaker 1: and old women would still be about. So he was
Speaker 1: very dismissive. And and this tactic too, seemed to be
Speaker 1: a common one, you know, delaying the ghost. Oh it's
Speaker 1: it's not going to be here until seven. So if
Speaker 1: you want to stick around the all night, be my
Speaker 1: guy already paid admittance, or just throwing off the crowd entirely.
Speaker 1: One description of a seance has Frasier putting Betty to
Speaker 1: bed and then about an hour later, running around asking
Speaker 1: Fanny to to emerge, to show herself or make herself heard.
Speaker 1: Then when nothing happened, more, the minister told the crowd
Speaker 1: that they were just too loud. They needed to quiet down,
Speaker 1: they needed to step out for about ten minutes and
Speaker 1: just collect themselves. Of course, when they came back, sure enough,
Speaker 1: scratching Fanny was also there, the ghost, making her her
Speaker 1: presence known. So these little tactics of tricking or delaying
Speaker 1: or distracting the crowd that had come to see the ghost.
Speaker 1: So finally, with the situation that has come out of
Speaker 1: people believing in this ghast so much. I mean, on
Speaker 1: one hand, you have the mob which is spoiling for
Speaker 1: Kent's punishment, and you have the crowds also gathering outside
Speaker 1: the Parsons home, and both of these things together drive
Speaker 1: the Lord Mayor to order a special investigation. Reverend Aldrich
Speaker 1: of St John's Clerkinwell assembled a company at his home
Speaker 1: where Elizabeth had been moved. At ten, she was put
Speaker 1: to bed by a group of women, and a bit
Speaker 1: after eleven, that group, which included Dr Samuel Johnson, came
Speaker 1: to her bedside and waited for the spirit. The little
Speaker 1: girl said she could feel the spirit, but no noises came,
Speaker 1: and so Dr Johnson declared that the whole thing was
Speaker 1: a hoax, wrote an account of it published that in
Speaker 1: the Gentleman's magazine. And it was really the beginning of
Speaker 1: the end for this idea of of a ghost. And
Speaker 1: poor Betty, of course wasn't off the hook though Elizabeth Um.
Speaker 1: She was moved again put through all sorts of tests.
Speaker 1: She was at one point strung up in a hammock
Speaker 1: with her feet and hands drawn away from her body,
Speaker 1: you know, to prove she wouldn't be able to make
Speaker 1: any sounds. After scratching Fanny, the ghost failed to make
Speaker 1: an appearance. Several nights in a row after these tests,
Speaker 1: Betty was threatened pretty clearly that her father would go
Speaker 1: to prison if she could not um call up the ghost.
Speaker 1: And that did the trick. I mean, that night the
Speaker 1: girl was caught smuggling aboard under her clothes and trying
Speaker 1: to make noises with it in an attempt to save
Speaker 1: her family to stop her father from going to prison.
Speaker 1: Um which, after that point clearly the ghost hoax was over.
Speaker 1: Although one interesting note, a lot of people who had
Speaker 1: heard the earlier noises said that the ones that Betty
Speaker 1: had made with the board under her clothes, which were
Speaker 1: clearly manufactured, were entirely different. The two sounds were entirely
Speaker 1: different from each other, um either suggesting a ghost had
Speaker 1: been making the first ones and poor Betty had just
Speaker 1: been pressured this final time into trying to save her
Speaker 1: family when the ghost wouldn't really show up, or more
Speaker 1: likely um Betty had had some other means of manufacturing
Speaker 1: the sound earlier. She was right to be scared, though,
Speaker 1: because her family did end up being pretty uh strongly
Speaker 1: punished for for what had happened. Right in July sev
Speaker 1: sixty two, Richard Parsons, his wife, and Mary Fraser were
Speaker 1: all tried and convicted of conspiracy. More the clergyman as
Speaker 1: well as a tradesman named James, who was believed to
Speaker 1: have assisted in this deception, were also convicted, although they
Speaker 1: got off with reprimands and the order to pay Kent settlement.
Speaker 1: Fraser and Mrs Parsons received hard labor and Mr Parsons
Speaker 1: got two years in prison and three appearances in the pillory.
Speaker 1: So it's a testament to how many people still believed
Speaker 1: in the ghosts, though that the crowd at the pillory
Speaker 1: was unusually quiet each time, and the public actually raised
Speaker 1: a subscription for the family, and I was surprised by
Speaker 1: this because I would think that the public, having bought
Speaker 1: into this idea of a ghost so thoroughly, would be
Speaker 1: maybe embarrassed and angry at this guy for tricking them
Speaker 1: and for trying to profit. But the more I thought
Speaker 1: about it, the more thought, well, if you if you
Speaker 1: admit that you've been fooled by this hoax, then you
Speaker 1: look like a fool. Uh. If you consider this guy
Speaker 1: as a poor, unfortunate soul who's being unfairly punished when
Speaker 1: there really was a ghost in his home, then I
Speaker 1: guess you're something else entirely. But you you can kind
Speaker 1: of get yourself off the hook that way. The goose
Speaker 1: really did stick around in the public's imagination too, though.
Speaker 1: It kind of like the Mary Toft Bunny births hooks
Speaker 1: that we talked about on an earlier podcast and which
Speaker 1: was about a generation or so before this became real
Speaker 1: shorthand for gullibility, uh, just falling for things too easily.
Speaker 1: And um, I guess while we're talking about Mary Mary Toft,
Speaker 1: and you mentioned the Sisters Fox earlier, it does it's
Speaker 1: so reminiscent of the Sister's Fox story with the tappings
Speaker 1: and the wrappings and the girls playing tricks on people. Um.
Speaker 1: But I kind of think of it more in the
Speaker 1: spirit of the merry tough bunny births because the Sisters
Speaker 1: Fox one is so it's the beginning of that spiritualist
Speaker 1: movement of the nineteenth century. It's kind of a different
Speaker 1: era than this. This is really in the hoax generation almost. Um.
Speaker 1: And and like I said, you know, with the public
Speaker 1: being interested in it, people found opportunities to benefit from
Speaker 1: it as well, in a satirical sort of way. Charles
Speaker 1: Churchill wrote a satirical poem about it called The Ghost.
Speaker 1: William Hogarth, who was a famous illustrator, engraved a scene
Speaker 1: of a seance at Elizabeth's bedside so people could indulge
Speaker 1: in something like this, indulge in a hoax, knowing that
Speaker 1: it wasn't true. That was part of the fun, being
Speaker 1: able to say, how could anybody fall for this? I
Speaker 1: sure didn't. One of the other things that's very reminiscent
Speaker 1: of the Sister's Fox story is that it's still unclear
Speaker 1: exactly what was making these knocking or rapping sounds. Uh.
Speaker 1: Some suggest that it was ventriloquism, And of course later
Speaker 1: there was the board that was introduced, so maybe that
Speaker 1: played a part in it. I guess. Probably the only
Speaker 1: one who knows for sure, at least about the board
Speaker 1: part of it, as Elizabeth Parsons. But little is known
Speaker 1: about her later life. She probably got married twice, the
Speaker 1: second time to a gardener, but we don't know much
Speaker 1: of the detail. I mean, what a ridiculous childhood she right,
Speaker 1: I'm imagining maybe she'd be eager to put that behind
Speaker 1: her after so much after the crowd, the Duke of
Speaker 1: York at your bedside when you're eleven, trying to wait
Speaker 1: for ghosts to appear. I bet she probably got a
Speaker 1: lot better sleep. She probably spent most of her later
Speaker 1: life catching up on sleep. We can, we can think
Speaker 1: of it that way. Thank you so much for joining
Speaker 1: us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email
Speaker 1: address or a Facebook you are l or something similar
Speaker 1: over the course of today's episode, since it is from
Speaker 1: the archive that might be out of date now, you
Speaker 1: can email us at History podcast at how stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com, and you can find us all over social
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