WEBVTT - SYMHC Classics: Accused by a Ghost! 0:00:02.440 --> 0:00:06.240 Happy Saturday, everybody. We have one last October Saturday classic. 0:00:06.480 --> 0:00:08.959 Earlier this week, we talked about the Greenbrier Ghost and 0:00:09.000 --> 0:00:12.360 we mentioned our show's previous episode on the Cocklane Ghost, 0:00:12.440 --> 0:00:15.440 so we're going to share that episode today. This episode 0:00:15.480 --> 0:00:19.639 is from back in October twelve by previous hosts Sarah 0:00:19.640 --> 0:00:25.600 and Babuina. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, 0:00:25.600 --> 0:00:34.800 a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, 0:00:34.920 --> 0:00:37.479 welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deplete 0:00:37.479 --> 0:00:40.320 A Chuck reboarding, and We've focused a lot on ghost 0:00:40.320 --> 0:00:44.840 stories this month for our Spooky Halloween series. And all said, though, 0:00:45.200 --> 0:00:48.040 I think the ghosts have been a pretty diverse crowd, 0:00:48.200 --> 0:00:53.040 ranging from socialite Madame La Lourie to headless Anne Boleyn 0:00:53.360 --> 0:00:57.000 to the real life fall stuff. But so far, all 0:00:57.040 --> 0:00:59.280 the ghosts we've talked about have just kind of been there. 0:00:59.280 --> 0:01:02.720 They've been thing, They've been making their noises, doing things 0:01:02.800 --> 0:01:07.200 like hovering over babies, creepily, taking headless carriage rides, washing 0:01:07.280 --> 0:01:11.480 laundry kind of aimless. I'd almost say, well, washing laundry 0:01:11.520 --> 0:01:14.240 isn't exactly aimless, but okay, I get your poor ghost. 0:01:14.319 --> 0:01:19.120 I get your point right, there's no real agenda today's ghost, however, 0:01:19.600 --> 0:01:23.720 who is The cock Lane ghost seemed to have had 0:01:23.760 --> 0:01:27.319 a mission, and that was revenge, something that, according to 0:01:27.360 --> 0:01:31.600 Andrew Lang's book on hauntings and hoaxes, tended to be 0:01:31.800 --> 0:01:34.840 fairly common in the eighteenth century, which was an age 0:01:34.880 --> 0:01:37.280 where it wasn't unusual to believe in ghosts at all. 0:01:37.520 --> 0:01:40.440 I mean, it does make sense, after all, a manufactured 0:01:40.480 --> 0:01:44.800 haunting could be a pretty simple, if creative way to 0:01:44.959 --> 0:01:48.600 settle your earthly disputes, you know, your unpaid loans, your feuds. 0:01:49.680 --> 0:01:52.440 Lang sums it up pretty well with a quote from 0:01:52.480 --> 0:01:55.760 his book when he writes about William Kent this podcast 0:01:55.840 --> 0:01:59.800 unfortunate subject. He says, accused by a ghost, he had 0:01:59.800 --> 0:02:03.760 a legal remedy. So recently in the Salem witch trials 0:02:03.800 --> 0:02:06.360 we talked about spectral evidence. I think this is kind 0:02:06.400 --> 0:02:09.480 of the ultimate inspectral evidence. A good point. When a 0:02:09.560 --> 0:02:13.560 ghost said that you murdered somebody. Actually, when the ghost 0:02:13.639 --> 0:02:16.080 says that you murdered it, what are you supposed to do? 0:02:16.720 --> 0:02:19.560 But before we get into all of that, we need 0:02:19.560 --> 0:02:22.160 to go back to the beginning. The cock Lane ghost 0:02:22.480 --> 0:02:26.520 wasn't initially out for blood. Its first appearance was actually 0:02:26.520 --> 0:02:30.120 pretty pretty harmless. Yeah, this ghost wasn't out for blood, 0:02:30.160 --> 0:02:33.440 at least at first. It's initial appearance came in seventeen 0:02:33.440 --> 0:02:37.200 fifty nine at this tiny house on cock Lane, a 0:02:37.320 --> 0:02:41.480 road which the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes as 0:02:41.960 --> 0:02:45.920 quote an obscure turning near St. Paul's Cathedral in London. 0:02:46.400 --> 0:02:48.920 So the home belonged to Richard Parsons, who was the 0:02:48.960 --> 0:02:53.080 deputy parish clerk of St Sepulcher's Church and also a landlord, 0:02:53.240 --> 0:02:57.600 an alcoholic, and a man pretty deeply in debt. The 0:02:57.680 --> 0:03:00.640 year before though, he'd taken in William Kent of Norfolk 0:03:00.760 --> 0:03:05.480 as a tenant, and Kent was of an independently wealthy man, 0:03:05.919 --> 0:03:08.360 but he had a bit of a family secret of 0:03:08.440 --> 0:03:11.440 his own. He was living with his dead wife's sister. 0:03:12.080 --> 0:03:15.760 The arrangement had started pretty innocently back in Norfolk, when 0:03:15.800 --> 0:03:19.079 Fannie Lyons, who was the sister in law, moved in 0:03:19.160 --> 0:03:22.200 to help care for Kent's motherless child. His wife had 0:03:22.320 --> 0:03:26.519 died during childbirth, but after the baby died to the 0:03:26.960 --> 0:03:30.400 couple continued to live together, eventually as a husband and wife, 0:03:30.720 --> 0:03:34.880 even though they weren't legally allowed to marry, so finally 0:03:34.920 --> 0:03:38.200 they moved to London, posing as as husband and wife. Still, 0:03:38.680 --> 0:03:42.200 but the unconventional living arrangement proved to be a bit 0:03:42.240 --> 0:03:45.760 of a liability, especially because Kent tended to make loans 0:03:45.880 --> 0:03:49.920 to his landlords, maybe a bad policy already, but to 0:03:50.040 --> 0:03:52.680 make things worse, he actually expected that he'd get the 0:03:52.720 --> 0:03:57.760 money repaid. This, of course, gave any sort of vindictive landlord, 0:03:57.880 --> 0:04:00.960 especially one who knew that he was living with his 0:04:01.040 --> 0:04:05.040 dead wife's sister, fodder for eviction and a way out 0:04:05.080 --> 0:04:08.120 of the loan potentially. So it must have seemed lucky 0:04:08.200 --> 0:04:12.240 when Kent met Parsons at St. Sepulchri'sh church and was 0:04:12.320 --> 0:04:16.920 offered rooms to rent. So Mr and Mrs Kent, as 0:04:16.960 --> 0:04:20.200 they thought she was anyway, gone on well with Parsons, 0:04:20.240 --> 0:04:23.040 his wife, and his two daughters for a little while, 0:04:23.160 --> 0:04:26.120 But then things started to head south when the naive 0:04:26.279 --> 0:04:30.120 Kent admitted to Parsons that he wasn't actually married after all. 0:04:30.880 --> 0:04:35.040 He also loaned Parsons a good bit of money, and then, 0:04:35.440 --> 0:04:37.920 as you mentioned, and as he had done in the past, 0:04:37.960 --> 0:04:41.159 he started to follow up on repayment fell into that 0:04:41.279 --> 0:04:45.040 same old trap. Still though the ghost didn't appear until 0:04:45.320 --> 0:04:49.120 Kent was out in the country on business and Fanny 0:04:49.160 --> 0:04:52.760 asked Richard parsons little eleven year old daughter, Elizabeth known 0:04:52.800 --> 0:04:55.360 as Betty, if she wanted to sleep in in her 0:04:55.480 --> 0:04:58.719 room and in her bed while Kent was gone. So 0:04:58.960 --> 0:05:02.320 that night where when Betty and Fanny were in bed together, 0:05:02.800 --> 0:05:09.799 they started to hear strange noises, wrappings, scratches, taps. Mrs 0:05:09.839 --> 0:05:13.080 Persons must have been pretty rationally. She explained away the 0:05:13.120 --> 0:05:16.400 noises as the nearby cobbler who might have been working 0:05:16.480 --> 0:05:18.560 late at night. But when the noises were heard again 0:05:18.640 --> 0:05:21.400 on a Sunday, the family started to wonder what was 0:05:21.480 --> 0:05:26.480 really going on. Fanny, for one, seemed completely convinced that 0:05:26.520 --> 0:05:30.320 the sounds weren't from a cobbler, weren't from any human 0:05:31.400 --> 0:05:34.960 making noise. They came from a ghost, and a specific 0:05:35.000 --> 0:05:37.720 ghost at that. Yeah, she thought that they came from 0:05:37.760 --> 0:05:40.560 the ghost of her dead sister, who had come to 0:05:40.680 --> 0:05:43.880 shame her and warn her of her own death. So 0:05:43.960 --> 0:05:49.000 pretty serious stuff. Richard Parsons investigated the house, even stripping 0:05:49.000 --> 0:05:51.440 the wainscoating off the wall to see if something was 0:05:51.560 --> 0:05:54.880 rattling around behind it, but he had no luck. The 0:05:55.080 --> 0:05:59.080 nightly rappings just got louder, and it sometimes described as 0:05:59.080 --> 0:06:01.359 the sound of a cat scratching a wicker chair, just 0:06:01.440 --> 0:06:04.320 to give you an idea. But it wasn't long before 0:06:04.360 --> 0:06:07.800 the neighbors started gossiping about the ghost that lived there 0:06:07.800 --> 0:06:11.320 as well and the secret history between Mr Kent and 0:06:11.440 --> 0:06:16.120 his wife, for as they previously thought his wife well 0:06:16.160 --> 0:06:19.240 and that the ghost was her dead sister. And so 0:06:19.839 --> 0:06:23.320 with all this gossip going on, the couple did finally 0:06:23.360 --> 0:06:27.360 move out of the house. At that point, the noises stopped, 0:06:27.400 --> 0:06:30.640 and according to Patrick Collins in the Forteen Times, this 0:06:30.720 --> 0:06:32.960 probably would have been a good time for Kent to 0:06:33.080 --> 0:06:36.880 just throw in the towel, cut his losses, forgive the 0:06:36.960 --> 0:06:41.520 twelve guinea debt that he had lent to Parsons instead, 0:06:41.520 --> 0:06:45.039 though he threatened to sue and um. At this point, 0:06:45.040 --> 0:06:47.800 the timeline gets a little hazy, and it's understandable a 0:06:47.839 --> 0:06:49.960 lot of these a lot of the stories we talked 0:06:50.000 --> 0:06:54.080 about in October have some sketchy details about them, But 0:06:55.320 --> 0:06:58.039 depending on the sourci look at, either several months go 0:06:58.160 --> 0:07:00.320 by or up to a year and a half goes 0:07:00.400 --> 0:07:05.799 by until we catch up again with the Kent family. 0:07:05.960 --> 0:07:10.680 At this point, Fanny was heavily pregnant, died of smallpox, 0:07:11.200 --> 0:07:14.920 and the sound started again in the house back on 0:07:15.040 --> 0:07:17.440 cock Lane and and this time they seemed to come 0:07:17.600 --> 0:07:22.880 specifically from Elizabeth parsons bedside, and the little girl also 0:07:22.960 --> 0:07:26.560 started to suffer from fits, and according to Charles Wild's 0:07:26.600 --> 0:07:31.760 Elliott's book Mysteries or Glimpses of the Supernatural, little Betty 0:07:32.080 --> 0:07:36.680 described even seeing an apparition of a quote woman surrounded 0:07:36.680 --> 0:07:39.880 by a blazing light. So it's not just these Knox 0:07:39.960 --> 0:07:42.760 that could be mistaken for a cobbler anymore. It seems 0:07:42.800 --> 0:07:47.520 something much more. Richard Parsons called a medium who interrogated 0:07:47.560 --> 0:07:51.200 the ghost, asking questions and receiving answers in the form 0:07:51.240 --> 0:07:54.040 of Knox. One meant yes and two meant no. This 0:07:54.160 --> 0:07:57.720 is very reminiscent of the Fox sisters story and the 0:07:57.760 --> 0:08:02.120 way that they communicated with the ghosts are supposedly communicated 0:08:02.160 --> 0:08:04.560 with ghosts, depending on what you believe. But maybe we 0:08:04.560 --> 0:08:16.520 should act this one out. I think we should so. 0:08:16.760 --> 0:08:20.080 One of the first questions the that was asked of 0:08:20.160 --> 0:08:23.520 the ghost was are you the wife of Mr Kent? 0:08:26.280 --> 0:08:35.480 Are you Kent's wife's sister? Did you die naturally by poison. 0:08:38.320 --> 0:08:43.720 Was anyone but Kent responsible for the poisoning? Will it 0:08:43.800 --> 0:08:50.520 ease your mind if the man be hanged? Oh man, yeah, 0:08:50.559 --> 0:08:54.720 that's bad news for Kent. There the single knock meaning yes. 0:08:54.920 --> 0:08:58.480 So the ghost who has now revealed, of course, to 0:08:58.559 --> 0:09:02.880 be the murder heard. Fanny Lions picked up a nickname 0:09:02.920 --> 0:09:08.160 scratching Fanny, which an unfortunate another element to the titles 0:09:08.200 --> 0:09:13.079 in this podcast. But um, she started to give even 0:09:13.120 --> 0:09:16.760 more information, you know. This interrogation went on even further 0:09:16.920 --> 0:09:21.120 and began to provide numerous details on her death. The 0:09:21.200 --> 0:09:24.000 type of poison that had been given her it was arsenic, 0:09:24.640 --> 0:09:27.880 how it was administered through a drink called pearl, how 0:09:27.880 --> 0:09:31.760 many hours it took two to three hours, um. All 0:09:31.800 --> 0:09:36.720 sorts of details, although interestingly, some information was apparently incorrect, 0:09:36.800 --> 0:09:39.440 I mean, aside from the fact that this lady died 0:09:39.440 --> 0:09:42.480 of smallpox clearly, but some of the details that the 0:09:42.559 --> 0:09:46.440 real Fanny Lions would have known were also incorrect. Parsons, though, 0:09:46.880 --> 0:09:52.560 was interested in in legitimizing this, seeing the situation going 0:09:52.600 --> 0:09:55.800 on in his house, the haunting, the haunting, and called 0:09:55.880 --> 0:09:58.960 in John Moore, who was the assistant preacher at St. 0:09:58.960 --> 0:10:01.800 Sepulcher's to get to the bottom of things, and and 0:10:01.840 --> 0:10:05.360 Morey believed that there truly was a spirit present and 0:10:05.480 --> 0:10:09.240 called on a fellow minister, Thomas Broughton, for confirmation. And 0:10:09.800 --> 0:10:12.840 after these two guys were on board with the idea 0:10:12.840 --> 0:10:16.079 of a haunting, other esteemed men started to visit to 0:10:16.320 --> 0:10:20.920 which lended a lot of legitimacy to the the entire premise. 0:10:21.520 --> 0:10:24.600 The public Ledger even wrote up the story, and crowds 0:10:24.640 --> 0:10:27.200 began to form at the house every night, so it 0:10:27.240 --> 0:10:30.240 was something of a spectacle, and the public began to 0:10:30.559 --> 0:10:33.680 truly believe that Kent was a murderer. So this guy 0:10:33.720 --> 0:10:37.360 who they've never heard of before, who nobody suspected of 0:10:37.440 --> 0:10:42.199 murdering his wife up until this point his wife quotes uh, 0:10:42.400 --> 0:10:46.680 suddenly is being accused of murder, like pretty seriously. So 0:10:46.840 --> 0:10:51.080 as interests grew, Parsons could begin to charge admittance to 0:10:51.160 --> 0:10:54.720 these seances that would be conducted at his home by 0:10:54.760 --> 0:10:58.520 his relative Mary Fraser, and the best members of society 0:10:58.600 --> 0:11:00.640 of course got bedside view. Is I mean this was 0:11:00.679 --> 0:11:04.400 a real attraction. Wasn't just something you'd read about in 0:11:04.440 --> 0:11:07.680 the paper. You'd go out and experience this yourself. But 0:11:07.720 --> 0:11:10.200 if you were one of the better members of society, 0:11:10.360 --> 0:11:13.360 you would get to pack in right next to little 0:11:13.520 --> 0:11:18.080 Betty's bed and watch and wait while she slept and 0:11:18.120 --> 0:11:21.000 see if the ghost visited. It's all. It adds an 0:11:21.040 --> 0:11:27.360 extra element of disturbing um scenes to to this whole story. 0:11:27.480 --> 0:11:29.160 It's just wild to me. I mean, I have to wonder, 0:11:29.160 --> 0:11:32.480 how did she even sleep well these people standing around you. 0:11:32.480 --> 0:11:35.000 You wonder how, yes, an eleven or twelve year old 0:11:35.040 --> 0:11:37.439 girl got a full night's sleep with all these people 0:11:37.440 --> 0:11:40.199 in her house every day. But the just as an 0:11:40.200 --> 0:11:44.040 example of the kind of people these sciences did attract. 0:11:44.120 --> 0:11:47.559 The Duke of York even attended at one point um 0:11:47.640 --> 0:11:50.040 Elliott's book That has a really good account of one 0:11:50.040 --> 0:11:53.280 of the sciences. It is from a skeptics perspective, but 0:11:53.320 --> 0:11:54.840 it gives you a sense of what it must have 0:11:54.880 --> 0:11:58.400 been like coming into this tiny house, into this tiny room, 0:11:58.840 --> 0:12:02.800 and watching this kid sleep, hoping a ghost would appear. Yeah. 0:12:02.840 --> 0:12:05.920 Horace Walpole, a master of Gothic hor and author of 0:12:06.040 --> 0:12:09.880 the Castle of Ottranto, visited one night with friends after 0:12:09.960 --> 0:12:14.200 the opera. He wrote of the ghost in seventeen sixty two. 0:12:14.240 --> 0:12:17.560 He said, quote, a drunken parish clerk set it on 0:12:17.720 --> 0:12:20.960 foot out of revenge. The Methodists have adopted it, and 0:12:21.000 --> 0:12:23.800 the whole town of London think of nothing else. He 0:12:23.880 --> 0:12:27.000 then described the house on cock Lane when we opened 0:12:27.000 --> 0:12:30.079 the chamber, in which were fifty people with no light 0:12:30.160 --> 0:12:32.920 but one tell candle. At the end, we tumbled over 0:12:32.960 --> 0:12:35.400 the bed of the child, to whom the ghost comes, 0:12:35.760 --> 0:12:38.760 and whom they are murdering by inches in such insufferable 0:12:38.760 --> 0:12:42.719 heat and stench, we heard nothing. He stayed until one 0:12:42.760 --> 0:12:45.680 thirty am, but was told that the ghost might not 0:12:45.760 --> 0:12:49.400 come until seven, when, as Walpole put it, only prentices 0:12:49.440 --> 0:12:51.440 and old women would still be about. So he was 0:12:51.559 --> 0:12:55.280 very dismissive. And and this tactic too, seemed to be 0:12:55.320 --> 0:12:57.600 a common one, you know, delaying the ghost. Oh it's 0:12:57.640 --> 0:12:59.160 it's not going to be here until seven. So if 0:12:59.160 --> 0:13:01.240 you want to stick around the all night, be my 0:13:01.360 --> 0:13:06.400 guy already paid admittance, or just throwing off the crowd entirely. 0:13:06.800 --> 0:13:10.320 One description of a seance has Frasier putting Betty to 0:13:10.440 --> 0:13:14.120 bed and then about an hour later, running around asking 0:13:14.160 --> 0:13:18.040 Fanny to to emerge, to show herself or make herself heard. 0:13:18.520 --> 0:13:22.440 Then when nothing happened, more, the minister told the crowd 0:13:22.480 --> 0:13:25.199 that they were just too loud. They needed to quiet down, 0:13:25.280 --> 0:13:28.640 they needed to step out for about ten minutes and 0:13:29.000 --> 0:13:32.760 just collect themselves. Of course, when they came back, sure enough, 0:13:33.120 --> 0:13:37.120 scratching Fanny was also there, the ghost, making her her 0:13:37.160 --> 0:13:42.760 presence known. So these little tactics of tricking or delaying 0:13:43.080 --> 0:13:46.920 or distracting the crowd that had come to see the ghost. 0:13:47.320 --> 0:13:50.560 So finally, with the situation that has come out of 0:13:50.600 --> 0:13:52.640 people believing in this ghast so much. I mean, on 0:13:52.640 --> 0:13:54.720 one hand, you have the mob which is spoiling for 0:13:54.800 --> 0:13:58.319 Kent's punishment, and you have the crowds also gathering outside 0:13:58.320 --> 0:14:01.440 the Parsons home, and both of these things together drive 0:14:01.520 --> 0:14:05.600 the Lord Mayor to order a special investigation. Reverend Aldrich 0:14:05.679 --> 0:14:08.200 of St John's Clerkinwell assembled a company at his home 0:14:08.360 --> 0:14:11.679 where Elizabeth had been moved. At ten, she was put 0:14:11.720 --> 0:14:13.679 to bed by a group of women, and a bit 0:14:13.720 --> 0:14:17.720 after eleven, that group, which included Dr Samuel Johnson, came 0:14:17.720 --> 0:14:21.080 to her bedside and waited for the spirit. The little 0:14:21.080 --> 0:14:24.480 girl said she could feel the spirit, but no noises came, 0:14:32.840 --> 0:14:35.800 and so Dr Johnson declared that the whole thing was 0:14:35.880 --> 0:14:38.480 a hoax, wrote an account of it published that in 0:14:38.560 --> 0:14:41.360 the Gentleman's magazine. And it was really the beginning of 0:14:41.360 --> 0:14:44.680 the end for this idea of of a ghost. And 0:14:45.280 --> 0:14:49.520 poor Betty, of course wasn't off the hook though Elizabeth Um. 0:14:49.560 --> 0:14:52.360 She was moved again put through all sorts of tests. 0:14:52.360 --> 0:14:54.240 She was at one point strung up in a hammock 0:14:54.320 --> 0:14:56.840 with her feet and hands drawn away from her body, 0:14:57.400 --> 0:14:59.120 you know, to prove she wouldn't be able to make 0:14:59.120 --> 0:15:03.360 any sounds. After scratching Fanny, the ghost failed to make 0:15:03.400 --> 0:15:06.520 an appearance. Several nights in a row after these tests, 0:15:06.960 --> 0:15:11.320 Betty was threatened pretty clearly that her father would go 0:15:11.520 --> 0:15:15.800 to prison if she could not um call up the ghost. 0:15:16.640 --> 0:15:19.520 And that did the trick. I mean, that night the 0:15:19.560 --> 0:15:23.600 girl was caught smuggling aboard under her clothes and trying 0:15:23.640 --> 0:15:26.440 to make noises with it in an attempt to save 0:15:26.480 --> 0:15:29.320 her family to stop her father from going to prison. 0:15:29.840 --> 0:15:34.640 Um which, after that point clearly the ghost hoax was over. 0:15:34.800 --> 0:15:37.760 Although one interesting note, a lot of people who had 0:15:37.800 --> 0:15:43.200 heard the earlier noises said that the ones that Betty 0:15:43.240 --> 0:15:45.400 had made with the board under her clothes, which were 0:15:45.440 --> 0:15:50.080 clearly manufactured, were entirely different. The two sounds were entirely 0:15:50.120 --> 0:15:53.800 different from each other, um either suggesting a ghost had 0:15:53.800 --> 0:15:57.280 been making the first ones and poor Betty had just 0:15:57.360 --> 0:16:00.760 been pressured this final time into trying to save her 0:16:00.800 --> 0:16:04.000 family when the ghost wouldn't really show up, or more 0:16:04.080 --> 0:16:08.040 likely um Betty had had some other means of manufacturing 0:16:08.040 --> 0:16:12.200 the sound earlier. She was right to be scared, though, 0:16:12.280 --> 0:16:15.960 because her family did end up being pretty uh strongly 0:16:16.040 --> 0:16:19.360 punished for for what had happened. Right in July sev 0:16:19.800 --> 0:16:23.600 sixty two, Richard Parsons, his wife, and Mary Fraser were 0:16:23.640 --> 0:16:27.960 all tried and convicted of conspiracy. More the clergyman as 0:16:28.000 --> 0:16:30.480 well as a tradesman named James, who was believed to 0:16:30.520 --> 0:16:34.800 have assisted in this deception, were also convicted, although they 0:16:34.800 --> 0:16:38.640 got off with reprimands and the order to pay Kent settlement. 0:16:39.320 --> 0:16:42.640 Fraser and Mrs Parsons received hard labor and Mr Parsons 0:16:42.640 --> 0:16:46.640 got two years in prison and three appearances in the pillory. 0:16:46.840 --> 0:16:49.720 So it's a testament to how many people still believed 0:16:49.720 --> 0:16:52.000 in the ghosts, though that the crowd at the pillory 0:16:52.120 --> 0:16:56.200 was unusually quiet each time, and the public actually raised 0:16:56.200 --> 0:16:58.680 a subscription for the family, and I was surprised by 0:16:58.680 --> 0:17:02.120 this because I would think that the public, having bought 0:17:02.160 --> 0:17:05.680 into this idea of a ghost so thoroughly, would be 0:17:05.840 --> 0:17:09.200 maybe embarrassed and angry at this guy for tricking them 0:17:09.240 --> 0:17:11.440 and for trying to profit. But the more I thought 0:17:11.480 --> 0:17:14.159 about it, the more thought, well, if you if you 0:17:14.280 --> 0:17:16.760 admit that you've been fooled by this hoax, then you 0:17:16.800 --> 0:17:20.400 look like a fool. Uh. If you consider this guy 0:17:20.480 --> 0:17:24.520 as a poor, unfortunate soul who's being unfairly punished when 0:17:24.520 --> 0:17:28.199 there really was a ghost in his home, then I 0:17:28.240 --> 0:17:32.480 guess you're something else entirely. But you you can kind 0:17:32.480 --> 0:17:35.240 of get yourself off the hook that way. The goose 0:17:35.359 --> 0:17:38.639 really did stick around in the public's imagination too, though. 0:17:38.720 --> 0:17:41.560 It kind of like the Mary Toft Bunny births hooks 0:17:41.600 --> 0:17:44.240 that we talked about on an earlier podcast and which 0:17:44.359 --> 0:17:47.920 was about a generation or so before this became real 0:17:48.040 --> 0:17:52.840 shorthand for gullibility, uh, just falling for things too easily. 0:17:52.960 --> 0:17:56.359 And um, I guess while we're talking about Mary Mary Toft, 0:17:56.400 --> 0:17:59.920 and you mentioned the Sisters Fox earlier, it does it's 0:18:00.040 --> 0:18:03.240 so reminiscent of the Sister's Fox story with the tappings 0:18:03.280 --> 0:18:07.960 and the wrappings and the girls playing tricks on people. Um. 0:18:08.000 --> 0:18:11.240 But I kind of think of it more in the 0:18:12.000 --> 0:18:16.120 spirit of the merry tough bunny births because the Sisters 0:18:16.119 --> 0:18:18.720 Fox one is so it's the beginning of that spiritualist 0:18:18.800 --> 0:18:21.880 movement of the nineteenth century. It's kind of a different 0:18:21.920 --> 0:18:27.600 era than this. This is really in the hoax generation almost. Um. 0:18:27.720 --> 0:18:30.240 And and like I said, you know, with the public 0:18:30.280 --> 0:18:34.040 being interested in it, people found opportunities to benefit from 0:18:34.080 --> 0:18:37.240 it as well, in a satirical sort of way. Charles 0:18:37.320 --> 0:18:40.320 Churchill wrote a satirical poem about it called The Ghost. 0:18:40.600 --> 0:18:44.760 William Hogarth, who was a famous illustrator, engraved a scene 0:18:44.800 --> 0:18:49.200 of a seance at Elizabeth's bedside so people could indulge 0:18:49.240 --> 0:18:52.520 in something like this, indulge in a hoax, knowing that 0:18:52.640 --> 0:18:55.120 it wasn't true. That was part of the fun, being 0:18:55.119 --> 0:18:58.520 able to say, how could anybody fall for this? I 0:18:58.560 --> 0:19:02.600 sure didn't. One of the other things that's very reminiscent 0:19:02.680 --> 0:19:05.760 of the Sister's Fox story is that it's still unclear 0:19:05.840 --> 0:19:11.240 exactly what was making these knocking or rapping sounds. Uh. 0:19:11.400 --> 0:19:15.240 Some suggest that it was ventriloquism, And of course later 0:19:15.280 --> 0:19:17.520 there was the board that was introduced, so maybe that 0:19:17.600 --> 0:19:19.920 played a part in it. I guess. Probably the only 0:19:19.960 --> 0:19:22.000 one who knows for sure, at least about the board 0:19:22.000 --> 0:19:24.240 part of it, as Elizabeth Parsons. But little is known 0:19:24.280 --> 0:19:27.639 about her later life. She probably got married twice, the 0:19:27.680 --> 0:19:30.040 second time to a gardener, but we don't know much 0:19:30.040 --> 0:19:34.159 of the detail. I mean, what a ridiculous childhood she right, 0:19:34.600 --> 0:19:38.360 I'm imagining maybe she'd be eager to put that behind 0:19:38.400 --> 0:19:42.679 her after so much after the crowd, the Duke of 0:19:42.760 --> 0:19:45.920 York at your bedside when you're eleven, trying to wait 0:19:45.960 --> 0:19:48.520 for ghosts to appear. I bet she probably got a 0:19:48.520 --> 0:19:52.680 lot better sleep. She probably spent most of her later 0:19:52.760 --> 0:19:55.360 life catching up on sleep. We can, we can think 0:19:55.359 --> 0:20:03.720 of it that way. 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