Cock Lane Ghost discredited. Popular Theory of Imposture. Dr. Johnson. Story of the Ghost. The Deceased Wife’s Sister. Beginning of the Phenomena. Death of Fanny. Recurrence of Phenomena. Scratchings. Parallel Cases. Ignorance and Malevolence of the Ghost. Possible Literary Sources. Investigation. Imitative Scratchings: a Failure. Trial of the Parsonses. Professor Barrett’s Irish parallel. Cause undetected. The Theories of Common-sense. The St. Maur Affair. The Amiens Case. The Sportive Highland Fox. The Brightling Case.
If one phantom is more discredited than another, it is the Cock Lane ghost.
The ghost has been a proverb for impudent trickery, and stern exposure, yet its history remains a puzzle, and is a good, if vulgar type, of all similar marvels. The very people who ‘exposed’ the ghost, were well aware that their explanation was worthless, and frankly admitted the fact. Yet they, no more than we, were prepared to believe that the phenomena were produced by the spiritual part of Miss Fanny L.—known after her decease, as ‘Scratching Fanny’. We still wander in Cock Lane, with a sense of amused antiquarian curiosity, and the same feeling accompanies us in all our explorations of this branch of mythology. It may be easy for some people of common-sense to believe that all London was turned upside down, that Walpole, the Duke of York, Lady Mary Coke, and two other ladies were drawn to Cock Lane (five in a hackney coach), that Dr. Johnson gave up his leisure and incurred ridicule, merely because a naughty child was scratching on a little wooden board.
The matter cannot have been so simple as that, but from the true solution of the problem we are as remote as ever. We can, indeed, study even the Cock Lane Ghost in the light of the Comparative, or Anthropological Method. We can ascertain that the occurrences which puzzled London in 1762, were puzzling heathen philosophers and Fathers of the Church 1400 years earlier. We can trace a chain of ‘Scratching Fannies’ through the ages, and among races in every grade of civilisation. And then the veil drops, or we run our heads against a blank wall in a dark alley. Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, Eskimo, Red Men, Dyaks, Fellows of the Royal Society, Inquisitors, Saints, have perlustrated Cock Lane, and have come away nothing the wiser. Some, of course, have thought they had the secret, have recognised the work of God, ‘dæmons,’ ‘spirits,’ ‘ghosts,’ ‘devils,’ ‘fairies’ and of ordinary impostors: others have made a push at a theory of disengaged nervous force, or animal magnetism. We prefer to leave theory alone, not even accepting with enthusiasm, the hypothesis of Dr. Johnson. ‘He expressed great indignation at the imposture of the Cock Lane ghost, and related, with much satisfaction, how he had assisted in detecting the cheat, and had published an account of it in the newspapers. Upon this subject I incautiously offended him, by pressing him with too many questions,’ says Boswell,—questions which the good doctor was obviously unable to answer.
It is in January, 1762, that the London newspapers begin to be full of a popular mystery, the Cock Lane ghost. Reports, articles, letters, appeared, and the ghost made what is now called a ‘sensation’. Perhaps, the most clear, if the most prejudiced account, is that given in a pamphlet entitled The Mystery Revealed, published by Bristow, in St. Paul’s Churchyard (1762). Comparing this treatise (which Goldsmith is said to have written for three guineas) with the newspapers, The Gentleman’s Magazine and the Annual Register, we get a more or less distinct view of the subject. But the various newspapers repeat each other’s versions, with slight alterations; The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Annual Register, follow suit, the narratives are ‘synoptic,’ while Goldsmith’s tract, if it be Goldsmith’s, is obviously written in defence of the unlucky Mr. K., falsely accused of murder by the ghost.
Mr. K.’s version is the version given by Goldsmith, and thus leads up to the ‘phenomena’ through a romance of middle-class life. In 1756, this Mr. K., a person of some means, married Miss E. L. of L. in Norfolk. In eleven months the young wife died, in childbed, and her sister, Miss Fanny, came to keep house for Mr. K. The usual passionate desire to marry his deceased wife’s sister assailed Mr. K., and Fanny shared his flame. According to Goldsmith, the canon law would have permitted the nuptials, if the wife had not born a child which lived, though only for a few minutes. However this may be, Mr. K. honourably fled from Fanny, who, unhappily, pursued him with letters, and followed him to town. Here they took lodgings together, but when Mr. K. left the rooms, being unable to recover some money which he had lent his landlord, the pair looked out for new apartments. These they found in Cock Lane, in the house of Mr. Parsons, clerk of St. Sepulchre’s.
It chanced (here we turn to the Annual Register for 1762) that Mr. K. left Fanny alone in Cock Lane while he went to a wedding in the country. She asked little Elizabeth Parsons, her landlord’s daughter, to share her bed, and both of them were disturbed by strange scratchings and rappings. These were attributed by Mrs. Parsons to the industry of a neighbouring cobbler, but when they occurred on a Sunday, this theory was abandoned. Poor Fanny, according to the newspapers, thought the noises were a warning of her own death. Others, after the event, imagined that they were caused by the jealous or admonishing spirit of her dead sister. Fanny and Mr. K. (having sued Mr. Parsons for money lent) left his rooms in dudgeon, and went to Bartlet Court, Clerkenwell. Here Fanny died on February 2, 1760, of a disease which her physician and apothecary certified to be small-pox, and her coffin was laid in the vault of St. John’s Church. Now the noises in Cock Lane had ceased for a year and a half after Fanny left the house, but they returned in force in 1761-62. Mr. Parsons in vain took down the wainscotting, to see whether some mischievous neighbour produced the sounds. [{165}] The raps and scratches seemed to come on the bed of little Elizabeth Parsons, just as in the case of the Tedworth drummer, investigated by Glanvill, a hundred years earlier; and in the case at Orleans, 230 years earlier. The Orleans case is published, with full legal documents, from MS. 40, 7170, 4, Bibliothèque du Roi, in Recueil de Dissertations Anciennes et Nouvelles sur les Apparitions, ii. 90 (à Avignon, 1751). ‘Scratching’ was usually the first manifestation in this affair, and the scratches were heard in the bedroom occupied by certain children. The Cock Lane child ‘was always affected with tremblings and shiverings at the coming and going of the ghost’. It was stated that the child had seen a shrouded figure without hands; two other witnesses (one of them a publican) had seen a luminous apparition, with hands. This brilliant being lit up the figures on the dial of a clock. ‘The noises followed the child to other houses,’ and multitudes of people, clergy, nobles, and princes, also followed the child. A certain Mr. Brown was an early investigator, and published his report. Like Adrien de Montalembert, in 1526, like the Franciscans about 1530, he asked the ghost to reply, affirmatively or negatively, to questions, by one knock for ‘yes,’ two for ‘no’. This method was suggested, it seems, by a certain Mary Frazer, in attendance on the child. Thus it was elicited that Fanny had been poisoned by Mr. K. with ‘red arsenic,’ in a draught of purl to which she was partial. She added that she wished to see Mr. K. hanged.
She would answer other questions, now right, and now wrong. She called her father John, while his real name was Thomas. In fact she was what Porphyry, the Neoplatonist, would have called a ‘deceitful demon’. Her chief effects were raps, scratchings, and a sound as of whirring wings, which filled the room. This phenomenon occurs in a ‘haunted house’ mentioned in the Journal of the Psychical Society. It is infinitely more curious to recall, that, when Mr. Im Thurn, in British Guiana, submitted to the doctoring of a peayman (see p. 39), he heard a sound, ‘at first low and indistinct, and then gathering in volume as if some big winged thing came from far toward the house, passed through the roof, and then settled heavily on the floor, and again, after an interval, as if the same winged thing rose and passed away as it had come’. Mr. Im Thurn thinks the impression was caused by the waving of boughs. These Cock Lane occurrences were attributed to ventriloquism, but, after a surgeon had held his hand on the child’s stomach and chest while the noises were being produced, this probable explanation was abandoned. ‘The girl was said to be constantly attended by the usual noises, though bound and muffled hand and foot, and that without any motion of her lips, and when she appeared to be asleep.’ [{166}] This binding is practised by Eskimo Angakut, or sorcerers, as of old, by mediums (δοχεις) in ancient Greece and Egypt, so we gather from Iamblichus, and some lines quoted from Porphyry by Eusebius. [{167}] A kind of ‘cabinet,’ as modern spiritualists call a curtain, seems to have been used. In fact the phenomena, luminous apparition, ‘tumultuous sounds,’ and all, were familiar to the ancients. Nobody seems to have noted this, but one unusually sensible correspondent of a newspaper quoted cases of knockings from Baxter’s Certainty of the Worlds of Spirits, and thought that Baxter’s popular book might have suggested the imposture. Though the educated classes had buried superstition, it lived, of course, among the people, who probably thumbed Baxter and Glanvill.
Thus things went on, crowds gathering to amuse themselves with the ghost. On February 1, Mr. Aldrich, a clergyman of Clerkenwell, assembled in his house a number of gentlemen and ladies, having persuaded Parsons to let his child be carried thither and tested. Dr. Johnson was there, and Dr. Macaulay suggested the admission of a Mrs. Oakes. Dr. Johnson supplied the newspapers with an account of what happened. The child was put to bed by several ladies, about ten o’clock, and the company sat ‘for rather more than an hour,’ during which nothing occurred. The men then went down-stairs and talked to Parsons, when they were interrupted by some of the ladies, who said that scratching and knocking had set in. The company returned, and made the child hold her hands outside the bedclothes. No phenomena followed. Now the sprite had promised to rap on its own coffin in the vault of St. John’s, so thither they adjourned (without the medium), but there was never a scratch!
‘It is therefore the opinion of the whole assembly, that the child has some art of making or counterfeiting particular noises, and that there is no agency of any higher cause.’