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Adjacent to London's Smithfield market and only a few minutes' walk from St Paul's Cathedral, is a short alleyway known as Cock Lane. The tall buildings and narrowness of this road give it a dark, foreboding presence and help to retain a sense of its origins as a medieval red-light district. Currently Cock Lane is home to financial companies and high tech publishers but in the eighteenth century this district housed London's working poor. It was this environment that, in January 1762, gave rise to an extraordinary scandal that engulfed all London. London (pronounced ) is the capital city of England and of the United Kingdom. ...
Smithfield meat market from the south Smithfield is an area in the north-west part of the City of London (which is itself the historic core of a much larger London). ...
St Pauls Cathedral from the south St Pauls Cathedral is a cathedral on Ludgate Hill, in the City of London, and the seat of the Bishop of London. ...
The De Wallen red-light district in Amsterdam. ...
The legitamacy of the hauntings is fiercly disputed to this day.
At the centre of the story is William Kent, a young man from Norfolk who managed to impregnate two daughters from the same wealthy family. The first, Elizabeth Lynes, he married, but she died in childbirth; a few months later, William eloped to London with his dead wife's sister, Fanny Lynes. Here William and Fanny lodged in Cock Lane at the house of a clerk named Richard Parsons. Fanny soon died, supposidly of smallpox and William found that he had made an enemy of both her family and Mr Parsons, whom he had sued for a debt.
However, the rivalry was only about to get deeper. The Parsons claimed to have been awoken by knocking and scratching in the night, and they could not find a tangible logical source for the knocking or scratching. Then, as further mysterious event occured, they (according to the Parsons) summoned the courage to begin communicating with the ghost using Yes/No questions and a system of knocking for the answer (once for yes, two for no, or vice-versa, the accounts contradict themselves to an extent) and thus supposidly determined that they were communicating with the ghost of Fanny Lynes, who claimed that she died not of smallpox, as her husband claimed, but of Arscenic poisoning in a premeditated murder by her husband, William Kent.
The Parsons soon gained the support of a few people, including a doctor and a priest, who worked to spread the word of the supposed haunting.
Londoners loved nothing more than a good sex and murder scandal and within days the Cock Lane ghost was headline news. Hundreds of people came to Cock Lane to listen to the ghost knock out its messages against William Kent. Events moved from the strange to the bizarre, with the fledgling Methodist movement – one of whose supporters heavily promoted the ghost – being dragged into the scandal. This further convinced Londoners of its reality and led to calls for William Kent to be hanged. The London authorities (including the Lord Mayor) dithered over the issue, creating a volatile atmosphere. The Methodist movement is a group of denominations of Protestant Christianity. ...
Eventually William Kent's cause was adopted by a group of "learned" people which included Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole and Oliver Goldsmith. They suspected that Richard Parsons was using his eleven-year-old daughter Betty to create the ghost and so got the Lord Mayor's permission to put her through a series of tests. Samuel Johnson circa 1772, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. ...
Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, more commonly known as Horace Walpole, (September 24, 1717 – March 2, 1797), was a politician, writer, and architectural innovator He was born in London, the youngest son of British Prime Minister Robert Walpole. ...
The "tests" used by these "learned" people left much to be desired. Even those who today deny the ghost's legitimacy admit that the comittee acted very irrationally and unjustly.
The Comittee refused to accept any possibility, no matter how seemingly strange, that the hauntings were legit and that anybody but the Parsons were guilty of it.
The first "test" composed of having a maid sleep with Betty in such a fasion that the maid bound Betty tightly to herself using her arms and legs. The knockings continued that night. The next night they bound Betty with chains as she slept. There was no knocking that night.
Thus the comittee decided that Betty had to be responsible and that she had managed to slip out of the maid's tight hold without rousing her and continue knocking.
However, the last "test" is agreed by all to have been unbelievably unfair and unjust. The Comittee members discreetly drilled a peephole into Betty's door and then informed her that if there was no knocking that night, her entire family would be arrested and severly punished. They left her unbound. During the night the sentries at the peephole saw Betty get up and create the knocking.
The main point of debate is what motivated Betty to create the knocking that night. Those denying the existence of the ghost claim she had done it all along, and those supporting the legitimacy of the hauntings claim that she was scared for her family and what the Comittee would do if there was no knocking, and thus did the only thing she could to insure that there was knocking that night: by doing it herself.
However, both sides agree about what happened next. Thus, the entire family was arrested anyway.
In July 1762 the main Pro-Parsonists (including Richard Parsons, his wife, several neighbours, a priest and a newspaper editor) were brought before the King's Bench and given lengthy prison terms and/or large fines. Richard Parsons went down for five years and was sentenced to stand at the pillory three times: on each occasion the crowd did not throw rotten fruit but instead handed him a substantial sum of money. It has been suggested that Pranger be merged into this article or section. ...
The story of the Cock Lane ghost became a national legend that was told to frighten children as well as being a cautionary tale. Charles Dickens alludes to it several times as do several other Victorian authors. The tale's popularity began to wane in the early twentieth century when it was superseded by some of the more spectacular supernatural stories coming out of the Spiritualist movement. Dickens redirects here. ...
One of the more important and highly-debated points on the legitimacy of the Cock Lane Ghost happened almost a centuary after the sentences were levied against the Parsonists. In the Mid 1800's, searchers discovered the body of whom it is widly believed is Fanny Lynes. There was no sign of the Smallpox on the body, that her husband William Kent claimed she died of. However, her face was almost perfectly preserved. A defining feature on the corpses of those who died through Arsenic Overdose/poisening, which was the method the Parsons said the supposed ghost claimed she had been murdered by William Kent.
Despire evidence pointing both to Parsonist innocence and Kent's guilt and to Parsonist guilt and Kent's innocence, it is impossible as of this time to determine which side is true.
References
- Chambers, Paul (2006). The Cock Lane Ghost: Murder, Sex and Haunting in Dr Johnson's London. Stroud: Sutton. ISBN 0750938692.
- Grant, Douglas (1965). The Cock Lane Ghost. London: Macmillan.
- Lang, Andrew (1894). Cock Lane and Common-sense. London: Longmans, Green.
For the former National Basketball Association player, see Andrew Lang (basketball). ...
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