The Paranormal Blog

In this week’s Weird Wednesday, historian Chris Laursen takes us back to the City of London, England in 1759 to 1762 to remember what was commonly deemed a malicious hoax, but may be an early recorded case of recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK) or poltergeist activity.

The malicious accusations of ‘Scratching Fanny’
by Chris Laursen

It is the major spectacle that often remains in the annals of history. The ghost that resided at Cock Lane in the City of London in the mid-eighteenth century was precisely that. A tale of sex, gossip, murder, séances and ghosts, it caught the imaginations of the droves visiting the London alleyway to gawk at the comings and goings of a highly-publicized haunted house.

The case has many classic signs of what today would be potentially considered recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis (RSPK), popularly known as poltergeist phenomena. It featured rapping noises that seemed to be able to communicate answers to those asking questions, much like the Philip Experiment had done in Toronto, Canada in the 1970s. (That experiment was conducted by the former Toronto Society for Psychical Research to try and conjure up a ghost, and they were successful in psychically creating rapping noises in and movement of a table.) At Cock Lane, malicious gossip led to a criminal trial, and poltergeist phenomena was relegated to being a mere hoax perpetrated by an eleven-year-old girl by the name of Elizabeth Parsons.

Elizabeth’s father, Richard, was an officiating clerk at a nearby church, and he lived on Cock Lane with his wife and two daughters, of whom Elizabeth was the eldest. Despite his duties at the church, Richard frequented the neighbourhood tavern and was known as a drunkard - not all that unusual for a man in his position in those times. The story, in brief, is that Richard Parsons accepted two lodgers into his home in October 1759, William Kent and his pregnant wife Fanny. William ended up revealing to Richard that he was not actually married to Fanny, and that they had both left their village out of shame. You see, Fanny was the sister of William’s former wife who had died in childbirth. It was considered immoral for him to marry his dead wife’s sister.

Strange phenomena commenced when William went out of town on business, and Fanny, nervous about sleeping alone, asked Parson’s daughter Elizabeth to share her bed. They were awakened several nights in a row by a rapping noise, but Elizabeth’s mother explained that it was likely the shoemaker next door working late. However, the rapping occurred in front of several witnesses on a Sunday night when the shoemaker was definitely not working. This caused great alarm in the family.

Soon after, there was a disagreement over the repayment of a loan William had given Richard, and the landlord took no shame in publicly bad mouthing his lodger’s relationship with Fanny. The couple moved to a new house where Fanny reportedly became seriously ill with smallpox. The rapping noises continued. Richard interpreted this as Fanny’s dead sister’s ghost seeking revenge for William’s actions. In late January, both Richard Parsons and a friend reportedly witnessed an apparition in the home, adding to the tensions. About a week later, Fanny died from her illness. The raps continued in the Parsons’ household, prompting the family to replace the wainscot from which the noise emanated, to no avail.

After several more months of inexplicable knocking, Parsons asked a local rector, Rev. John Moore, to investigate. Moore was familiar with similar noises that had affected his mentor John Wesley in 1715 and of how the Wesley family had communicated by knocking back. As in contemporary cases of RSPK, the Cock Lane phenomena seemed to center on one person, in this case young Elizabeth Parsons, so investigations were most successful when she was present. In the 1984 book Ghosts (Orbis Publishing), Frank Smyth wrote:

“Moore’s most productive sessions were held in Elizabeth’s bedroom, after the girl had been put to bed. Sometimes the knocks came from the floorboards, sometimes from the bedstead or the walls. On the rare occasions when the ‘spirit’ appeared to be pleased, it made a noise like the fluttering of wings; when displeased it made a noise like ‘a cat’s claws scratching over a cane chair’ - and it became known as ‘Scratching Fanny.’”

Rev. Moore managed to communicate with the source of the knocking, and he discovered the spirit of William Kent’s illegitimate bride Fanny, poisoned by William in the throes of her illness. William did not find out about these accusations until he read an article in a local newssheet almost a year after Fanny had died. He requested to sit in on a séance, where the alleged spirit of his dead wife bluntly accused him of murdering her.

Séances continued and public fascination grew through 1761, leading to the formation of The Committee of Gentlemen, an impromptu group of impartial investigators seeking ways to test the validity of the spirit rappings, especially considering the serious accusations lodged against William Kent. The Committee’s séances began on February 1, 1762, and initially were fruitless. On the third day, however, a curtain rod spun on its own and powerful knocking was heard high up in the chimney. The pressure was on for young Elizabeth as the Committee threatened to send her and her parents to Newgate Prison if fraud were revealed.

Interestingly, as has been documented in more recent poltergeist cases (for example the Enfield Poltergeist or the case of Tina Resch), Elizabeth obviously felt the pressure to perform. She was caught trying to make knocking sounds with a piece of wood. ‘Scratching Fanny’ was disgraced, but William Kent was relieved of the accusations against him. Rev. Moore and the Parsons were convicted of conspiring against William. Richard was sentenced to two years, his wife one year imprisonment and the rector fined heavily. Young Elizabeth Parsons did not stand trial, and the ghost did not return thereafter.

Despite this, the debunking of the Cock Lane poltergeist remains contested. There were many witnesses to the phenomena and it closely matches RSPK events scientifically observed over the past century. Elizabeth may have very well been the agent for this poltergeist, and as in the Philip Experiment, the answers yielded by her “knocking spirit” may have been psychically derived.

In 1860, what was supposedly Fanny’s body was exhumed, revealing a well-preserved corpse with no sign of smallpox and an intact nose, quite rare in such an aged cadaver. Such preservation would possibly have today’s forensic scientists searching for signs of arsenic poisoning.

Like almost all ghost stories, this one will forever remain a true mystery.

Further reading:

Paul Chambers. The Cock Lane Ghost: Murder, Sex and Haunting in Dr. Johnson's London (Sutton Publishing, 2006).

Andrew Lang. Cock Lane and Commonsense (1896), freely available through Project Gutenburg, http://www.gutenberg.org

Image credits:

Picture of Cock Lane in the eighteenth century from Ghosts, edited by Peter Brookesmith (Orbis Publishing, 1984).

“Cock Lane, Humbug” from Ghosts: An Illustrated History by Peter Haines (Treasure Press, 1987).