Scratching Fanny
Cock Lane, in London’s West Smithfield area, was once full of brothels, hence its name, where Falstaff went to “buy a saddle” (Henry IV Part 2, (1597-8)), and the point where the Great Fire of London burnt itself out in 1666, marked by a small statue of a Golden Boy in an alcove at the corner with Giltspur Street. Almost a century later it was the location of a paranormal phenomenon that gripped Georgian Britain.
William Kent and his sister-in-law, Fanny Lynes, who by then were romantically involved, moved down from Norwich to London and took up lodgings in a house in Cock Lane owned by Richard Parsons. William resumed his former occupation as a moneylender, Parsons bring one of his clients.
While there the couple reported hearing curious knockings and scratching noises during the night, moving out when Parsons refused to repay the loan. Kent had to take him to court. In early January 1762, Fanny contracted smallpox and died, her death sparking off another series of disturbing noises in Parsons’ house, louder and more incessant than before and, curiously, centering around Parsons’ daughter, the eleven-year-old Elizabeth, who was prone to convulsions.
Claiming that the noises were being made by Fanny’s ghost, Parsons, with the aid of a Methodist minister, John Moore, organized a series of séances to contact her. Using a series of binary question to which the ghost answered in the affirmative with one knock and in the negative with tow, the interrogation revealed that Fanny had died from arsenical poisoning administered by William Kent, not smallpox. Parsons, via the medium of the ghost, was accusing Kent of murder.
Reports of the hauntings were carried in editions of the St James’s Chronicle and London Chronicle between 16th and 19th January 1762 and news of the Cock Lane ghost, by then dubbed “Scratching Fanny”, spread through London like wildfire. Large crowds would assemble in the street making it impassable, simply to see the haunted house, others succumbing to Parson’s invitation to step inside and “talk” to the ghost, for a fee. Often it would oblige.
With noises still being reported during the latter part of January, the ghost attracted the attention of the great and the good. Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford, announced that along with Prince Edward, the Duke of York, Lady Northumberland, Lady Mary Coke, and Lord Hertford, he would be visiting the premises on January 30th. Despite the eminence of the party, not only had they to struggle through the throngs of onlookers but they were also disappointed, the ghost failing to make an appearance, the Public Advertiser drily observing that “the noise is now generally deferred till seven in the morning, it being necessary to vary the time, that the imposition may be better carried on”.
By then opinion had sharply divided between those who thought the whole thing was a hoax and those who believed that the premises were really haunted, a divergence that highlighted the difference of approach to matters supernatural between the established Anglican church and the Methodists.
While the Anglicans were generally sniffy about anything that smacked of superstition, the Methodists, whose founder, John Wesley, had been strongly influenced by a supposed haunting at his family home, regarded ghosts as an affirmation of the afterlife. In the court of public opinion “Scratching Fanny” was closely associated with Methodism, a point that William Hogarth made in an illustration published in The Times and in his print Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (March 15, 1762).
