Scratching Fanny – The Aftermath

The affair of “Scratching Fanny” might have been a hoax and an egregious attempt to frame a man for murder, but as well as eliciting a groundswell of sympathy at the time and highlighting divisions in the approach of religious bodies to the supernatural, it lived long in the public memory. Mrs Nickleby in Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9) opines that her great-grandfather must have been at school with the Cock Lane ghost, “for I know the master of his school was a dissenter, and that would, in a great measure, account for the Cock-lane Ghost’s behaving in such an improper manner to the clergyman when he grew up”. He also mentioned it in Dombey and Son (1846-8) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859).    

“If one phantom is more discredited than another, it is the Cock Lane ghost”, wrote Andrew Lang in Cock Lane and Common Sense (1896), “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 … We still wander in Cock Lane, with a sense of amused antiquarian curiosity, and the same feeling accompanies us in all our explanations of this branch of mythology … but from the true solution of the problem we are as remote as ever”.

While we can still join Lang in wandering down Cock Lane, Parsons’ house was demolished in 1979.