Scratching Fanny, ghost of Cock Lane
- London On The Ground
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
A notorious 18th century London ghost attracted crowds, the press, debates on religion and morals - and an inquiry led by Samuel Johnson.
The spirit, thought to be Fanny Lynes, late wife of William Kent, made scratching and knocking noises around the bed of a sleeping young girl. In séances ‘Scratching Fanny’ accused William of poisoning her.
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THE MAIN CHARACTERS of this story Richard Parsons, parish clerk for St Sepulchre’s Newgate. Elizabeth Parsons, Richard’s elder daughter (around 11 or 12 years old). William Kent, former inn keeper and post office keeper, originally from Norfolk. Frances “Fanny” Lynes, Kent’s common-law wife and sister of Kent’s late wife (who had died in childbirth). John Moore, assistant preacher of St Sepulchre’s and rector of St Bartholomew the Great Stephen Aldrich, parish priest of St John Clerkenwell THE SCENE Richard Parsons’ house on Cock Lane near Smithfield, 1759-1762. |
Richard Parsons rented out rooms in his house on Cock Lane to William Kent and Fanny Lynes. The couple were forbidden to marry by the morals of the time, since William had previously been married to Fanny’s deceased sister and that marriage had produced a living child. Nevertheless, they co-habited as husband and wife, calling themselves Mr and Mrs Kent.
William and Fanny had previously lodged together in East Greenwich and in the City of London near Mansion House, where William agreed to lend some money to the landlord. They tried to keep the true nature of their relationship quiet, but the landlord refused to repay the loan, possibly because he had discovered the truth about them.
Not long after moving into the rooms in Cock Lane, and in spite of his experience with his previous landlord, William made a loan of 12 guineas to Parsons, to be repaid at one guinea per month.
In 1759, before going away to attend a wedding in the country, William asked young Elizabeth to sleep in the same bed with Fanny, who was several months into a pregnancy. During this time Fanny and Elizabeth were disturbed at night by unusual scratching and knocking sounds.
At first the noises were attributed to a neighbouring shoemaker, but they were heard again when he was absent. Neighbours were called in to witness the sounds and one even reported seeing a ghostly figure climbing the stairs.
Parsons also reported seeing a ghost. This was assumed by some to be the spirit of William’s late wife expressing disapproval at his relationship with her sister.
After William and Fanny moved to a property in Clerkenwell in January 1760 - presumably for a quieter location in the final weeks of her pregnancy - Fanny contracted smallpox and died before giving birth. She was buried in the crypt of St John’s Clerkenwell (for more on Clerkenwell, see Would Elizabeth I recognise Clerkenwell today?).
The terms of Fanny’s will were generous to William, leaving him the majority of her estate (around £245 in total), but only provided half a crown to each of her siblings. As a result, her family tried to overturn her will in a court based on civil law known as Doctors’ Commons. This was unsuccessful, so they began proceedings against William in the Court of Chancery.
By 1761, remarried and now a stockbroker, William was still owed three guineas of the overdue loan he had made to Parsons. After instructing his solicitor to begin a law suit he managed to recover the outstanding sum by January 1762.
This coincided with a return of the spooky noises.
Another woman had lodged in Parsons’ house in Cock Lane when William and Fanny left for Clerkenwell, but she moved out after being disturbed by the strange sounds.
The noises appeared to come from under young Elizabeth’s bed, so Parsons commissioned a carpenter to remove the wooden panels from her bedroom walls to try to discover their source. He also called in John Moore, assistant preacher of St Sepulchre’s and rector of St Bartholomew the Great. Together they decided that, this time, the ghost was Fanny Lynes.
Using a system of one knock for ‘yes’ and two knocks for ‘no’, they interrogated the ghost, who claimed that - far from dying of smallpox - Fanny had been poisoned by William.
Moore had been told by one of Fanny’s sisters, Ann, that the coffin lid had been screwed down before she had been able to see the corpse. In his view this suggested that William did not want her to witness the lack of smallpox scars, bearing out the ghost’s claim that smallpox was not the cause of her death.
Moore, who leaned towards the new Methodist brand of Protestantism, brought in a Methodist preacher named Thomas Broughton, who satisfied himself that the ghost was genuine. The story soon became the talk of the town, written up in the press and throwing suspicious attention on William Kent.
William soon wanted to witness the ghost himself. He went to Cock Lane with Broughton, two physicians who had attended Fanny before she died and a relation of Parsons called Mary Frazer.
In an upper room Elizabeth Parsons was put to bed, with her younger sister, in full sight of the audience who sat around the bed. Using the system of knocks, Moore obtained answers from the ghost to the effect that she had been poisoned by William and that he would be hanged.
A number of other such night-time séances also took place. They always began with Elizabeth being put to bed, often followed by an initial period of silence until the ghost announced its presence to the audience with a scratching sound while Elizabeth slept. This would then be followed by an interrogation of the ghost, answered by the knocking sounds.
One séance involved a maid who had worked for William and Fanny at Cock Lane, who was sceptical of the poisoning allegations. The maid, Esther Carlisle (known as “Carrots” because of her red hair), insisted that William and Fanny had been "very loving, and lived very happy together."
As more people became interested, many of whom were disbelieving, séances were requested at other locations in the locality. These included one at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, when young Elizabeth admitted to the audience of around 20 people that she had been fully aware of their conversation when she had appeared to be asleep.
Press coverage of the story of the Cock Lane ghost grew and the little street soon became crowded with visitors. Parsons started charging for access to the house to communicate with Scratching Fanny, as the ghost had become known.
Attention continued to grow and more questions about the authenticity of the ghost were raised. At one point the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Samuel Fludyer, ordered that young Elizabeth should be tested at the house of Stephen Aldrich, Anglican parish priest of St John Clerkenwell.
Eventually the story reached the highest echelons of society, leading to a visit by the Duke of York (Prince Edward, brother of King George III), the Duchess of Northumberland, Lady Mary Coke, the Marquess of Hertford and Horace Walpole (Earl of Orford, the son of the first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and owner of Strawberry Hill House).
Walpole, who was a Whig politician, writer and historian, was a sceptic. He and his aristocratic companions appear to have been drawn to Cock Lane purely for amusement.
“The reigning fashion is a ghost”, he wrote, “a ghost that… only knocks and scratches”, adding that “it is as much the mode to visit the ghost as the Prince of Mecklenburg, who is just arrived. I have not seen him yet, though I have left my name for him.”
After a visit to the opera, Walpole and his blue-blooded companions continued their night’s entertainment by driving in a hackney coach through the rain to Cock Lane, only to find it and the house so full that they could not get in.
However, when word spread that the Duke of York was there, Walpole wrote that “the company squeezed themselves into one another’s pockets to make room for us.”
He continued: “When we opened the chamber, in which there were fifty people, with no light, but one tallow candle at the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child to whom the ghost comes, and whom they are murdering by inches in such insufferable heat and stench.”
The high-ranking guests stayed until half past one in the morning, but heard nothing. Nevertheless, Walpole wrote, “Provisions are sent in like forage, and all the taverns and ale-houses in the neighbourhood make fortunes.”
In February 1762 Stephen Aldrich and Lord Dartmouth assembled a committee to carry out an investigation. Members included the matron of a maternity hospital, churchmen, a Captain Wilkinson (who had previously attended a séance with a pistol, to shoot the source of the knocking, and a stick, with which to make his escape, but the ghost had been silent throughout) and John Moore.
The most famous member of the investigation was Samuel Johnson, author of a celebrated dictionary of the English language and one of the 18th century’s greatest literary figures. He wrote an account of the séance the committee held at Aldrich’s house.
Elizabeth Parsons was “required to hold her hands out of bed”, but, although “the spirit was very solemnly required to manifest its existence by appearance, by impression on the hand or body of any present, by scratches, knocks, or any other agency, no evidence of any preter-natural power was exhibited.”
The ghost also failed to fulfil its promise to knock on the coffin of Fanny Lynes when the group went into the crypt of St John’s.
“It is, therefore, the opinion of the whole assembly”, Samuel Johnson concluded, “that the child has some art of making or counterfeiting a particular noise, and that there is no agency of any higher cause.”
Nevertheless, further séances were held to test Elizabeth and the ghost, including one at a house in Covent Garden. Here the girl was placed in a hammock and asked to keep her hands and feet extended outside the bed. There were no sounds. She and her father were then threatened with Newgate Prison if no more noises were heard.
Before that could happen her maids saw Elizabeth hiding in her underclothes a small wooden board, on which she made the scratching and knocking noises. They told the investigators, who finally knew that she was responsible for the sounds and concluded that her father Richard Parsons had commanded her to make them.
As a result, not only Richard Parsons, but also four other people were charged with conspiracy to take away William Kent’s life by accusing him of the murder of Fanny Lynes. The other four were Parsons’ wife, John Moore, Mary Frazer and a tradesman named Richard James. They were tried at Guildhall by the Lord Chief Justice William Murray (later the Earl of Mansfield).
All five were found guilty. John Moore and Richard James agreed to pay William Kent £588 in damages and were released.
Richard Parsons was sentenced to stand in the pillory on three occasions, including one at the end of Cock Lane. While in the pillory, there was a collection for him among the “prodigious number of spectators, who seemed to commiserate his case”, according to press reports at the time. However, he was also given two years’ imprisonment in the King’s Bench.
His wife Elizabeth was jailed for one year, while Mary Frazer got six months, with hard labour, in the Bridewell.
It seems that Parsons was motivated to create the hoax out of revenge against William for his pursuit of the debt that he had owed. He hoped that the ghost story would provide evidence for William to be charged with Fanny’s poisoning. Nevertheless, in spite of the guilty verdict, Parsons maintained his innocence throughout.
The story of the Cock Lane ghost is a reminder of how much more widespread was a belief in the supernatural in the 18th century than it is today. Ghosts were seen as evidence of an afterlife, a core belief for many religions.
Methodism was particularly known for what mainstream Anglicans regarded as “superstitious” beliefs. Although it was not yet a separate church, the episode highlighted a growing divide between Methodism and mainstream members of the Church of England.
The story also illustrates Georgian society’s disapproval of a man living in a romantic relationship with his dead wife’s sister.
The Cock Lane ghost captured the public imagination. It soon became the subject of a short theatrical piece by David Garrick (one of the 18th century's greatest actor managers), an essay by the writer Oliver Goldsmith, who may also have been responsible for a satirical illustration on the theme, and engravings by artist William Hogarth.
In the 19th century Charles Dickens referred to the ghost in a number of his books, including Nicholas Nickleby in which the main character's mother claims that her great-grandfather "went to school with the Cock-lane Ghost".
Cock Lane was also the site of a pub called the Fortune of War, where bodies stolen from graveyards, including that of the nearby St Sepulchre’s, were displayed for sale to surgeons (see City pubs past: half a dozen lost City of London inns and taverns).
See also City of London Street names: a dozen of the best for the origin of the name of Cock Lane and other City of London streets.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks and tours, please click here.
Cock Lane is on the route of my walking tour Monasteries, Martyrs, Murder and Meat, which has its next outing at 2.30pm on Sunday 19 July 2026.
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