Cock Lane Ghost.

Cock Lane Ghost. In the year 1762 London was thrown into a state of extraordinary excitement by the reported existence of a ghost in the house of one Mr Parsons, in Cock Lane, Smithfield. Strange and unaccountable noises were heard in the house, and a luminous lady, bearing a strong resemblance to one who, under the name of Mrs Kent, had once resided in the house, but who had died two years before, was said to have been seen. Dark suspicions as to Mr Kent having poisoned the lady were immediately aroused, and were confirmed by the ghost, who, on being interrogated, answered, after the fashion of the spirits of our own day, by knocking. Crowds were attracted to the house to hear the ghost, and the great majority became believers. At length a plan was formed by a few sceptics to ascertain the real origin of the noises. Parson's daughter, a girl eleven years of age, from whom they supposed the sounds to proceed, was taken to another house by herself, and threatened with the imprisonment of her father in Newgate if she did not renew the rappings that evening, the noises having for some time been discontinued. She was discovered to have taken a board with her into bed, and when the noises took place, no doubt was entertained that they had all along been produced by similar methods. A prosecution was then raised by Mr Kent, and Parsons was condemned to stand thrice on the pillory for imposture and defamation. Among those who visited the house was Dr Johnson, but it is not true that, with all his natural bent to easy belief in the supernatural, he was one of the dupes of this miserable imposture. Churchill's gross caricature of Pomposo's credulity in his tiresome poem of over four thousand lines, The Ghost, was mere false and malicious slander, and deserved the payment that the burly Johnson promised to give Foote upon his own stage if he persisted in taking him off in the same way. See A. Lang's Cock Lane and Common Sense (1894).