The Cock Lane Ghost ("Scratching Fanny") and the Johnson Committee

Cock Lane runs west from Pye Corner to Snow Hill, in Smithfield, in the City of London. Richard Parsons, parish clerk of St Sepulchre's, kept a house there and took in lodgers. Among them were William Kent, a moneylender from Norfolk, and Fanny Lynes, the sister of his late first wife. They called themselves husband and wife. Kent had lent Parsons money.

It began in 1759 or 1760. Kent was away at a wedding. Fanny shared a bed with Parsons's 11-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. The two reported scratching and rapping noises, like the sound of a cat scratching a chair.

Fanny died on 2 February 1760, officially of smallpox. James Franzen, landlord of the nearby Wheat Sheaf, reported seeing a ghostly white figure ascend the stairs.

January 1762. The noises returned, centred on Elizabeth as she lay in bed. She had convulsions. She spoke of a shrouded figure without hands.

Parsons and the Methodist preacher John Moore set up a code. One knock meant yes, two meant no. On 12 January, two knocks answered "Did you die naturally?" One knock answered "By poison?" The spirit, soon called "Scratching Fanny" by the press, was accusing Kent.

He shouted back: "Thou art a lying spirit, thou are not the ghost of my Fanny." Crowds made the lane impassable. Parsons charged admission. Horace Walpole came by night with the Duke of York. It rained torrents, he wrote, "yet the lane was full of mob."

1 February 1762. A committee met at the Clerkenwell house of Rev. Stephen Aldrich, where the girl had been put to bed. Samuel Johnson was among them. They sat more than an hour. Nothing.

Then ladies by the bed heard knocks and scratches. Elizabeth said she felt the spirit "like a mouse upon her back." She was told to hold her hands out of bed. From then on, nothing. The promised knock on Fanny's coffin in the vault of St John's, Clerkenwell, never came.

Johnson judged that the child had "some art of making or counterfeiting a particular noise." In later tests at Covent Garden, maids saw her hide a small piece of wood about 6 by 4 inches. Kent had Fanny's coffin opened. The corpse was undisturbed.

10 July 1762. At Guildhall, before Lord Mansfield, Richard Parsons, his wife, Mary Frazer, Richard James and John Moore faced a charge of conspiracy against Kent's life. The jury took about 15 minutes to find all five guilty. Parsons was pilloried three times and jailed for two years, but the crowd treated him kindly. Elizabeth was never charged.

The court and the committee saw fraud, and a quarrel over the loan. Others read religious politics into it, and William Hogarth placed the ghost atop a thermometer of credulity. Colin Wilson called it plainly a poltergeist, while Andrew Lang wrote that it "remains a puzzle." By then "Cock Lane" meant any ghost scare. Dickens kept the name alive in three novels.