Cock Lane, London: The Ghost That Named a Murderer
0:00 / 14:59
London, 1762. In a cramped house on Cock Lane in Smithfield, knocks and scratches surround an eleven-year-old girl. People say it's the ghost of Fanny Lynes, who died two years earlier. Through one knock for yes and two for no, she accuses the man she loved of poisoning her.
Adam takes the lads through the full story: a forbidden love, a fall-out over money, aristocrats crammed into a Smithfield bedroom, and Samuel Johnson waiting by a coffin in a Clerkenwell crypt for a knock that never comes.
Then there's a small board, a conspiracy trial and a pillory crowd that did something nobody expected. Oz wants evidence, Frank wants justice for a frightened kid, and everyone wants to know who wrote the script.
Plus Frank invents a knock code, and it gets badly out of hand.
The Grave Shift is a Ghost Haunt UK production. Hosted by Adam, Oz and Frank.
Full transcript
AdamLondon, seventeen-sixty-two. In a cramped house in Smithfield, something is knocking on the wall of a little girl's bedroom.
AdamOne knock for yes. Two for no. The knocking says it's a dead woman, and she's naming the man she says murdered her.
AdamAristocrats cram into a tiny house to hear it. Samuel Johnson's committee goes down into a crypt to test it. This is The Grave Shift.
AdamWe're on Apple, Spotify and everywhere else you get your podcasts. Follow us, rate us, and tell one sceptical mate.
FrankAdam, I love it when you do the crypt voice. Your eyebrows go up like a bloke reading a gas bill.
OzHis eyebrows are the most reliable instrument in this room. They've never given me a false reading.
AdamGood evening and welcome to episode eight. Tonight we're in London, on a street called Cock Lane.
FrankI'm going to be a grown-up about that.
OzHe said that in the car. He lasted four seconds.
AdamThe ghost got a nickname from the London press, too. They called her Scratching Fanny.
FrankNo. No, they did not. Adam, that's entrapment.
AdamHand on heart, it's in the sources. Eighteenth-century Londoners had no idea how this would sound to us.
OzFrank, take a breath. This is a serious story with a dead woman in it.
FrankYou're right. Sorry. Respect for Fanny. Genuinely.
FrankBefore we start, I want to agree a code. If I'm scared, one knock. If I'm not, two knocks.
OzAnd what's three knocks?
FrankThree knocks means put the kettle on.
OzThat's not a spirit code, Frank. That's a kitchen.
AdamNoted. The Frank Protocol is in effect. Right. Let's go back a few years, to Norfolk.
AdamThere's a man called William Kent. He marries a woman called Elizabeth Lynes.
AdamIt turns to tragedy almost straight away. Elizabeth dies in childbirth, not long after the wedding.
FrankGod. That was so common back then, and it never stops being awful.
AdamHer younger sister, Frances, known as Fanny, had come to help keep the house. Over time, she and William fall in love.
OzWith his late wife's sister. I can see the problem coming.
AdamSo could the law. Under church law at the time, a man couldn't marry his dead wife's sister. It was forbidden.
FrankSo they're in love, they're both grieving the same woman, and they're told, legally, no.
AdamExactly. So they do what people did. They go to London, where nobody knows them, and live as husband and wife.
OzBig city. Nobody asks questions. Until somebody does.
AdamAround seventeen-fifty-nine, they end up lodging in a house on Cock Lane, near Smithfield. The landlord is Richard Parsons.
AdamParsons is the parish clerk at St Sepulchre's church nearby. Respectable job, not a lot of money.
FrankParish clerk. So he's churchy. That's a good start for a ghost story.
OzThat's a good start for a funding application.
AdamNow, this next bit matters later. The claim is that Kent lent Parsons money, and Parsons didn't pay it back.
AdamThe details vary depending on who's telling it, and historians argue about it. But keep it in your back pocket.
OzPocket. Debt. Noted. Kit's on, by the way. Meter's on zero, recorder's running.
FrankOne knock. I'm already a bit scared.
OzYou knocked three times.
FrankThen I'm scared and I want a brew. Carry on.
AdamSo at some point Kent goes away for a family wedding, and Fanny doesn't want to sleep alone.
AdamSo the Parsons' young daughter, Elizabeth, sleeps in the bed with her for company.
AdamAnd the story goes that's when the noises start. Knocking. Scratching. In the night, around the bed.
FrankAlready it's round the kid. Already round Elizabeth.
OzHold that thought, because everything in this case comes back to where that child was.
AdamMeanwhile Kent and Parsons fall out, by most accounts over the money. Kent and Fanny move out.
AdamThen, early in seventeen-sixty, Fanny falls seriously ill. She's pregnant. And she dies. The doctors put it down to smallpox.
FrankShe's young, she's pregnant, she couldn't marry the bloke, and she's gone.
AdamShe's buried in the vault under St John's church in Clerkenwell. Remember that vault.
AdamOne more detail. Kent and Fanny had made wills in each other's favour. So when she dies, he inherits.
OzAnd there's your murder motive, if you're the sort of person looking for one.
AdamThe story goes that Kent then pushed to get his money back off Parsons. So now there's real bad blood.
FrankSo if the money story's true, Parsons is skint, he's being chased by Kent, and he's got a grudge.
AdamAnd in early seventeen-sixty-two, the knocking at Cock Lane comes back.
AdamIt's around Elizabeth again. She's about eleven or twelve now. Knocks and scratches in her room, in her bed.
AdamThe household works out a system. Questions are put to the ghost. One knock for yes. Two knocks for no.
FrankThat's my code. They stole my code.
OzThey had it about two hundred and sixty years before you, Frank.
FrankThen I've been robbed in advance.
AdamA woman called Mary Frazer takes on the job of interpreter. She asks the questions and the knocks answer.
AdamThe spirit says it's Fanny. It says she didn't die of smallpox. She was poisoned, by William Kent, with arsenic, so it was claimed.
FrankOh. So that's the accusation. That's not a spooky noise anymore, that's a murder charge.
OzThat's a hanging offence. Off the back of knocks on a bed frame.
AdamAnd London goes absolutely mad for it. Word spreads. Crowds jam Cock Lane. People cram into that little house.
AdamThe press nicknames her Scratching Fanny. It's in the papers. It's the talk of the coffee houses.
OzSeventeen-sixty-two's version of going viral. Except the comments section is a man shouting in the street.
AdamAnd it's not just ordinary folk. Horace Walpole, the writer and son of a prime minister, went to see for himself.
AdamThe Duke of York is said to have gone too. Aristocrats in their finery, squashed into a bedroom in Smithfield.
FrankImagine being Parsons. You've got a duke on your landing and you've not hoovered.
OzThey didn't have hoovers, Frank.
FrankThen he's got no excuse, has he.
AdamAs I understand it, Walpole wasn't impressed. The ghost didn't do much on the night he went.
OzClassic. Brilliant on all the nights nobody important is watching.
FrankOr it's shy. You'd be shy with a duke in your bedroom.
AdamHere's the bit that gets me. Kent himself turns up. The accused man sits in the room while the ghost is questioned about him.
AdamThrough the knocks, the ghost is asked whether he poisoned her. The knocks say yes. He reportedly called it a lying spirit, right there.
FrankThat's horrific, actually. You're grieving, and a bed is calling you a murderer in front of a crowd.
OzAnd your private life is all over the papers. The sister, the not being married. All of it.
FrankFour knocks. I've decided four knocks means I feel bad for this man.
OzThe code's getting longer than the Magna Carta.
AdamSo it's a public scandal and a possible murder accusation. Something has to be done. A committee is put together to investigate.
AdamAnd on that committee, among the clergymen and gentlemen, is Doctor Samuel Johnson. The dictionary man.
FrankThe dictionary man! Ghost hunting! That's like finding out Delia Smith does cage fighting.
OzActually, he's the right person. The bloke whose whole job is checking what things mean.
AdamThey set up a proper test. Elizabeth is put to bed under observation at a different house, and the spirit is asked to perform.
AdamThen there's the big one. The spirit had promised it would knock on its own coffin, in the vault at St John's, Clerkenwell.
FrankOh, that's bold. That's the ghost putting its money where its mouth is.
AdamSo members of the committee go down into the crypt, stand by Fanny's coffin, and wait.
AdamThey call on the spirit to knock.
FrankAnd?
AdamNothing. Not a sound.
OzI'd have given anything to have a recorder down there. Just to log the silence.
FrankYou'd have been thrilled. Sat in a crypt with Samuel Johnson, recording nowt.
OzBest night of my life, that.
AdamThe committee concludes the noises are being produced deliberately by somebody. In other words, fraud. Johnson is generally credited with writing it up.
FrankFine. But a quiet crypt doesn't prove the bedroom was fake.
AdamThen it gets worse for the Parsons family. Elizabeth is tested again, and this time there's pressure on her.
AdamBy the accounts, she was told that if the noises didn't happen, there'd be serious trouble for her and her family.
AdamAnd she's caught with a small board, hidden on her. Apparently it was used to make the knocks and scratches.
FrankOh, love.
OzThere it is. The board. That's not a ghost, that's a piece of wood.
FrankHang on, though. She's eleven, twelve. She's told make a noise or your dad's in trouble. Of course she cheats.
OzOr she'd been cheating all along and finally got caught.
FrankWe'll come back to that. I am not letting that go.
AdamKent, meanwhile, has had enough. He takes legal action, and in July seventeen-sixty-two it goes to trial at the Guildhall.
AdamRichard Parsons, his wife, Mary Frazer the interpreter and others are charged with conspiracy against William Kent.
OzConspiracy. So not just a prank. The court thought it was a plan to ruin him.
AdamThe judge is Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice. They're found guilty.
AdamParsons gets the pillory. Locked in by the head and hands in public. And prison on top.
FrankThe pillory wasn't just embarrassing, either. People threw stuff at you. Stones, rubbish. People died in the pillory.
OzThat's right. Depending on the crowd, it could be properly dangerous.
AdamAnd here's the twist. Parsons is stood there in the pillory, and the crowd doesn't pelt him.
AdamReportedly, they take up a collection. For him. They give him money.
FrankNo way! That's brilliant! London had a whip-round for the ghost bloke!
OzThat's either the best or the worst thing I've ever heard about the British public.
FrankIt's the most British thing I've ever heard. Convicted of conspiracy? Aw, poor lad, here's a few bob.
AdamIt tells you something. A lot of ordinary Londoners seem to have seen Parsons as the underdog, whatever the court said.
OzOr he'd given them the best entertainment of the year, and they were tipping the act.
FrankFive knocks. Five knocks means tip the act.
OzWe're going to need a laminated card.
AdamSo. Let's argue about it. Because I think there's more here than a girl with a board.
OzGo on, then. Who wrote the script? Somebody did. An eleven-year-old doesn't dream up arsenic and a will on her own.
AdamThat's what jumped out at me. It's the same shape as our Samlesbury episode. Remember Grace Sowerbutts?
FrankFourteen-year-old. Accused her own family of witchcraft in sixteen-twelve.
AdamAnd the judge found she'd been coached. According to the court, a priest fed her the story. A child as the mouthpiece.
OzNobody needs one. A motive, maybe, and a board in the girl's clothes. The court looked at it and convicted.
OzIf the accusation sticks, Kent hangs. That's not a haunting, that's revenge with sound effects.
FrankBut hang on. That debt motive is disputed. Nobody's got Parsons confessing he did it for the money.
OzNobody needs one. A motive and a board in the girl's clothes. The court looked at it and agreed.
FrankThe court saw a man, a debt and a grudge, and went for the obvious answer. Courts do that.
FrankAnd remember, according to the story, the knocking started back with Fanny alive, before the big falling-out.
OzAccording to the story. Which comes from the people who later got convicted of making it up.
FrankAlright, fair. One knock. That's a point.
FrankBut here's my real one. They only catch her with the board when she's terrified and told it has to happen tonight.
FrankThat's exactly when a kid would fake it. It doesn't tell you what was going on all the other nights.
OzFrank. A crypt. A promised knock on a coffin. And silence. The ghost set its own test and failed it.
FrankYeah. That one hurts me. I'll be honest.
AdamFor me, the person nobody thinks about is Fanny. She died young, couldn't marry the man she loved, and then she's turned into a show.
AdamHer name's in every paper, her private life is everyone's gossip, and she gets a nickname we're still sniggering at.
FrankYeah. We did snigger. That's on us.
OzAnd Elizabeth. Whatever happened, a child was put in the middle of a murder accusation and a room full of aristocrats.
FrankRight. Verdicts. Oz first, because I know what he's going to say.
OzFraud. Driven by adults, possibly over money, carried out by a scared kid with a board. The real victim was William Kent.
OzI will concede one thing. The pillory whip-round. I genuinely can't explain that, and I love it.
FrankMy verdict: by seventeen-sixty-two, it's fake. The board, the coffin. I can't get round it.
FrankBut I think something frightened a little girl and a pregnant woman in that bed first, and the adults ran with it.
AdamMine: it's a fraud, but it's a fraud about who gets to tell the story. A child's voice, adults' words. Same as Samlesbury.
AdamAnd Fanny never got a say in any of it. Not alive, and not dead either.
OzKnock once if you agree.
FrankKnock.
AdamThis has been The Grave Shift. I'm Adam.
FrankI'm Frank. And three knocks. Somebody put the kettle on.
OzI'm Oz. The Frank Protocol is now officially longer than the episode.
AdamNext time you hear a knock in an old house at night, ask yourself who's holding the board.
AdamYou can listen to this episode and every other episode of The Grave Shift on all major podcast providers -- link's in the description below.
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