A London headline about telling a joke from a lie in ten seconds made me reread the haunting of 1762 that took the capital six weeks and Dr Johnson to settle
Monday, a Slow Afternoon, a Shop Full of Noises
The radiators in the shop have started. Every October they are bled, and for a week afterwards they knock. One knock, a pause, two knocks. My colleague jumps each time.
I said, “One for yes, two for no.” She did not know what I meant. So I told her about Cock Lane, and then I went and read it all again, because it is the best ghost story in London and it is true that it happened, in the sense that everybody behaved exactly as described.
I had a headline in mind too. A customer’s copy of the London Prat has, on its first page, a piece titled “How to Tell Satire From Fake News in Ten Seconds.”
Ten seconds. In 1762 it took the whole of London six weeks.
The House in Cock Lane
Cock Lane is a narrow street by Smithfield meat market. It is still there. In 1759 a man called Parsons, who was clerk of the parish church nearby, let rooms in his house to a couple.
The man was a Mr Kent. The woman, Fanny, passed as his wife. In fact she was the sister of his dead wife, and the law then did not allow them to marry. They had come to London to live quietly.
Kent lent his landlord some money. The landlord did not pay it back. There was a quarrel. The couple moved out, Kent sued for the debt, and shortly afterwards Fanny, who was expecting a child, died of smallpox.
That is the background. Nobody disputed any of it.
The Knocking
Two years later, noises began in Parsons’s house. Knocking and scratching, at night, in the room where his daughter slept. She was about twelve.
Parsons let it be known that it was a spirit. A method was worked out for questioning it. One knock for yes. Two for no. A scratching sound if it was displeased.
By this means the ghost explained itself. It was Fanny. She had not died of smallpox. She had been poisoned, by Kent, with arsenic in a drink. She wanted him hanged.
The neighbours came to listen. Then the rest of London.
The Crowd
By January 1762 Cock Lane was impassable. Carriages blocked it from end to end. People paid to be let into the house and stood packed in a small bedroom, round a child in a bed, in the dark, waiting for a knock.
Dukes went. A royal prince went. A famous writer of the day described going after the opera, in a hackney coach, with a party that included two ladies of title, and finding the house so full they could barely get in.
The newspapers printed the ghost’s answers daily. Pamphlets came out. Clergymen took sides. One group of enthusiastic ministers believed and prayed with the girl. Others said it was a scandal.
And Mr Kent, who was alive and in London, found that he was being accused of murder, in print, by a dead woman, with no way of answering.
The Committee
So a committee was formed. A clergyman of standing got together a group of gentlemen to examine the matter properly. One of them was the most celebrated man of letters in England: the great dictionary-maker himself.
They took the girl to another house, away from her father, and watched her. She was put to bed. Her hands were held outside the covers. Nothing happened.
The spirit had made a promise. It had said that it would prove itself by knocking on its own coffin, which lay in the vault of a church in Clerkenwell.
So at one o’clock in the morning, the committee went down into the crypt. A party of sober gentlemen, with candles, standing round a coffin under a church, waiting for a dead woman to knock.
The spirit was solemnly required to perform its promise. They waited.
Nothing.
The dictionary-maker wrote the report. It is very short. It concludes that the child has some art of making or counterfeiting a particular noise, and that there is no agency of any higher cause.
How It Was Done
A little later the girl was told that if the ghost did not appear, her father would go to prison. That night the watchers saw her slip something under her nightdress. It was a small piece of wood, a board that the kettle stood on. She had been knocking on that.
It came out that Parsons had put her up to it, to revenge himself on the lodger who had sued him.
He was tried for conspiracy, with his wife and some others. He was sentenced to two years in prison and to stand three times in the pillory.
And here is the detail I love most. The pillory was meant to be a punishment by the public. People threw things. Men died in it. When Parsons was put up, the crowd did not throw anything. They took up a collection for him.
They still believed in the ghost.
Ten Seconds
So, the headline.
I should like to think I would have seen through it. A child in a bed. Noises that only happen when she is there. A landlord with a grudge. An accusation that cannot be tested.
But consider how it looked. Everyone was talking about it. The best people had been. It was in the paper every day. Clergymen vouched for it. And the story was satisfying: a wronged woman, a secret poisoning, a guilty man walking free.
It had every mark of the things I am told to watch for now. It confirmed what people already suspected about a couple living in sin. It could not be checked. It was passed on by people who had not been there. And it accused a real person.
What settled it was not cleverness. It was method. Take the girl away from the father. Hold her hands. Go to the place where the claim can actually be tested, and wait.
That took six weeks and a committee. And even then, the crowd at the pillory had not changed its mind.
Satire and the Other Thing
The customer who lent me the paper says the article’s point is that a joke wants you to see through it and a lie does not.
By that test Cock Lane was a lie. Parsons did not want anyone to see the piece of wood.
But the jokes came at once. A great painter of the day put the ghost into a print mocking credulity, with a thermometer measuring the congregation’s madness. A playwright had it on stage within weeks. A poet wrote a long comic poem.
They did more to end it, I suspect, than the report. A committee can tell you a thing is false. Laughing at it is what makes people let go.
Fairness to the Believers
I do not think they were stupid. It was an age that half believed in spirits and was not sure what to do about it. The dictionary-maker himself thought the question of ghosts was open. That is why he went. He wanted to know.
And spare a thought for the girl. She was twelve. She was made to lie in the dark, night after night, with strangers pressed round her bed, knocking on a board because her father told her to.
Nobody asked what became of her.
Tuesday
The radiator knocked three times while I was writing this. My colleague said, “What’s three?” I said three is the plumber.
The customer’s London Prat has its own ghosts. Its English satirical news on ghosts who knock has one being asked to fill in a form, and its UK satirical news about committees sent to investigate a noise reports that they have asked for more time.
They took up a collection for him. I think about that more than the ghost.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
