London's Most Iconic Ghost Story

We're celebrating Maddy's new documentary all about London's most famous ghost - the ghost of Cock Lane! It's out today on History Hit - https://www.historyhit.com/ This is a rerun of our episode from earlier this year promoting Maddy's new book 'Hoax: Truth & Lies In The Age Of Enlightenment' https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hoax-Truth-Lies-Age-Enlightenment/dp/180522235X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=PG6RKEZNRRQK&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.-TdvC2T3TT9CNMna6m8eYg.nSNSVQx_aOQ_P6qwGoSqiUd5YYgSRV9EXL8V3JOTIB4&dib_tag=se&keywords=hoax+maddy+pelling&qid=1793099414&sprefix=hoax+maddy+pelling%2Caps%2C111&sr=8-1 where the Cock Lane ghost story is covered in great depth. The haunting of Cock Lane is the most iconic ghost story in London's long history, taking place in the year 1762. Was it a hoax? Edited by Tim Arstall. Senior Producer is Freddy Chick. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. After Dark is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello After Darkers. Now brace yourselves for a public service announcement.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  History Hit, the production company behind After Dark, also makes documentaries. And I'm talking beautifully shot, fantastically told, immersive histories on screen. There's hundreds and hundreds available to watch right now, online at historyhit.com, with a new release each week.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  There's a lot to digest there, but guys, take a deep breath because there is more. Antony and I have made two new History Hit TV documentaries. I have recently made one about London's most notorious haunting, the Cockling Ghost, based on my new book, Hoax, that is releasing for Halloween.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  And I've got one following that about the Great Irish Famine, which is coming soon.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  To see what's on offer and to subscribe, visit historyhit.com/subscribe to start exploring the past.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ+ individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect, while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  Death was no stranger in 18th century London. It peered from the city's heaped graveyards, swung with the heads of traitors from the heights of Temple Bar, and drifted through alleyways with the fog. And yet, in the wet, colourless January of 1762, something happened that made even this hardened city stop and shiver. This nearly 300-year-old ghost story has it all. We've dug today's episode out of the archive just in time for the release of my brand-new documentary, where I delve even deeper into the story of the Cockling Ghost. I'll be taking you across London to the exact spots where this drama played out.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  And I'm joined by a fantastic lineup of expert historians to unpack the rich social history. It's out right now on History Hit TV. You can find the link directly in our show notes.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  Hello, everyone. I'm back, briefly.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  I'm back. It's December. We've gone back in time. Maddie is still pregnant.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  I'm still pregnant. No, you'll be hearing this, hopefully, towards the end of April, beginning of May. I have popped back up in Antony's life, pre-me returning properly to the podcast, because I have a book coming out.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Not content with a human baby.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  I've made a book baby.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  She's made a book baby too. So this is the first of two episodes about Maddy's new book, Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment, which is out with profile books and available from the 7th of May in stores and online. If you're listening before that,

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Pre-order.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  What do you need to do?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Pre-order, please. It's so important. Tell everyone why it's important to preorder, because I think often, if you're not an author, you may be not aware of this. It's so crucial, isn't it?

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yes. So pre-ordering is really important for authors because it lets bookshops know that there is demand for the book, that they need to order X amount of books in.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Makes them more interested in it.

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Makes them more interested. It also shows a bit of momentum behind that book, so there's more likely that newspapers are going to pick up and review it, so that you all find out about it, or the podcast beyond After Dark.

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Please help.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Are inviting you on. So this is a really kind of... And do you know what? Let's be really honest about it, actually. It's a really nerve-wracking and almost... It's going to sound a bit weird, but it is a bit soul-bury. You're like, oh, God, I've worked really hard on this. Please don't hate us.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  I created this, and now it goes out into the world, and people are allowed to judge it.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's also a little boost for the author, just to be like, oh, my God, I've got some pre-orders ready to go.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Someone wants to read it. It's nice.

• 4:18Speaker 01

  Somebody does want to... Well, I've already read it, so I was going to say I want to read it.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  Antony has done his homework.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  I have. But we are recording this in December, as we say, because Maddie will be with a real baby. And we wanted to do this because it's so exciting to have this book coming out. And, okay, first of all, let's talk about the ways, potentially, in which After Dark has shaped this book.

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Ooh, good question.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Because it's like, not very different. It's very different from your first book. It's not like your first book necessarily. And so how do you think After Dark has informed this? Because this is the audience.

• 4:55Speaker 00

  Our listeners have really informed this in terms of what they respond to on the show. This is a book that's told in three-thirds, with three different stories. And it is very story-led. There is a lot of history in here. There's a lot of archival research. Like, I've done a proper job.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  It's solid history. But I tell it in a way that I hope people will want to keep turning the pages. I want them to feel excited, what is coming next. These are such weird, revelatory, bizarre, important stories. And they're stories that, some of them, people might be a little bit familiar with, particularly the one we're going to talk about today, but they might not know all of the details. But there are others in here that you will never have heard of and that you will honestly be shocked by. I mean, there's some really weird human behaviour in this. So in terms of After Dark, I think... I don't know about you, but I think the show has taught me so much about how to storytell, and it's changed my writing for the better. It's changed also, I can now picture our listeners when I'm writing, and I know what I want to say to them.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yes.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  So it has really informed it in a lot of ways. This is very scary, being a guest on the show, by the way.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  You're not a guest. This is, you know, this is your home, but we'd have to do this to sell your books. We're doing it. It's totally worth our while. Right. So I want to talk to you about the Cockling Ghost. So that is going to be the topic that we are...

• 6:14Speaker 00

  That is going to be the topic for today.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  We said it is very After Dark-coded, and we're starting with a ghost. So this makes total sense. Now, give After Dark listeners the context of this time. We are in the sweet spot for us, the 18th century. We know and love this century. For those who are maybe new to this, or new to our work, or your work, or 18th century, what's going on at this time?

• 6:36Speaker 00

  Okay, so this is a century... We always talk about this as our favourite century. It's so important. So much happens. It is... The sort of popular idea that we have of the 18th century is this Age of Enlightenment, right? This idea that rationality and science and reason and learning took over from the superstition and the magical thinking of the past. And this book looks at how that is very much not the case. And, you know, this idea of enlightenment, literally bringing light to things, actually cast a lot of shadows. And in those shadowy edges, all kinds of people were up to all kinds of things. In terms of a little bit of context, so the Cockling Ghost specifically, this book starts out in the 1760s.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:14Speaker 00

  Well, the late 1750s, really. And it runs all the way to the 1820s. So my absolute favourite framing, mid-century to almost mid-century.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  There are things like, the British Museum opens in 1759. This idea of bringing order to things, taxonomising things, putting things into categories, collecting things, stealing things, displaying stuff. Everything has a place, has a purpose. Animals, objects, and people, of course, are categorised in this way, in this time. So everything is about rationalising stuff. In the 1750s, we have things like the Gregorian calendar comes in. So the way that the Georgians understand the world, the way that they're telling time even, is changing. They are putting order onto everything, or attempting to. But of course, underneath the surface, there's kind of a strange tension

• 8:07Speaker 00

  that's bubbling away all the time and manifests in lots of different ways. So we have things like, in 1756, we've got the Seven Years' War that's going on. 1760, we have the death of George III and the coronation in 1761 of George III. Who's my favourite of the Georgians, I think, by a long way? But we also have things, you know, so on the one hand, that seems, you know, a new monarch has come to the throne, everything is exciting and new and glamorous and grand. But we also have, in 1760 into 1761, Tacky's Revolt in Jamaica, which is one of the biggest revolts by enslaved communities in this period. The Foundling Hospital, that we've done an episode on before, is founded in this moment, as well as slightly before.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  But it's operating to cater for people in the city of London who have no option but to give their children up because of the poverty and the chaos that exists in the Georgian world. So you have this kind of binary idea of... Everything being sort of neoclassical, you think of the 18th century, it's all its columns, it's grand architecture, everything is under control. And then you have chaos, you have William Hogarth depicting Gin Lane and, you know, people sort of spilling down steps because they're so drunk and dropping their children and hanging themselves in upstairs rooms. This is a world in which people are struggling to navigate. The changes that are happening culturally, where their place is within it.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  And within that world, into it creep a number of liars who want to take advantage of this uncertainty. And the idea of the book, I think, really, that I had was, I take cases that have obvious lies told in them, and obvious imposters, people who pretend to be something they're not. But actually, at the beginning and the introduction, I ask the reader to decide for themselves who the real liars are and who is, who's taking advantage, who is profiting from the lying. And yeah, you have to kind of navigate that for yourself, as you are about to find out in this episode.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Well, it's you profiting from the lying now, selling a book about it.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  Yes, please.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Okay. So, and this, I think, is really apt in terms of the first case that we're going to look at, which is the girl playing ghost. Set the stage for us, set the scene. We have some key characters that we're going to need to know in this particular case.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  We do. So we're going to spend a lot of time in grimy north east London, around Smithfield. But we're not there yet. So we start off very pleasantly in the countryside in Norfolk. And we have three main characters, if you like, who I want to introduce you to. Now, the first of these is William Kent. He is a young man who's living in Norfolk. He has inherited a business from his father. He's never really had to work that hard. And he is a mummy's boy. He famously traipses, I mean, he's a grown man, but he famously traipses around after her. She sort of rules his life. He is a womanizer as well. He has various relationships with local women. And he is intrinsically ambitious.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  And this is something to remember about him, that he, nothing is ever enough for him. Now, he has a relationship with Elizabeth Lines, or Elizabeth Kent, as she's about to become.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Spoiler, married.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  Yes. So Elizabeth is very much not from the same social class as William Kent. He is, you know, sort of lower middling, or I suppose what we might now call sort of upper working class. She is a gentleman's daughter. They live in the big house.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Wow, this is a big difference. You can't overstate that.

• 11:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Now, they somehow strike up a relationship. Kent is, he's charismatic for all his faults and women are drawn to him. And by the time they go up the aisle, which by the way, her family do not approve of, but it's necessary because by the time they get to the altar, she's showing she is pregnant.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  So this is a, you know, a situation of like, this isn't ideal, but we're going with it.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 00

  So they marry and they live together for a little while. He uses her dowry to buy a local inn. So he's moving up in the world. He's like, I made something for myself and my wife's hot and pregnant and a gentleman's daughter.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Now he's in the Mercantile class.

• 12:23Speaker 00

  Exactly. But Elizabeth's time is drawing nearer and nearer. Obviously, they've got married well into the pregnancy, so it's not long before she's about to give birth. And to help her do this, her sister, from the same posh family, called Fanny Lines, comes to live with them in the tavern, right? So Elizabeth eventually goes into labour, Fanny's with her, which was, you know, ordinary for the time. There would have been some other midwives there who don't get referenced in the archive, but Fanny's there. And tragically, she sees her sister die in childbirth in front of her. Now, the child survives, and this is really key to what happens next. So the next few weeks, Fanny continues to live in the house, which is quite unusual. And she has elder brothers at this time who are like, could you please come back to our

• 13:07Speaker 00

  respectable domestic household?

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. I think that word's really key there, right? Respectability is, is under threat here again.

• 13:14Speaker 00

  Exactly. You know, one sister's been ruined by this guy. Like, you need to come home. But Fanny's not having any of it. She has fallen for William Kent and...

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Jesus, Fanny.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  I know. I mean, he must have been, he must have had something about him. He doesn't appeal to me from everything that I know about him, but she's like, I'm smitten, I see what Elizabeth saw in him. And, you know, there's an opening in the household, let's say. So they look after the child together, but under canon law, legally speaking, they can get married. And William Kent, you know, they start, start up a relationship, but under canon law, so church law, it is considered incestuous because the child from Elizabeth is still living. Now, that child dies quite quickly. And as far as I can tell, there's nothing sinister about this. It's a sickly child from birth. Obviously, his mother has died, she's not there to feed it. It's a series of tragic, tragic events.

• 14:06Speaker 00

  But even with the child dead, because it survived the mother, it's still an incestuous marriage, which means that Fanny's family could legitimately object to it, break the marriage apart, even if it was legally binding in the first place. And so William does what he thinks is the right thing, slash the most advantageous thing for him.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  And he decides to go to London. He's like, sorry, Fanny, everyone in the village knows we've been having a relationship, and now the baby's dead. I'm kind of, you know, I've caught my ties, really, I'm going to cash in on the inn and I'm going to go to London and make my name in the big smoke, which, you know, mid 18th century, a lot of people were doing that. And Fanny is devastated. She, now, this is according to William Kent, and we have his version of events. We do not have Fanny's version of events, bear that in mind. He says that she pesters him, she doesn't leave him alone, she writes to him constantly, how dare you have left me, I'm going to come to London, I am going to take the stagecoach, I'm going to walk there, I might be raped and murdered on the way, it'll be your fault because I needed to come here and...

• 15:05Speaker 01

  But I'm coming.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  I need to be with you, you've abandoned me. And he has abandoned her. They've started, whether it's a sexual relationship, it's certainly a romantic relationship, that everyone in the community is aware of. Her reputation is ruined already.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, gone.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  So eventually, he gives in, he relents, he's like, go on then. What a gentleman. And the pair eloped to London. Now, elopements in this moment is something that's becoming increasingly common. We're getting novels like Samuel Richardson's Pamela or Virtually Rewarded.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  Now, remind me, what year are we in here?

• 15:36Speaker 00

  We're in, so at this point, we're in 1759, going into 1760.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  So the Marriage Act has passed.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  So even though this elopement thing is good, so that's kind of, it's now more formalized marriage ceremonies and legal.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so the Marriage Act comes in because of all of these elopements. So the Marriage Act is essentially to try and regulate some of what's happening because, you know, elopement can be a form of stealing wealth, you know, marriage is essentially wealth management, it's asset management in this period. And if that is interrupted by romance and people running off together who haven't got a plan, this can be an issue for the families. So they elope, like many people, in Fanny's mind, I think the idea is that she is deeply in love with him, he's deeply in love with her. Nobody's going to know in London that they're not married. And so they, they turn up, they get rooms near Mansion House, which is the residence of the Lord Mayor, in a relatively respectable part of the city. It's not, you know, they're...

• 16:30Speaker 01

  He's got a bit of money in his pocket now for the sale of the inn, yeah.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, they're renting rooms in a house with a landlord, but they introduce themselves as the Kents.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  This is my wife, Fanny, hello, nice to meet you. And that's how they live for a little while. And that might end us their story, were it not for William Kent's ambition.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sorry, but that would be a really boring book, and I know their book is not boring, so...

• 16:50Speaker 00

  It's not boring.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  It's what happens now is where this takes this turn.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Kent, he is so ambitious and he's always trying to get one up on people. He always wants to be in control, which, again, makes me doubt his account of Fanny a little bit. And he does something that he does several times in his life. He lends money to the landlord. And he's, he's sort of bolstered by this. He, he feels empowered that, you know, this guy now owes me money, I'm living in his house, but I'm in charge, I'm a big shot. And he lets slip that they're not married. And the landlord is like, oh, that's an issue.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  Because nobody else is going to want to rent rooms here. You're making this not respectable.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  You're bringing it down, yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, you're lowering the tone, you need to go.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  That's what happens everywhere I go.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  You're just lowering the tone, it's so embarrassing. Yeah, everywhere we go out together, I'm like...

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  I guess we're leaving again. So he, through a series of kind of disputes with him, the landlord, the landlord ends up in debt's prison because he won't pay the debt, and Kent and Fanny are kicked out and they're now on the street. They don't know where to live. So they have to find somewhere new to live.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Where are they going to go, Maddie?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Where are they going to go? What's the name of this, this episode? Okay, so one day, they head towards Smithfield, which is a less salubrious part of town, let's say. You know, this is...

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Lovely now.

• 18:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, beautiful now. Smithfield Market, which is, you know, there's a version of it still there, but that's very much in play in the 18th century. It's a kind of riotous place. There are animals being slaughtered, brought in from the countryside for slaughter here. There's an annual fair with fortune tellers and performers. And, you know, it's a sort of, it's a slightly dingy, dirty place. There's lots of medieval winding streets. This isn't the sort of glistening, gleaming, grand 18th century city that you get closer to the river. But it's all they can afford, and also they've got to move away from the area where they've revealed they're not married. So they're looking for anonymity again. So they walk into St Sepulchre. Now, friend of the pod, why is this church important to us?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  So very close to Newgate Prison, and these, these are the last bells that you hear if you're condemned, and, and they will chime the night before, but then they'll chime the day as well. So there's loads of songs about St Sepulchre, it's a real landmark in the history of death in London and the crime and regulation. So they're moving within this, this is a really like built up...

• 19:06Speaker 00

  This is a darker place to live as well.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. I mean, think about the poverty and the suffering that's going on essentially right across the street in Newgate, you know, this is...

• 19:14Speaker 00

  This is a grim part of town, essentially. Have you been to the church, by the way?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  I have, yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 00

  It's gorgeous, it's absolutely stunning. And still very much frozen in the moment that Fanny and William would have, would have known, which, and I, the first time I walked in, I was researching this, and I was, you know, had that journey of them coming from Norfolk in my head, and to stand in that place was incredible. So they, they go into the church and they think, maybe someone in here will know some rooms to rent. So they sit for a service and they watch their potential neighbours coming in and out of the church. And the rector comes up to talk to them at the end. Now, I'm going to introduce him in a minute.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so this, okay, new characters.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  New characters.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Well, in a minute, hold on, yeah, go on.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he, he has his own reputation, we'll get to that. But he says, hello, you're new here, welcome.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  What's the crack?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  What are you doing? And they say, oh, we... Have moved to London recently. We're a newly married couple. We're looking for rooms to rent. Do you know anywhere? And he says, that's so funny because I live on Cock Lane, right behind this church. And I rent the first two floors of my house and currently they're empty. Would you like them? And they go, yes, please. Thank you very much.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  I also think that says something about how they are presenting, right? Because you talked about this and you've hinted at this about the veneer of, well, in Fanny's case, it's true. But the veneer of respectability that he's able to adopt and has now grown into.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  And as you say, for Fanny, it's not a performance. She is a gentleman's daughter. She will be well spoken. She's well dressed still at this stage. You know, she's in the clothes from her family home that has been brought for her. That she, she is clearly of a different class.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Like there's already hoaxing here.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  You know, like this isn't.

• 20:47Speaker 00

  On all fronts, my friend.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  But you know, oh, yes, yes. Okay. Yes. Right.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  So.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Spoiling. So we, the rector is saying, I've got two floors. Come in here now and we'll have an outshot.

• 20:59Speaker 00

  I will now introduce you to the rector.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  So this guy's name is Richard Parsons and he's the rector at St. Sepulchre. He has a reputation locally for being a bit of a drunk.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  And also there's a really strange incident with him in the summer before. It's reported in the newspapers and I found like one tiny fleeting reference to this where he and his wife, and I'll introduce her in a minute, receive a letter, a malicious, like poison pen letter to their house, accusing him of being involved in some way, we're not sure how, in the death of a young woman, a respectable young woman in this area. And there's no more information than that, but it's reported in the local paper.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's enough there for.

• 21:39Speaker 00

  People know not to trust him. You know, he's unreliable, but of course Fanny and Kent are not locals. They don't know. So they say, that's fantastic.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  And a bit desperate.

• 21:48Speaker 00

  They're desperate. Yeah. So he says, we can go right now and look at the rooms. So they do. And in the household, they find Elizabeth Parsons, who is Richard's wife. They also find little Elizabeth or Betty, and she is going to be crucial to our story. Little Betty Parsons, who at the time is 10 years old. And then we also have Anne Parsons, who is the youngest daughter and she's six.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 22:08Speaker 00

  So on the surface, according to Fanny and Kent, you know, there's a husband and wife. There's two little girls. They seem non-threatening. The house is sort of flat-fronted, small. It's just one room on top of another with a staircase connecting them all. It's quite dingy, but they get the attic room to sleep in and a room as a sort of parlor. What more could they want? It's fine for now.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Smiling here because this.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Because you know what's gonna happen.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Well, yes, that too, but also because the, the, this so captured my imagination so many years ago before I, you even knew you, let alone, that I went to see if I could find the house, but it's not there.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Unfortunately, it was not down in the 1960s.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  But go on. So we have this, we have this domestic setting. And as you say, there's a respectability, seeming respectability amongst that domestic setting that they are now inserting themselves into.

• 22:59Speaker 00

  Yes. So life at Cock Lane for several months is totally fine. There are tensions that start to bubble, but the family are friendly. Now Kent himself still has business going on in Norfolk. He hasn't transferred everything to London. So he's away a lot. And he sort of neglects Fanny really. He's, he's away so much that he, he is absent from her life. And she by now is pregnant and she is, you know, rapidly expanding, aren't we all?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  She's like, she's like you, Maddie.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  She's like me. Well, do you know, it's so interesting in this book, like there's so much of every single character, every single female character in this book is pregnant and has a child at some point. And I found myself more drawn to that side of their story than I would have otherwise have been actually because of experiencing this myself. So it's really interesting what you bring as a historian at certain points in your life.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Can I just say, can I just pause here for one second? That in real time now, because obviously we're recording this in advance, there is a world in which you are now at home with a child, when listeners are listening to this and that child is screaming its head off. And you're going like, what is happening in my life? But in a good way.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  The tarot cards, remember? They said it was gonna be good.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  They said it was gonna be fine. It'll be fine. Yeah, it's all under control, guys.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  This is so weird. Timelines in my head right now are freaking themselves out. We're in the future. Yeah, okay.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Okay. So Fanny's pregnant.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 00

  Like I am currently, but also not currently.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  When you're listening to this, yes.

• 24:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So when Kent is away, the Parsons basically lend little Betty, who's 10,

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:30Speaker 00

  to Fanny to sleep in her bed because coal is expensive. It's cold at the top of the house. And this was like, this is fairly ordinary. This is an unusual thing. So Fanny, who is rapidly ballooning, is sleeping with this little girl in the bed with her and they, they become, I can say that, I've experienced it. They become quite close. They spend a lot of time together, you know, for little Betty, who's grown up in the squalor of Smithfield, here is a gentleman's daughter and she's sleeping in her bed. This is a glamorous young woman who she would never otherwise come into contact with. And there's a little bit of an obsession there, I think. There's a certainly, certainly a connection.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 00

  But Betty is fascinated, let's say. Now, the other thing that Kent does to make his wife slash non-wife feel more comfortable in this environment, and also to assert his own social class, as he sees it, is that he hires a day servant.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  For Fanny. So this is a young woman called Esther Carlisle, and she comes to the house. She helps Fanny dress. She'll, you know, empty the chamber pot, change the sheets, whatever. And she helps her undress at the end of the day and that kind of thing and does her hair and whatnot. Now, the Parsons family don't take to this particularly well. They see this for what it is, that it's pretension and a bit ridiculous. And poor old Esther, she has very red hair and they nickname her Carrots. And they, I know, it's quite mean. And they sort of mock her every time she comes into the house. So there's, again, tension is building and there's a sort of difference between the landlord's family and the renters.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:56Speaker 00

  And the way that they want to use the domestic space and live their lives is starting to become kind of, it's very obvious that it's very different.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  I feel so sorry for Carrots McGee or whatever.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Poor Esther Carlisle. Yeah. And she, we are going to see her again as this story goes on. She's an important character.

• 26:15Speaker 00

  But we don't really have any, any kind of archival evidence of how she felt about this, about being called Carrots. I can't imagine she loved it. So two things happen around this time, well, several things actually, that really start to tip the scales. It's a sort of series of weird events that start to happen. One of the things is that when Kent is away, Parsons, Richard Parsons, the dad, will invite his friends over, not least the landlord of the Wheat Sheaf, which is the pub just at the end of the road. And they will just sit up all night and get drunk. And Fanny doesn't love this, even though she's in the attic room. She locks the bedroom door. You know, these are really drunk men downstairs. She doesn't really know. Her husband's away. And her and little Betty will lock themselves away and she can't really sleep. She's pregnant. She's exhausted. Also something I'm currently experiencing.

• 26:57Speaker 00

  You know, and it's, it's starting to make Fanny uneasy. She's feeling nervous and maybe a little bit paranoid. Certainly that's how Kent interprets it. I think she has a right to be kind of pissed off in this environment, you know.

• 27:10Speaker 00

  The other thing that happens is Kent decides to lend his landlord money again. So he lends Parsons 12 guineas, which is a not inconsiderable sum. And the arrangement is that he will pay back one guinea per month for a year with interest. So this is a way of Kent making an extra bob or two.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  One guinea a month? Okay, yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. But for, you know,

• 27:30Speaker 01

  No, you're right.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  For Parsons, this is a significant amount. He is only a rector, so he has a meager income from the church and he drinks a lot of that away. So this is gonna get him into trouble.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Now, this is when the first ghostly thing starts to happen as well.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  So let's pause here for a second to understand. So we've seen these two castes of characters come together all the way from Norfolk.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  So unlikely that they would ever cross paths.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  We have the lines slash Kent's.

• 27:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  And they have come, they're lying. We go to St. Sepulchre's. The rector there says, I've got, I've got rooms that you can, so they've gone in there. Parsons is a bit of a drinker. Fanny's upstairs pregnant now with little Betty and they've locked themselves in because there's men coming and going when William is away.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  So we have a house that is tumultuous. We have a house that's unsettled. We have a house that the door is kind of always open and people are coming and going and travelling through. And again, worth pointing out that although there would have been traffic through Fanny's original family home, it wouldn't have been in the same way. No.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Also, Fanny's kind of trapped here when Kent's not there. Where's she gonna go?

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is a real fall for her, even in this scenario.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  A safe area. She's not gonna be going for a walk by herself.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  So when we look at historic hauntings or ghost apparitions, ghostly apparitions, there's often something that is worth bearing mind about the location. And this is called the Cock Lane ghost. So it's so key in this of where she has found herself.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  This domestic space, this environment in which this all takes place is so important. And this is something that we see again and again with 18th century hauntings. And even earlier, certainly early modern hauntings, you know, towards the, even the end of the medieval period onwards. There's this idea, you know, we find ghosts in taverns, we find them at crossroads, we find them everywhere. But the ghost in the household has particular place in the cultural imagination. And there are, you know, I go into this in the book, there are so many cases leading up to this one, where people are being supposedly haunted by sounds, by visions, by ghosts that are attacking them in some way, physically hurting them, almost like what we would today call a poltergeist.

• 29:41Speaker 00

  When you start to look into those cases, you find there is tension between the husband and wife, or the master and the servants, or the children are being mischievous in some way. One of the most famous cases we have at the beginning of the 18th century is John Wesley, the Methodist preacher. When he's a small boy, he's away at school with his brother. But his father is a vicar in Lincolnshire, and the rectory there, that he lives in with his wife and servants and several daughters, I think two daughters, starts to become haunted by, first of all, steps running up and down upstairs. And then there's sounds, there's the sound of a horn that blasts at night, and it gets worse and worse. And this all happens at the Christmas period. I always think this is really interesting, that Christmas always comes into it, so much also sort of wintery months, anyway. And eventually, it

• 30:25Speaker 00

  dies down. And there have been so many interpretations of the relationship between the husband and wife and what was going on there. They have huge political and religious difference within their household, and they're arguing all the time. And then there's problems with the servants as well. And so, how much of this is imagination? How much is actual mischief being done?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  People are making these noises?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Piss people off, basically, yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. The girls wake up and their beds have been moved, they're pricked with needles, and they bleed. You know, what is going on here? So there's so many cases like that leading up to this. And this is what we see in Cock Lane. So it's not the first of its kind, but it becomes the archetype because of the scandal that's going to attach itself to it.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  So what it does, it so becomes the archetype, that's so true. What is the pattern of initial hauntings then?

• 31:08Speaker 00

  Okay, so while Fanny and Kent are still living there, Kent's away a lot, as we say, they start to hear, and this originates in the attic, so where Betty is sleeping in the same bed as Fanny. And we start to get these knocking sounds. The whole room is wrapped in wainscoting, so you know, wooden panelling, floor to ceiling, which is incredibly, it just sounds grand, but it's really grimy and rotten and, you know, covered in like coal dust and stuff. It's really grim up there. We start to get these knockings, they're kind of like wraps on the wood. And then there's also a scratching sound. And this will often happen at night, when the two, well, the woman and the young girl are in bed. And at first, it's just Fanny who can hear it, and Betty sleeps through it often.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  So Betty, you know, Fanny literally sees her asleep in the bed next to her. So it can't be Betty, surely. And Fanny says this to the rest of the household, she says to the Parsons, you know, I can hear these sounds, I can't sleep. What's going on? Are you making them? Is it something in the house? And they say, we all live very close to our neighbours here, we have a cobbler who works next door, it's probably just him doing his work at night.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Sure, makes sense, yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Until one day on a Sunday, they hear the noises, and they go around to the cobbler and say,

• 32:19Speaker 01

  What are you cobbling?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, what are you cobbling? And he says, nothing, it's a Sunday, I've not been doing anything. And eventually, other people in the household do start to hear this. Kent hears it when he's back one time. Elizabeth Parsons, the wife, starts to hear it. Even Richard admits that he can hear the noises. And this starts to, you know, you think about Fanny, she's already uneasy, she's got these drunk men downstairs, her husband's away a lot, she's getting into the last stages of pregnancy, she's also so exhausted, and she's starting to feel unwell. And this is something that's going to escalate. But it's really starting to get to her now. And then, one night, a really strange occurrence happens. And I read this in multiple different accounts, from multiple

• 33:02Speaker 00

  different perspectives, and tried to reason with myself of what this could be. Whether this is, they're already hyped up and it's imagination. It's an element of the story that doesn't really fit with the pattern of everything else. And I still don't know where it sits. And I'm kind of fascinated by it. So one night, Richard Parsons is downstairs, drinking with his friend, James Franzen, who's the landlord of the Weet Sheaf, right? And James Franzen gets up to go and use the chamber pot. So he moves towards the stairs, maybe the chamber pot is upstairs, or something, you know, he's, they're inside the kitchen on the ground floor. So he gets to the staircase, and remember that this is, you know, really tight enclosed dingy space, and there's this narrow staircase that wraps around the height

• 33:43Speaker 00

  of the building. And when he gets to the stairs, he looks up, and there is a figure on the stairs, floating, an inch or so above the steps. It's a woman, and she's all in black, and her dress and her hair are kind of fluttering and shimmering. And he obviously has been drinking quite a lot. And he looks up at her, and he has to sort of steady himself on the wall, because he's so pissed, but also shocked by what he sees. And as he does so, he swears that she kind of beckons to him with a finger. But then, when he looks back up, she's gone. And he reports this everywhere. He's like, oh my god.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  It's funny, he's the owner of an inn, isn't it, that he might be?

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's like,

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Come to my young guys.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Guys, guys, I just saw this.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Terry Cottle died by suicide, but his heart lived on, transplanted into Sonny Graham. Years later, Sonny died the exact same way, same heart, same fate. But that wasn't the strangest connection between them. Sonny also married Terry's widow. Hosted by Karen Kilgariff, this is Heart, an Apple original podcast produced by Plan B and Blanchard House. New episodes are available Mondays, and Apple TV subscribers get special early access to the entire season. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

• 35:23Speaker 02

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• 36:06Speaker 01

  In a world where swords were sharp,

• 36:09Speaker 03

  And hygiene was, actually, probably better than you think it is.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Two fearless historians,

• 36:15Speaker 04

  Me, Matt Lewis,

• 36:16Speaker 03

  And me, Dr Eleanor Yanaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  So word quickly spreads, the house on Cock Lane, little bit haunted, a little bit freaky. Within a few days even, Fanny and Kent decide they've had enough.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  They move out. Fanny is, as I said, moving to the last stages of her pregnancy, and she is now seriously unwell. She has a fever, she can't breathe very well, and these little red pustules are starting to appear on her body.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Oh dear.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  So Kent realises, he calls the doctor, and the doctor's like, you've got to take her somewhere else. Like, this is not the environment for this woman to be in. So he moves her to other lodgings, very reluctantly, because he doesn't want to pay. He's such a sort of miserly person when he's not benefiting from it. He's like, really? I have to pay for new rooms? Like, these are fine, Fanny, you'll cheer up. He does move her eventually. She is incredibly ill. It's smallpox, which, you know, is a kind of serial killer in Georgian London at this time. Not sure where she gets it from, it's highly contagious, no one in the Cock Lane house has it, Kent doesn't have it. Of course, they could be carriers

• 37:53Speaker 00

  of it and not present the symptoms, but it's interesting that nobody has the symptoms. But Fanny does. Now, before the end comes for poor Fanny, Kent does get in touch with her sister, who is living in London.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  There's another sister.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  There's another sister, yeah. This isn't dead Elizabeth, this is just another sister. And, you know, Fanny's family have not heard from her since she eloped. This is, you know, you think about in Pride and Prejudice, Wickham and Lydia running off together, like, once you get into London, you disappear.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  They have no idea. Yeah, exactly. So this sister is kind of shocked and overjoyed, and then also the tragedy of her sister dying of smallpox now. So she rushes to her bedside, and they kind of have this reconciliation. And for a little while, Fanny seems to rally, and her sister is there, and this is wonderful. But a few days later, tragically, she does die. And she dies still pregnant. And I find that so sort of haunting, and, you know, that's the real haunting of this, I think. It's so tragic. And Kent, once again, has lost his wife, in all but name, and also another child. So he's devastated. But even in his grief, he makes some strange decisions. So he has the funeral at St John Clarkhamwell,

• 39:07Speaker 00

  which is just slightly north of Smithfield. And Fanny, this is a very quick burial, Fanny is put into a coffin, and her sister, when she comes to the funeral, is outraged because she realises there's no brass nameplate on the coffin. Because Kent doesn't, under the scrutiny of God in church, want to lie that they're married. And he doesn't want the scandal attached to him that this pregnant lady was not his actual wife. So he leaves her unnamed, in an unmarked coffin. And she's put into the crypt under St John Clarkhamwell, which is still there. The rest of the church was bombed in the Second World War, but the crypt is still there. Luckily, it doesn't have coffins in anymore, but it did well

• 39:49Speaker 00

  into the 19th century. And it's the most incredible space. I recommend anyone to go into that. It's extraordinary. So she's put into there, and, you know, her story, again, that might have been the end of it, like, a thousand million other women in London in this moment, who have eloped, who have put their faith in a man who has let them down, who have died of a disease, who have died in childbirth, or died pregnant, or, you know, whatever it is. She's put into the coffin, she's put into the crypt. That's the end. But,

• 40:18Speaker 01

  But it's not.

• 40:19Speaker 00

  She's not gonna stay down there for long.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Now, this is where the story starts to become iconic in many ways.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  This is the part people might know.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  This is the reason that we're here in a way, that, that, and it's, and it's the reason that things like After Dark exist and it's, it's one of the, it's, there, there's some unusual things happening there. We've talked about a potential ghost appearing at the top of stairs with wavy hair.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  It's all very human.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there's, okay, there's knocking going on and it's a bit like, oh, what's going on? This is all, you know, and especially, you know, talk about knocking in a wooden house.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Like a sidebar to the main event, right? It seems like there's this human drama playing out and there's just some knocking. It's a bit weird, but it's nothing.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Now, we're about to, we, we talked about a stage earlier. We're about to take centre stage in terms of this.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  I'm so glad you've said that because so much of the book is, the language of the book, I tried to make it about performance and, you know, I opened the book with a street conjurer and end it with this idea of, of theatre as well. So I love that you've kind of picked up on that language.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  It's also, and you, this is one of the highlights of the book for me, I think, is this sense of place in it. And so when you are in this bedroom, that we are going to come back to in a minute, when you're in there, you know, all you have to imagine is the wooden floors and then there is drapery.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. There's essentially curtains. It's a stage. It's 100%.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Well, it is a stage and they build a stage. So it's like, there are, and I'm sure we'll describe it in a bit. There is also this sense of people are, no, I'm not gonna spoil it.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  It's pure theatre. Yes.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  It's pure theatre, basically.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  But let's get to that point. Okay. So cut to two years later. We're now in 1762. Kent, you will be unsurprised to hear, has moved on and is getting married again legitimately this time.

• 42:05Speaker 01

  The other lion sister.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Luckily, no. It's an unwitting young woman who knows nothing of his past. But in order to do that, business hasn't been going so well for him for the last two years because, you know, he's a bit of an asshole. So he decides he needs those 12 guineas plus interest that he'd, he'd lent Richard Parsons. He lent it two years ago and he's not had a penny paid back. So, you know.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Now, the other thing to say about Kent, and I, I think this is, this is really important in the story.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  And you can read it two different ways, is that Fanny's family find out when she dies two years prior, that she changed her will, even though they weren't married, in William Kent's favour. Which means not only is anything that belongs to Fanny to go to him, but if one of the members of her very well-to-do, respectable family die and Fanny has left money.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  It will go to Kent.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  And in this moment, two years later, one of her brothers dies and suddenly Kent's inheriting like quite a considerable amount of money and they find out about this. Yeah, again. And they're like.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Like, that man, he's bleeding his dry.

• 43:17Speaker 00

  He's bleeding his dry. We thought we'd got rid of him two years ago. He drove Fanny to the grave as they see it. And they really do see it as that. And he buried, he buried her in an unmarked coffin. What a bastard. And now he's claiming an inheritance from a family that he does not know. So you've got that drama going on and then you've got him calling in the debt from Parsons.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Two years later. So he, he writes to Parsons. He's like, remember me from two years ago? Pay up, please.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Give me my 12 guineas.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Is Richard Parsons gonna take this line down?

• 43:47Speaker 01

  No, because he's a drunk.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, okay, he says, gosh, it's really funny that you bring this up now and that you mention this because you know that knocking that was happening in our house two years ago when you were here, it's started up again. And it's escalating a little bit and I think there's a message in it.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  I, I don't know. What, what is it saying?

• 44:09Speaker 00

  What was that?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  That might be a message that's got to do with you.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  By now, the knocking is really centred around little Betty herself. So you remember she was sleeping in the attic.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  She was there.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  She was there. Yes. Was she making the noises? She was seemingly asleep the whole time. But now every time she goes to bed, she falls asleep and the knocking starts up. And Parsons cops on to this. And what the actual origins and the mechanics of this are is so unclear. Is this supernatural? I know your answer's gonna be no. Um, is this Parsons, the dad, choreographing this?

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Your book is called Hokes.

• 44:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm just leaving it open for people to interpret. Um, or is it little Betty herself? We, we don't know.

• 44:59Speaker 00

  And I kind of, I leave it a little bit open in the book. I have my suspicions of the way that this worked, but I do try and leave it as open as possible for people to decide. But Parsons himself decides, you know what, we need someone to take a look at this knocking because it's kind of freaking us all out. So he asks his friend, who is the rector at St Bart's the Great, which is also in Smithfield. If anyone's never been to there, it's absolutely amazing. Medieval church is incredible. Um, and very grimy and dark. You must have been into the Bart's, it's really incredible. Um, so the rector from there comes over and he's like, wow, why have you called me here? What's this about? Why are we stood in your daughter's bedroom? Your daughter who's 12 at this point, like, and we're just watching her sleep.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  This is so weird. Anyway, the knocking starts up and they're both like, whoa, this is weird. This is very strange. And they kind of hype themselves up. And eventually they come about this method of communicating, shall we say, with the spirit, whatever it is that's making the knocking. And they say, and people, this will be so familiar to people because it's been used in every Hollywood film, every ghost story afterwards. They say knock once for yes and twice for no. And we're in it. Exactly.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Have you seen Most Haunted?

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um, and this, you know, people did this a little bit beforehand. As I say, there's a lot of ghost stories pre-Coclane, but this is when, this is cemented in popular culture. So they say knock once for yes, twice for no. And they put questions to it. And at first the questions are like, are you a spirit? Knock. Yes, I am. Um, are you haunting us? Yes. And eventually the questions escalate to be, are you the ghost of Fanny Lyons who lived here two years ago? Knock. Uh, did you die naturally?

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Well done.

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Forgot about the counting.

• 46:49Speaker 00

  Yep. Uh, you didn't die naturally. Hmm. Did William Kent murder you? Yep. Word gets out.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  So now we have a ghost and a murder.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  We have an accusation of murder against someone who wants his cash back.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  And so this is how Parsons plays the game and he invites people in the local area, at first it's just the local area, to come and witness this every single night. Betty is put to bed, she falls asleep seemingly, and the knocking starts. And people are invited to ask their own questions, but always about Fanny and Kent. And don't forget, this is a scandal about people who eloped, who are living out of wedlock.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  Um, and interestingly, they move Fanny from her own bedroom up into the attic, the room where not the murder took place, but the other crimes, right? This, you know, having a sexual relationship outside of marriage. This is the place where Fanny developed her pregnancy. This is a sort of sinful, shameful sight all of a sudden. This is scandal made into theatre. And as you say, the room itself, when people come to see this, there's the bed with the curtains drawn back, little Betty in there, like with the blanket up to her chin and a little white cap on. And, you know, she's this tiny malnourished 12-year-old. Um, and so this is no longer just people from the area of Smithfield that are coming to the house. Suddenly, this is in the newspapers. Everyone's like, have you heard about the ghost that you can go and talk to?

• 48:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  And it's accused, it's accused a man who's supposedly a gentleman of murder. This is escalating and escalating. And soon we have people, like, we have aristocrats coming, we have artists, we have writers, we have people who are interested in the question of, is there life after death? Do ghosts exist? But also people who are like, I just wanna see this theatre. This is so exciting.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  And you opened this chapter.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  I do. So I, I open it, I open the beginning of the book with a group of aristocrats going, including Horace Walpole, who is a, an MP, he is a designer, he's a writer, he's a sort of flamboyant know-it-all. He's insufferable. Um, but he's one of the biggest sort of commentators of the 18th century. We have so much of his writing.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Too much.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  And yeah, too much. He's, he's a real bitch. Um, but good fun. He goes with a series of friends, including the king's own brother, the Duke of York. So this has reached the top of society. This is the king's brother, George the Third's brother, stepping into this tiny gross little lane with this grim little house.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Would never have been in this space in his life.

• 49:17Speaker 00

  Known that this existed. You know, this is outrageous. This is crazy. And he's stood in the bedroom of a 12-year-old from the lowest ranks of society, waiting for some knocking to happen. This is how big this gets. And we have an image of one of the seances. This is a satirical cartoon at the time because, you know, you always talk about skepticism as well.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 00

  This is a time of great debate and there's real worry about getting duped, about whether things are real or not, how we can tell what's real. You know, this is the age of scientific experiment. How do we prove things are real? And these seances are seen by some as theatre, but also by others as an experiment, a scientific experiment to prove whether ghosts exist. So describe for us this image in Fanny's bedroom, please.

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Okay. So it says, English credulity or the invisible ghost. And we have a much bigger room than it would have been depicted.

• 50:08Speaker 00

  Very generous.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  So we have a very big room, but actually it wouldn't have been that big at all. There is a bed on the right-hand side, again, quite a grand bed, but we're incorporating the curtains into this now. So it's not a four-poster bed at all. Um, within the bed, which looks.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  This is hilarious. Betty is a toddler.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Yes. This is a baby, beside another baby, by the way, there's another little baby head popping up there. And then over it, I mean, you're gonna have to tell me what that is, Muddy, but I mean, it looks to me, okay, it looks a bit like it's a, it's a weird judge-type thing with a hammer or something. I don't really know what it is, but it's glowing. Oh, is that what it is?

• 50:43Speaker 00

  Well, so there's this idea. Um, the, the, the, people who are questioning this are questioning at the moment because you can't see the ghost. You can only hear it. And so there's this idea that like, it can't possibly be real because there's no visual evidence. And in this particular cartoon, we get this kind of, you know, this is meant to be, this is meant to be the ghost of Fanny. And she's holding a mallet in her hand because she's knocking, right?

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. This is, oh my god, that's so funny.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And this is a kind of comedy version that we see of her again and again. She has like a hammer or a mallet.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Oh, it genuinely is funny. Yeah, okay. Oh, that's taking the piss out of, that's undercutting it so much. It's like, oh.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  And there was huge debate. This elicited so many jokes and so much seriousness and people could not decide.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  There's a fellow looking under the bed for where it's coming from.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  This is so interesting because this artist has clearly been reading the papers because on one of the seances, there's a man who comes with his own candle. He lights it because the room is kept very, very dark, you know, for the atmosphere. And this guy looks into the bed and shouts, you know, this is ridiculous. It's just a series of pulleys and levers.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:43Speaker 00

  And when he looks into the bed, the bed starts to shake and the ghost is angry and he is removed from the room. So, you know, there's even within this space, there are people, you can see there's loads of speech bubbles coming out from people's mouths and everyone is debating. And so many religious men were drawn into this. So not only is the royal family drawn in, but the church is drawn in and so many of them believe.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  And then there's this blind figure coming in through the door, as if, you know, I'm walking into this space blind in so many ways, as in like blind to the truth, blind to.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  Willingly blinded. This is, the, the big sort of debate of the book is, you know, how much do people want to be lied to?

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  How much do we enjoy a good hoax? We want to be duped.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  And it's in this picture because this looks like a night out.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  And it absolutely was. You know, this is, you go to the theatre in the early evening and then you pop across to this other theatre, Cockley, later on.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.

• 53:35Speaker 04

  In a world where swords were sharp.

• 53:38Speaker 03

  And hygiene was actually probably better than you think it is. Two fearless historians.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  Me, Matt Lewis.

• 53:45Speaker 03

  And me, Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, dive headfirst into the mud, blood, and very strange customs of the Middle Ages.

• 53:52Speaker 04

  So for plagues, crusades, and Viking raids, and plenty of other things that don't rhyme. Subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Now, at the heart of this, albeit a ghostly accusation, is an accusation of murder nonetheless. And so we're talking about like legal people getting involved, or sorry, we're talking about church people getting involved. We're talking about very high levels of society getting involved and there's an accusation of murder on the table. So what, what happens there?

• 54:37Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this gets to the point where the Lord Mayor of London is called in because there are calls from people going to the seances to say, William Kent should be arrested. He killed Fanny Lines. And the papers report that he killed her with arsenic, that he beat her to death. You know, it escalates, this sort of rumor mongering occurs. And the Kent actually himself goes to the lawman and is like, are you going to do something?

• 55:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Because I can't conduct my business. I can't get married. This woman doesn't want to marry me anymore. Her family is saying I'm a murderer. You know, nobody will, will exchange money with me or anything. And, you know, all of this is going on. And the other thing that I want to just point out about this is that we have Kent, you know, as sort of dreadful as he is, he's not guilty of murder and he is being accused. But also the other person at the centre of this who is going to start to suffer is little Betty herself.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  She is 12 years old at this point, on the cusp of womanhood. And she, you know, this is, the, the theatrical scene in her bedroom is dubbed by the papers, Miss Fanny's Theatre. And, you know, as amusing as we might find the word Fanny now, they found it just as amusing in the 18th century.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Joke, by the way. Didn't I do really well?

• 55:43Speaker 00

  You did really well. So it becomes known as scratching Fanny of Cockley. You know, people really play into this idea of sort of sex and shame and scandal. And Betty herself, little 12 year old Betty, has to undress into her night shift every night in front of all these strangers and get into bed and perform going to sleep. And people are watching her. They're scrutinizing her every move. And she becomes this kind of living, fleshy proxy for the dead, ruined woman who was much older than her. It's, I mean, it's really, really grim.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  And it becomes more grim, I think, and we'll see this when we kind of come to sum up, but it becomes more and more grim when we think about potentially, you talk about who's hoaxing who and who may have been orchestrating this because in some ways, it's the very people that you would hope would be protecting her rather than exploiting her.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Yep, but that's not the case. So we have, the, the seance is going on on the one hand, and then the accusation of murder, someone needs to deal with it. So the Lord Mayor is like, okay, I'm going to put together a committee of learned Enlightenment men to sort this out.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  I'd come in, I'd be like, right, guys.

• 56:50Speaker 00

  I know everything. It's fine.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  I know nothing, right?

• 56:53Speaker 00

  So the head of this committee, and I talk about all the people who are in it in the book, but for the sake of this, we'll go with the head of the committee, who is Dr. Samuel Johnson. Ever heard of him?

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Heard of him, yeah. No, good. He's now dictionary, yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. And interestingly, he really believes in ghosts. So, you know, there's even, you think.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  He's a funny old man, isn't he?

• 57:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I am so obsessed with him. He's absolutely fascinating. I mean, we should do a whole episode on him. He's, he's really interesting.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  But he, you know, we, we think maybe your idea of the Enlightenment would be the learned men don't believe in this stuff. And it's the, the unlearned, unwashed people at the bottom of society who do. That's really not what you find here. And so Samuel Johnson's like, I want to prove that this is real. He's not setting out to prove it's false. He's like, I really want this to be real. I'm really interested in this idea that Fanny has come back and I want to hear what she's got to say.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Can we apply this Enlightenment rigor?

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Can we do a proper experiment? So they first of all start attending the seances and then they're like, do you know what? I think we need for scientific continuity to remove Betty to a different site. So Betty starts to be taken to different houses around London. These are no longer houses like the one that she is used to, that she's grown up in. These are the houses of aristocrats. And she really becomes a victim of abuse here. I mean, this is really grim. You say that, you know, the people around her, like her father, for example, and her mother, should be protecting her. They are often not allowed to accompany her now. And she is going to, you know, not that they were helping in the first place.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  But they're really not able to help now. So she's taken to different, different houses. And sometimes she's made to sleep in a room or even in a bed with grownups she doesn't know, men and women. At one stage, she's made to sleep with a servant who, this woman holds her, her arms by her side all night and puts her own legs over Betty's legs to stop her from moving. And the sounds still happen, reportedly. At one point, and this, when I read this, I heard such a shiver. At one point, she is, this Betty, is suspended on a series of ropes above the floor of the room, so quite high up, that even bother with a bed. And, you know, her arms and legs are tied to the corners of the room. This is, I mean, it's sort of like horror film poltergeist stuff, really.

• 58:58Speaker 00

  But it's being done to her by human beings. And, you know, it's, it's really, really grim. So.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  A collection of human beings. Do you know what I mean? Like it's, it's a committee of people coming together to go, ah, yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  Who've been officially appointed to do this to her. And sometimes the noises happen, sometimes they don't. There's no definitive evidence. They can't decide what to do. And so they come up with this other idea. They're like, okay, maybe we need to go straight to the source. We need to go to the ghost herself. Betty is maybe irrelevant or she's complicating things. She's lying. She's acting. It's muddying the waters. So they decide instead, they're going to take the approach that they're going to do a seance in the crypt at St. John Clark and well, where Fanny was buried a few years earlier.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Go straight to the source.

• 59:37Speaker 00

  Go straight to the source. Not only this, but they make William Kent go with them.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:42Speaker 00

  And you think this is a man who buried Fanny two years ago. More theatre. And I think this is interesting. I think Kent does want to go because he wants to prove his innocence. But they get down to the crypt and he has to identify which one is her coffin. And they open the coffin. You think she's been dead for two years. She was pregnant when she dies. This is very, very, very grim and sad and upsetting for everyone. So they do that. They open the coffin, what they think is her. I mean, there are hundreds in there and these are coffins that have, you know, already molded and fallen into each other. And it's impossible to tell. But they pick one that is plausibly her.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  And they call on her ghost to come and they say, now's the time.

• 1:00:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  Accuse William Kent, he's here. And nothing happens. Of course, nothing happens. And so they come out of the crypt and for them, that is the end of the story. They're like, we've proven it, it's all fine, it's all done. But Betty herself continues to be toured around London and people refuse to believe the committee that this was false. They're like, no, no, no, this is real, it's still real.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  Story's too good, guys.

• 1:00:42Speaker 00

  It's too good, it's too entertaining. And you know, people's determination to believe in this. And eventually Betty is caught out. And I always wonder, is this the first time she's done this? Because, you know, maybe it's her family doing these sounds because Betty herself is in bed. Often she's made to have her hands out of the bed so people can see what she's doing. One night, though, she's in an aristocratic house. And she waits till everyone's left the room and she's, they're putting so much pressure on her about the noise is not coming. And they're saying, they're talking loudly in the room where she's there saying, oh, your dad's going to go to prison for this. You're going to go to prison for this. So she's really, she needs to do something. She feels she needs to do something. So when everyone's gone, she jumps out of the bed and she goes to the fireplace in the room. She takes a wooden board that is used for putting the kettle on.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  And she puts it down the front of her nightdress and gets back into bed so that she can knock on it, bless her. But two serving women have been watching her through the keyhole and they see her. And for, for most people, that's the end. They're like, we caught you.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  The fallout is really immense. So, and it's, it doesn't happen in the way that you'd think. So the Parsons family themselves are arrested. And Richard Parsons is accused of trying to cause the death of William Kent through false accusation. So this is serious.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  What a strange way to come about doing that.

• 1:01:58Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yeah, yes. This isn't, you know, you lied about there being a ghost and brought all of London, including the aristocracy to your door. This is, you nearly killed a man. You know, this is, the stakes are high. So he goes to trial with his wife, with James Franzen of the Wheat Sheaf, a handful of other people who are involved. And interestingly, so they get some hard labour. They don't get a horrendous sentence. Richard Parsons is sentenced to be put in the pillory three times, including once at Cock Lane.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  That can cost you your life.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this is really, it's really dangerous. Usually people throw rotten veg at you, rotten dead animals, they can beat you. Nobody touches him. He's so popular in that area for what he's done. People defend him. They stand around him in a ring and make sure he's not hurt. Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, mocked horrendously in the press, mocked on stage. There's a, the West End booms, by the way, with this new ghost on the scene. There are a thousand plays that come out, plays about other ghosts from the past are re put on. There's scenes of, you know, royalty meeting the Cock Lane ghost. There's jokes about, you know, country bumpkins coming into the city and finding it's the city folk who are stupid and believe in stuff. And, you know, all of that.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Exploiting them, yeah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 00

  Exactly. And Samuel Johnson gets so pissed off that he actually, he threatens to have a fistfight with one of the playwrights. He's like, I will knock you out. Stop accusing me of this.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  He's a big man.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  He's a, he was a big man, like he could handle himself. So, you know, it ends in ways that you don't necessarily think, who are the liars here? Everyone to a certain extent.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Everyone's trying to exploit, everyone that's not a woman or a girl is trying to exploit somebody in this story. Like, really, like.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. And Fanny and Betty are the victims of it, I think.

• 1:03:38Speaker 01

  You know what, I'm going to talk about legacy to round this conversation off in a second. But actually, what strikes me about it is, and this comes across in your book as well, is that Betty becomes the really dark collateral to everyone else's crack. Okay, I know Kent is being accused of murder. I know all of that. Like, you know, I know.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  But Betty is a child.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  But she's being strung up in certain instances. And you know, the way you say when Parsons in the stocks and nobody really cares. And then they're taking the piss out of Samuel Johnson, all that kind of thing. What strikes me about that, and again, this is what I took from the book, and it's interesting to see what people will take in all these different things, is that how desperate people are for entertainment. We say hosting a podcast about dark history. And, and how we, we are so willing to enter into that space.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  And, and people are so, it's human nature to want to believe in it. And Betty is forced to deliver that to people. And what I find so tantalizing is that in the end, Betty disappears from the archive. We don't know what happens to her. We, from the second that she's caught with the bit of wood down her dress, does she just walk home? She doesn't go up in court. She's too young to be taken up in court. She's not accused of anything. The rest of her family are.

• 1:04:50Speaker 00

  She's just let go. Does this ruin the rest of her life, this trauma?

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's, there's no way she's skipping away into the sunset with no impact.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  And don't forget, she had a relationship with Fanny. She felt close to her. They had several months together where she was sort of enamored with this glamorous woman who died tragically. How does that shape the rest of your life? I don't know. But this is, you know, this is a case that causes such a scandal because it implicates, as I say, royalty, the mayor of London, there are writers, enlightenment thinkers. And it really rocks the boat in terms of what is the enlightenment? Where is Britain going in this moment? We think of ourselves as the head of this great empire, as moving on, creating progress all the time. That we are superior to everyone else and we can order things and apply rules because we're better. We, we know what we're doing. We understand how the world works.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  And this shows that that is absolutely not the case and also reveals a society that is willing to believe stuff that ain't true.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  And what, if you, if you were to see the legacy of this ghost story or this hoax story in modern day, either entertainment or cultural events, where, how, where do you think it lies?

• 1:05:59Speaker 00

  It's there in every Poltergeist case that happens in the next few centuries. You know, this idea of the knocking, of communicating with the ghost. As I say, it doesn't start with Cock Lane, but this is the moment where it becomes, okay, this is cemented in our imagination. Like this is, you know, knock once, knock twice, whatever. You see it in, in Victorian ghost stories. You see it in the Battersea Poltergeist case, the Enfield Poltergeist case.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  It's very bad, I suppose.

• 1:06:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. You see it in, in Hollywood. You know, this, this case has never left us.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Well, Maddie will return from the past to the present again next week with more hoaxy hijinks, where we will be talking about another chapter from her book, Hoax, which is out on the 7th of May.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  7th of May.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  Pre-order it now.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Please.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  And until then, here's Hoax. Enjoy it.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  This is a, a marketing proof copy because at this point in time, in December, while I'm still pregnant, we're pre-recording this. We don't have the hardback yet.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  That's how, that's how in the future we are.

• 1:06:58Speaker 00

  So it will not quite look like this. It will be a bit more glam.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Like me.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Thank you for watching and listening to After Dark. We will talk to you soon.

• 1:07:15Speaker 02

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.

• 1:07:59Speaker 05

  In 2011, a woman's body was found in a California vineyard.

• 1:08:03Speaker 06

  This is one of those types of murder investigations that you come across maybe once, maybe never.

• 1:08:10Speaker 05

  It appeared the killer tried to make the victim unidentifiable.

• 1:08:13Speaker 07

  Much more extreme than any other case I'd ever worked on. It haunted me.

• 1:08:17Speaker 05

  For over a decade, she was a Jane Doe. Then she finally had a name. But learning her identity is when the real mystery began. The killer knows who you are, but you don't know who the killer is. So be careful. Because that's not a one and done. I'm Olivia LaVoice and this is Ada. All episodes available now. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.