Ghosts · London

Scratching Fanny of Cock Lane

Cock Lane, Smithfield, in the City of London

Spooky: for older readers

In January 1762 the London newspapers were full of nothing but the Cock Lane ghost.

It had begun a few years before, in the house of Mr Parsons, clerk of St Sepulchre's church, in Cock Lane near Smithfield. He had let rooms to a gentleman, whom the papers called only Mr K., and to a young woman called Fanny, who kept house for him. Once, when Mr K. went away to a wedding in the country, Fanny asked the landlord's little daughter, Elizabeth Parsons, to share her bed for company. That night both of them were woken by strange scratchings and rappings.

Mrs Parsons blamed a cobbler next door, hard at work. But the noises came on a Sunday too, when no cobbler would work. Fanny feared they were a warning of her own death.

Fanny and Mr K. quarrelled with Parsons over money and moved away to Clerkenwell, and there, early in 1760, Fanny died. Her doctor said it was smallpox. For a year and a half Cock Lane was quiet. Then the knocking came back, louder than ever, and always around little Elizabeth's bed. Parsons tore down the wall panelling to look for a joker next door, and found nothing. The child trembled and shivered whenever the ghost came and went. She said she had seen a figure in a shroud, with no hands. Two other people saw a shining figure that lit up the face of a clock.

Then someone thought of asking the ghost questions: one knock for yes, two for no. And so the knocks spelled out a dreadful tale. The ghost was Fanny. Mr K. had poisoned her with red arsenic in her favourite drink, and she wished to see him hanged.

All London came. Crowds followed the child wherever she went, with clergy, nobles and princes among them. Horace Walpole came with the Duke of York and three ladies, five of them crammed into one coach. Scratching Fanny, people called her.

At last a party of gentlemen, among them the great Dr Johnson, put the child to bed in a clergyman's house and sat up to listen. For more than an hour there was nothing. The ghost had promised to knock on her own coffin in the vault of St John's church, so they went down to the vault and waited. Not a sound. They decided the child must have some trick of making the noises, and that “there is no agency of any higher cause.”

No plate yet. We are still looking for an old picture of this place.

What people said

  • Whirring wings. Besides the knocks and scratches, people heard a sound like great wings beating, which filled the room.
  • A deceitful ghost. The ghost answered questions sometimes rightly and sometimes wrongly. It called Fanny's father John, when his name was really Thomas.

Other tellings

  • The end of it. Elizabeth was tested again and again, at last hung up in a kind of hammock with her hands and feet spread wide. When she was told that she and her father would go to Newgate prison if there were no noises, she hid a little board under her dress, and the maids saw her do it. The scratches she made were nothing like the old ones, said everyone who had heard both.
  • Parsons and others were tried at the Guildhall and convicted of conspiracy in July 1762. Parsons was put in the pillory, but the crowd took up a collection for him.
  • Lang's doubts. Writing in 1894, Andrew Lang pointed out that the noises began when Parsons and his lodgers were still friends, so he had no reason then to fake them, and that the child couldn't copy the sounds when she was forced to try. He thought the true cause had never been found.
  • A pamphlet of 1762, The Mystery Revealed, said to have been written by Oliver Goldsmith, told the story in Mr K.'s defence.

What the history says

The Cock Lane affair was real, and was one of the great sensations of 1762. Lang drew his account from the newspapers of the time, the Gentleman's Magazine, the Annual Register and The Mystery Revealed. The ghost's accusation was never proved. Fanny's doctor and apothecary had certified that she died of smallpox.

Go and See

Where
Cock Lane, West Smithfield, in the City of London. Parsons was clerk of St Sepulchre's church.
Access
A public street, open at all times. Nothing of the Parsons' house survives that we know of. [TODO: confirm]
Allow
A few minutes.
Families
A spooky mystery with a murder accusation at its heart. It turns into a story about a hoax, so it suits curious older children.

Visiting details checked 24 October 2026 with OpenStreetMap. Always check before you travel.

51.5173° N, 0.1024° W · Open in OpenStreetMap

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From our sister sites

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Sources

  1. Andrew Lang, Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894), the chapter “Cock Lane and Common-Sense”, which uses the London newspapers, the Annual Register, the Gentleman's Magazine and the pamphlet The Mystery Revealed (1762). Our main source. Project Gutenberg.
  2. Dr Samuel Johnson's account of the night at Mr Aldrich's house (1762), as quoted by Lang.

This is a legend, told as people told it. Spotted something wrong? Tell us.