DebunkedWhite

The Cock Lane Ghost

added03 September 20261762

In the winter of 1762 a house on Cock Lane near Newgate was knocked on by the ghost of Fanny Lynes, a young woman who had died and who now accused her own lover, in raps, of poisoning her. London lost its head: carriages blocked the street, money was taken at the bedroom door, the affair was discussed in Parliament. A commission that included Samuel Johnson spent a night in the vault of St John's and summoned the ghost to the coffin, where nothing happened. Eleven-year-old Elizabeth Parsons was then put in a hammock with her hands tied and the knocking stopped; watched closely, she was found with a small board hidden on her. Her father Richard Parsons was sentenced to two years and stood three times in the pillory.

Getting thereDirections Flights Where to stay Tours

Suggest a correction

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first.

On the map

51.51729, -0.10239

London Open in maps

Getting there

Booking links may be affiliate links: if you book something, the site earns a small commission. It costs you nothing extra.

Sources

Cock Lane ghost — Wikipedia

More in London

DebunkedOrange

Ghostwatch on the BBC

BBC Elstree Studios and the suburban district of Northolt in Greater London, UK, are the defining locations of one of the most controversial media hoaxes in broadcast history. On Halloween night in 1992, the BBC aired "Ghostwatch," a mock live investigative special into a haunted council home that triggered nationwide public hysteria, regulatory sanctions, and real-world tragedy.

DebunkedWhite

The Unlucky Mummy and the Titanic

The painted coffin lid of a priestess of Amun-Ra, acquired by the British Museum in 1889 as EA22542. By the early twentieth century a story had grown around it: everyone who owned it was ruined or died, the photographer who took its picture shot himself, and in April 1912 the museum was said to have shipped it secretly to America aboard the Titanic. None of it happened. The lid is a flat board, not a mummy, and no body was ever attached to it; it has not left London except for wartime and 1990s storage, as the accession registers show. The story was got up privately by the journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson and the editor W. T. Stead, who liked to tell it at dinner; Stead himself died on the Titanic.

DebunkedWhite

The British Museum Crystal Skull

A life-size rock crystal skull, bought by the British Museum from Tiffany & Co. in 1897 and displayed for half a century as Aztec work. In the nineties the museum's researchers traced it to the Paris dealer Eugène Boban, who sold Mexican antiquities in the second half of the nineteenth century and had connections to the German lapidary workshops of Idar-Oberstein. In 2005 a joint study by the British Museum and the Smithsonian found the regular marks of a rotary wheel under the microscope, and the inclusions showed the quartz to be Brazilian — unavailable to pre-Columbian Mexico. The label in the gallery was rewritten.

DebunkedWhite

Florence Cook and the Spirit Katie King

The London medium Florence Cook would go behind a curtain and Katie King would come out — a full materialisation, photographed and vouched for by the physicist William Crookes. Everyone remarked on the resemblance between the medium and the spirit. In December 1873 William Volckman seized Katie round the waist and held on until confederates pulled her away; when the curtain was opened, Cook lay there with her clothing disarranged. In January 1880, at a sitting in Hackney, Sir George Sitwell caught the spirit Marie and did not let go: it was Cook in her underclothes, and her corset and dress were found in the cabinet. Her career ended there.

Everything in London →

Nearest on the map

DebunkedWhite

The Unlucky Mummy and the Titanic

2 km away

DebunkedWhite

The British Museum Crystal Skull

2 km away

DebunkedWhite

William Roy Sells His Method to a Newspaper

William Roy, in fact William George Holloway, was the highest-earning British medium of the forties and fifties: he named sitters' dead relatives with an accuracy that was taken as unanswerable. In 1958 he sold the Sunday Pictorial a series describing his whole business for £30,000. A microphone was hidden in the cloakroom where the sitters left their coats; an assistant listened to their conversation and fed it to Roy's earpiece down a wire run through the leg of his chair. Beyond that, Roy kept years of card files built from newspaper obituaries and parish records. He wrote that he regretted nothing except being caught, and a few years later went back into practice under another name.

2 km away

More: Debunked

DebunkedOrange

Ghostwatch on the BBC

DebunkedYellow

Alternative 3

Anglia House in the historic center of Norwich, Norfolk, UK—the former central broadcast headquarters of Anglia Television. It was from this building in the summer of 1977 that the network aired "Alternative 3," one of the most elaborate television mockumentaries in British broadcast history, which inadvertently laid the groundwork for modern conspiracy lore regarding secret space programs and elite off-world colonies.

DebunkedYellow

The Beale Ciphers

Bedford County and the city of Lynchburg in Virginia, USA, form the geographic core of one of the most famous cryptographic mysteries in American history. In 1885, an anonymous pamphlet surfaced containing three coded texts purporting to reveal the exact burial site of an enormous cache of gold, silver, and jewels buried in the 1820s by an adventurer named Thomas J. Beale.