Happy Saturday, everybody. We have one last October Saturday classic. Earlier this week, we talked about the Greenbrier Ghost and we mentioned our show's previous episode on the Cocklane Ghost, so we're going to share that episode today. This episode is from back in October twelve by previous hosts Sarah and Babuina. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deplete A Chuck reboarding, and We've focused a lot on ghost stories this month for our Spooky Halloween series. And all said, though, I think the ghosts have been a pretty diverse crowd, ranging from socialite Madame La Lourie to headless Anne Boleyn to the real life fall stuff. But so far, all the ghosts we've talked about have just kind of been there. They've been thing, They've been making their noises, doing things like hovering over babies, creepily, taking headless carriage rides, washing laundry kind of aimless. I'd almost say, well, washing laundry isn't exactly aimless, but okay, I get your poor ghost. I get your point right, there's no real agenda today's ghost, however, who is The cock Lane ghost seemed to have had a mission, and that was revenge, something that, according to Andrew Lang's book on hauntings and hoaxes, tended to be fairly common in the eighteenth century, which was an age where it wasn't unusual to believe in ghosts at all. I mean, it does make sense, after all, a manufactured haunting could be a pretty simple, if creative way to settle your earthly disputes, you know, your unpaid loans, your feuds. Lang sums it up pretty well with a quote from his book when he writes about William Kent this podcast unfortunate subject. He says, accused by a ghost, he had a legal remedy. So recently in the Salem witch trials we talked about spectral evidence. I think this is kind of the ultimate inspectral evidence. A good point. When a ghost said that you murdered somebody. Actually, when the ghost says that you murdered it, what are you supposed to do? But before we get into all of that, we need to go back to the beginning. The cock Lane ghost wasn't initially out for blood. Its first appearance was actually pretty pretty harmless. Yeah, this ghost wasn't out for blood, at least at first. It's initial appearance came in seventeen fifty nine at this tiny house on cock Lane, a road which the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes as quote an obscure turning near St. Paul's Cathedral in London. So the home belonged to Richard Parsons, who was the deputy parish clerk of St Sepulcher's Church and also a landlord, an alcoholic, and a man pretty deeply in debt. The year before though, he'd taken in William Kent of Norfolk as a tenant, and Kent was of an independently wealthy man, but he had a bit of a family secret of his own. He was living with his dead wife's sister. The arrangement had started pretty innocently back in Norfolk, when Fannie Lyons, who was the sister in law, moved in to help care for Kent's motherless child. His wife had died during childbirth, but after the baby died to the couple continued to live together, eventually as a husband and wife, even though they weren't legally allowed to marry, so finally they moved to London, posing as as husband and wife. Still, but the unconventional living arrangement proved to be a bit of a liability, especially because Kent tended to make loans to his landlords, maybe a bad policy already, but to make things worse, he actually expected that he'd get the money repaid. This, of course, gave any sort of vindictive landlord, especially one who knew that he was living with his dead wife's sister, fodder for eviction and a way out of the loan potentially. So it must have seemed lucky when Kent met Parsons at St. Sepulchri'sh church and was offered rooms to rent. So Mr and Mrs Kent, as they thought she was anyway, gone on well with Parsons, his wife, and his two daughters for a little while, But then things started to head south when the naive Kent admitted to Parsons that he wasn't actually married after all. He also loaned Parsons a good bit of money, and then, as you mentioned, and as he had done in the past, he started to follow up on repayment fell into that same old trap. Still though the ghost didn't appear until Kent was out in the country on business and Fanny asked Richard parsons little eleven year old daughter, Elizabeth known as Betty, if she wanted to sleep in in her room and in her bed while Kent was gone. So that night where when Betty and Fanny were in bed together, they started to hear strange noises, wrappings, scratches, taps. Mrs Persons must have been pretty rationally. She explained away the noises as the nearby cobbler who might have been working late at night. But when the noises were heard again on a Sunday, the family started to wonder what was really going on. Fanny, for one, seemed completely convinced that the sounds weren't from a cobbler, weren't from any human making noise. They came from a ghost, and a specific ghost at that. Yeah, she thought that they came from the ghost of her dead sister, who had come to shame her and warn her of her own death. So pretty serious stuff. Richard Parsons investigated the house, even stripping the wainscoating off the wall to see if something was rattling around behind it, but he had no luck. The nightly rappings just got louder, and it sometimes described as the sound of a cat scratching a wicker chair, just to give you an idea. But it wasn't long before the neighbors started gossiping about the ghost that lived there as well and the secret history between Mr Kent and his wife, for as they previously thought his wife well and that the ghost was her dead sister. And so with all this gossip going on, the couple did finally move out of the house. At that point, the noises stopped, and according to Patrick Collins in the Forteen Times, this probably would have been a good time for Kent to just throw in the towel, cut his losses, forgive the twelve guinea debt that he had lent to Parsons instead, though he threatened to sue and um. At this point, the timeline gets a little hazy, and it's understandable a lot of these a lot of the stories we talked about in October have some sketchy details about them, But depending on the sourci look at, either several months go by or up to a year and a half goes by until we catch up again with the Kent family. At this point, Fanny was heavily pregnant, died of smallpox, and the sound started again in the house back on cock Lane and and this time they seemed to come specifically from Elizabeth parsons bedside, and the little girl also started to suffer from fits, and according to Charles Wild's Elliott's book Mysteries or Glimpses of the Supernatural, little Betty described even seeing an apparition of a quote woman surrounded by a blazing light. So it's not just these Knox that could be mistaken for a cobbler anymore. It seems something much more. Richard Parsons called a medium who interrogated the ghost, asking questions and receiving answers in the form of Knox. One meant yes and two meant no. This is very reminiscent of the Fox sisters story and the way that they communicated with the ghosts are supposedly communicated with ghosts, depending on what you believe. But maybe we should act this one out. I think we should so. One of the first questions the that was asked of the ghost was are you the wife of Mr Kent? Are you Kent's wife's sister? Did you die naturally by poison. Was anyone but Kent responsible for the poisoning? Will it ease your mind if the man be hanged? Oh man, yeah, that's bad news for Kent. There the single knock meaning yes. So the ghost who has now revealed, of course, to be the murder heard. Fanny Lions picked up a nickname scratching Fanny, which an unfortunate another element to the titles in this podcast. But um, she started to give even more information, you know. This interrogation went on even further and began to provide numerous details on her death. The type of poison that had been given her it was arsenic, how it was administered through a drink called pearl, how many hours it took two to three hours, um. All sorts of details, although interestingly, some information was apparently incorrect, I mean, aside from the fact that this lady died of smallpox clearly, but some of the details that the real Fanny Lions would have known were also incorrect. Parsons, though, was interested in in legitimizing this, seeing the situation going on in his house, the haunting, the haunting, and called in John Moore, who was the assistant preacher at St. Sepulcher's to get to the bottom of things, and and Morey believed that there truly was a spirit present and called on a fellow minister, Thomas Broughton, for confirmation. And after these two guys were on board with the idea of a haunting, other esteemed men started to visit to which lended a lot of legitimacy to the the entire premise. The public Ledger even wrote up the story, and crowds began to form at the house every night, so it was something of a spectacle, and the public began to truly believe that Kent was a murderer. So this guy who they've never heard of before, who nobody suspected of murdering his wife up until this point his wife quotes uh, suddenly is being accused of murder, like pretty seriously. So as interests grew, Parsons could begin to charge admittance to these seances that would be conducted at his home by his relative Mary Fraser, and the best members of society of course got bedside view. Is I mean this was a real attraction. Wasn't just something you'd read about in the paper. You'd go out and experience this yourself. But if you were one of the better members of society, you would get to pack in right next to little Betty's bed and watch and wait while she slept and see if the ghost visited. It's all. It adds an extra element of disturbing um scenes to to this whole story. It's just wild to me. I mean, I have to wonder, how did she even sleep well these people standing around you. You wonder how, yes, an eleven or twelve year old girl got a full night's sleep with all these people in her house every day. But the just as an example of the kind of people these sciences did attract. The Duke of York even attended at one point um Elliott's book That has a really good account of one of the sciences. It is from a skeptics perspective, but it gives you a sense of what it must have been like coming into this tiny house, into this tiny room, and watching this kid sleep, hoping a ghost would appear. Yeah. Horace Walpole, a master of Gothic hor and author of the Castle of Ottranto, visited one night with friends after the opera. He wrote of the ghost in seventeen sixty two. He said, quote, a drunken parish clerk set it on foot out of revenge. The Methodists have adopted it, and the whole town of London think of nothing else. He then described the house on cock Lane when we opened the chamber, in which were fifty people with no light but one tell candle. At the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child, to whom the ghost comes, and whom they are murdering by inches in such insufferable heat and stench, we heard nothing. He stayed until one thirty am, but was told that the ghost might not come until seven, when, as Walpole put it, only prentices and old women would still be about. So he was very dismissive. And and this tactic too, seemed to be a common one, you know, delaying the ghost. Oh it's it's not going to be here until seven. So if you want to stick around the all night, be my guy already paid admittance, or just throwing off the crowd entirely. One description of a seance has Frasier putting Betty to bed and then about an hour later, running around asking Fanny to to emerge, to show herself or make herself heard. Then when nothing happened, more, the minister told the crowd that they were just too loud. They needed to quiet down, they needed to step out for about ten minutes and just collect themselves. Of course, when they came back, sure enough, scratching Fanny was also there, the ghost, making her her presence known. So these little tactics of tricking or delaying or distracting the crowd that had come to see the ghost. So finally, with the situation that has come out of people believing in this ghast so much. I mean, on one hand, you have the mob which is spoiling for Kent's punishment, and you have the crowds also gathering outside the Parsons home, and both of these things together drive the Lord Mayor to order a special investigation. Reverend Aldrich of St John's Clerkinwell assembled a company at his home where Elizabeth had been moved. At ten, she was put to bed by a group of women, and a bit after eleven, that group, which included Dr Samuel Johnson, came to her bedside and waited for the spirit. The little girl said she could feel the spirit, but no noises came, and so Dr Johnson declared that the whole thing was a hoax, wrote an account of it published that in the Gentleman's magazine. And it was really the beginning of the end for this idea of of a ghost. And poor Betty, of course wasn't off the hook though Elizabeth Um. She was moved again put through all sorts of tests. She was at one point strung up in a hammock with her feet and hands drawn away from her body, you know, to prove she wouldn't be able to make any sounds. After scratching Fanny, the ghost failed to make an appearance. Several nights in a row after these tests, Betty was threatened pretty clearly that her father would go to prison if she could not um call up the ghost. And that did the trick. I mean, that night the girl was caught smuggling aboard under her clothes and trying to make noises with it in an attempt to save her family to stop her father from going to prison. Um which, after that point clearly the ghost hoax was over. Although one interesting note, a lot of people who had heard the earlier noises said that the ones that Betty had made with the board under her clothes, which were clearly manufactured, were entirely different. The two sounds were entirely different from each other, um either suggesting a ghost had been making the first ones and poor Betty had just been pressured this final time into trying to save her family when the ghost wouldn't really show up, or more likely um Betty had had some other means of manufacturing the sound earlier. She was right to be scared, though, because her family did end up being pretty uh strongly punished for for what had happened. Right in July sev sixty two, Richard Parsons, his wife, and Mary Fraser were all tried and convicted of conspiracy. More the clergyman as well as a tradesman named James, who was believed to have assisted in this deception, were also convicted, although they got off with reprimands and the order to pay Kent settlement. Fraser and Mrs Parsons received hard labor and Mr Parsons got two years in prison and three appearances in the pillory. So it's a testament to how many people still believed in the ghosts, though that the crowd at the pillory was unusually quiet each time, and the public actually raised a subscription for the family, and I was surprised by this because I would think that the public, having bought into this idea of a ghost so thoroughly, would be maybe embarrassed and angry at this guy for tricking them and for trying to profit. But the more I thought about it, the more thought, well, if you if you admit that you've been fooled by this hoax, then you look like a fool. Uh. If you consider this guy as a poor, unfortunate soul who's being unfairly punished when there really was a ghost in his home, then I guess you're something else entirely. But you you can kind of get yourself off the hook that way. The goose really did stick around in the public's imagination too, though. It kind of like the Mary Toft Bunny births hooks that we talked about on an earlier podcast and which was about a generation or so before this became real shorthand for gullibility, uh, just falling for things too easily. And um, I guess while we're talking about Mary Mary Toft, and you mentioned the Sisters Fox earlier, it does it's so reminiscent of the Sister's Fox story with the tappings and the wrappings and the girls playing tricks on people. Um. But I kind of think of it more in the spirit of the merry tough bunny births because the Sisters Fox one is so it's the beginning of that spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century. It's kind of a different era than this. This is really in the hoax generation almost. Um. And and like I said, you know, with the public being interested in it, people found opportunities to benefit from it as well, in a satirical sort of way. Charles Churchill wrote a satirical poem about it called The Ghost. William Hogarth, who was a famous illustrator, engraved a scene of a seance at Elizabeth's bedside so people could indulge in something like this, indulge in a hoax, knowing that it wasn't true. That was part of the fun, being able to say, how could anybody fall for this? I sure didn't. One of the other things that's very reminiscent of the Sister's Fox story is that it's still unclear exactly what was making these knocking or rapping sounds. Uh. Some suggest that it was ventriloquism, And of course later there was the board that was introduced, so maybe that played a part in it. I guess. Probably the only one who knows for sure, at least about the board part of it, as Elizabeth Parsons. But little is known about her later life. She probably got married twice, the second time to a gardener, but we don't know much of the detail. I mean, what a ridiculous childhood she right, I'm imagining maybe she'd be eager to put that behind her after so much after the crowd, the Duke of York at your bedside when you're eleven, trying to wait for ghosts to appear. I bet she probably got a lot better sleep. She probably spent most of her later life catching up on sleep. We can, we can think of it that way. Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address or a Facebook you are l or something similar over the course of today's episode, since it is from the archive that might be out of date now, you can email us at History podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else. You listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday, everybody. We have one last October Saturday classic. Earlier this week, we talked about the Greenbrier Ghost and we mentioned our show's previous episode on the Cocklane Ghost, so we're going to share that episode today. This episode is from back in October twelve by previous hosts Sarah and Babuina. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, welcome to the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm deplete A Chuck reboarding, and We've focused a lot on ghost stories this month for our Spooky Halloween series. And all said, though, I think the ghosts have been a pretty diverse crowd, ranging from socialite Madame La Lourie to headless Anne Boleyn to the real life fall stuff. But so far, all the ghosts we've talked about have just kind of been there. They've been thing, They've been making their noises, doing things like hovering over babies, creepily, taking headless carriage rides, washing laundry kind of aimless. I'd almost say, well, washing laundry isn't exactly aimless, but okay, I get your poor ghost. I get your point right, there's no real agenda today's ghost, however, who is The cock Lane ghost seemed to have had a mission, and that was revenge, something that, according to Andrew Lang's book on hauntings and hoaxes, tended to be fairly common in the eighteenth century, which was an age where it wasn't unusual to believe in ghosts at all. I mean, it does make sense, after all, a manufactured haunting could be a pretty simple, if creative way to settle your earthly disputes, you know, your unpaid loans, your feuds. Lang sums it up pretty well with a quote from his book when he writes about William Kent this podcast unfortunate subject. He says, accused by a ghost, he had a legal remedy. So recently in the Salem witch trials we talked about spectral evidence. I think this is kind of the ultimate inspectral evidence. A good point. When a ghost said that you murdered somebody. Actually, when the ghost says that you murdered it, what are you supposed to do? But before we get into all of that, we need to go back to the beginning. The cock Lane ghost wasn't initially out for blood. Its first appearance was actually pretty pretty harmless. Yeah, this ghost wasn't out for blood, at least at first. It's initial appearance came in seventeen fifty nine at this tiny house on cock Lane, a road which the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes as quote an obscure turning near St. Paul's Cathedral in London. So the home belonged to Richard Parsons, who was the deputy parish clerk of St Sepulcher's Church and also a landlord, an alcoholic, and a man pretty deeply in debt. The year before though, he'd taken in William Kent of Norfolk as a tenant, and Kent was of an independently wealthy man, but he had a bit of a family secret of his own. He was living with his dead wife's sister. The arrangement had started pretty innocently back in Norfolk, when Fannie Lyons, who was the sister in law, moved in to help care for Kent's motherless child. His wife had died during childbirth, but after the baby died to the couple continued to live together, eventually as a husband and wife, even though they weren't legally allowed to marry, so finally they moved to London, posing as as husband and wife. Still, but the unconventional living arrangement proved to be a bit of a liability, especially because Kent tended to make loans to his landlords, maybe a bad policy already, but to make things worse, he actually expected that he'd get the money repaid. This, of course, gave any sort of vindictive landlord, especially one who knew that he was living with his dead wife's sister, fodder for eviction and a way out of the loan potentially. So it must have seemed lucky when Kent met Parsons at St. Sepulchri'sh church and was offered rooms to rent. So Mr and Mrs Kent, as they thought she was anyway, gone on well with Parsons, his wife, and his two daughters for a little while, But then things started to head south when the naive Kent admitted to Parsons that he wasn't actually married after all. He also loaned Parsons a good bit of money, and then, as you mentioned, and as he had done in the past, he started to follow up on repayment fell into that same old trap. Still though the ghost didn't appear until Kent was out in the country on business and Fanny asked Richard parsons little eleven year old daughter, Elizabeth known as Betty, if she wanted to sleep in in her room and in her bed while Kent was gone. So that night where when Betty and Fanny were in bed together, they started to hear strange noises, wrappings, scratches, taps. Mrs Persons must have been pretty rationally. She explained away the noises as the nearby cobbler who might have been working late at night. But when the noises were heard again on a Sunday, the family started to wonder what was really going on. Fanny, for one, seemed completely convinced that the sounds weren't from a cobbler, weren't from any human making noise. They came from a ghost, and a specific ghost at that. Yeah, she thought that they came from the ghost of her dead sister, who had come to shame her and warn her of her own death. So pretty serious stuff. Richard Parsons investigated the house, even stripping the wainscoating off the wall to see if something was rattling around behind it, but he had no luck. The nightly rappings just got louder, and it sometimes described as the sound of a cat scratching a wicker chair, just to give you an idea. But it wasn't long before the neighbors started gossiping about the ghost that lived there as well and the secret history between Mr Kent and his wife, for as they previously thought his wife well and that the ghost was her dead sister. And so with all this gossip going on, the couple did finally move out of the house. At that point, the noises stopped, and according to Patrick Collins in the Forteen Times, this probably would have been a good time for Kent to just throw in the towel, cut his losses, forgive the twelve guinea debt that he had lent to Parsons instead, though he threatened to sue and um. At this point, the timeline gets a little hazy, and it's understandable a lot of these a lot of the stories we talked about in October have some sketchy details about them, But depending on the sourci look at, either several months go by or up to a year and a half goes by until we catch up again with the Kent family. At this point, Fanny was heavily pregnant, died of smallpox, and the sound started again in the house back on cock Lane and and this time they seemed to come specifically from Elizabeth parsons bedside, and the little girl also started to suffer from fits, and according to Charles Wild's Elliott's book Mysteries or Glimpses of the Supernatural, little Betty described even seeing an apparition of a quote woman surrounded by a blazing light. So it's not just these Knox that could be mistaken for a cobbler anymore. It seems something much more. Richard Parsons called a medium who interrogated the ghost, asking questions and receiving answers in the form of Knox. One meant yes and two meant no. This is very reminiscent of the Fox sisters story and the way that they communicated with the ghosts are supposedly communicated with ghosts, depending on what you believe. But maybe we should act this one out. I think we should so. One of the first questions the that was asked of the ghost was are you the wife of Mr Kent? Are you Kent's wife's sister? Did you die naturally by poison. Was anyone but Kent responsible for the poisoning? Will it ease your mind if the man be hanged? Oh man, yeah, that's bad news for Kent. There the single knock meaning yes. So the ghost who has now revealed, of course, to be the murder heard. Fanny Lions picked up a nickname scratching Fanny, which an unfortunate another element to the titles in this podcast. But um, she started to give even more information, you know. This interrogation went on even further and began to provide numerous details on her death. The type of poison that had been given her it was arsenic, how it was administered through a drink called pearl, how many hours it took two to three hours, um. All sorts of details, although interestingly, some information was apparently incorrect, I mean, aside from the fact that this lady died of smallpox clearly, but some of the details that the real Fanny Lions would have known were also incorrect. Parsons, though, was interested in in legitimizing this, seeing the situation going on in his house, the haunting, the haunting, and called in John Moore, who was the assistant preacher at St. Sepulcher's to get to the bottom of things, and and Morey believed that there truly was a spirit present and called on a fellow minister, Thomas Broughton, for confirmation. And after these two guys were on board with the idea of a haunting, other esteemed men started to visit to which lended a lot of legitimacy to the the entire premise. The public Ledger even wrote up the story, and crowds began to form at the house every night, so it was something of a spectacle, and the public began to truly believe that Kent was a murderer. So this guy who they've never heard of before, who nobody suspected of murdering his wife up until this point his wife quotes uh, suddenly is being accused of murder, like pretty seriously. So as interests grew, Parsons could begin to charge admittance to these seances that would be conducted at his home by his relative Mary Fraser, and the best members of society of course got bedside view. Is I mean this was a real attraction. Wasn't just something you'd read about in the paper. You'd go out and experience this yourself. But if you were one of the better members of society, you would get to pack in right next to little Betty's bed and watch and wait while she slept and see if the ghost visited. It's all. It adds an extra element of disturbing um scenes to to this whole story. It's just wild to me. I mean, I have to wonder, how did she even sleep well these people standing around you. You wonder how, yes, an eleven or twelve year old girl got a full night's sleep with all these people in her house every day. But the just as an example of the kind of people these sciences did attract. The Duke of York even attended at one point um Elliott's book That has a really good account of one of the sciences. It is from a skeptics perspective, but it gives you a sense of what it must have been like coming into this tiny house, into this tiny room, and watching this kid sleep, hoping a ghost would appear. Yeah. Horace Walpole, a master of Gothic hor and author of the Castle of Ottranto, visited one night with friends after the opera. He wrote of the ghost in seventeen sixty two. He said, quote, a drunken parish clerk set it on foot out of revenge. The Methodists have adopted it, and the whole town of London think of nothing else. He then described the house on cock Lane when we opened the chamber, in which were fifty people with no light but one tell candle. At the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child, to whom the ghost comes, and whom they are murdering by inches in such insufferable heat and stench, we heard nothing. He stayed until one thirty am, but was told that the ghost might not come until seven, when, as Walpole put it, only prentices and old women would still be about. So he was very dismissive. And and this tactic too, seemed to be a common one, you know, delaying the ghost. Oh it's it's not going to be here until seven. So if you want to stick around the all night, be my guy already paid admittance, or just throwing off the crowd entirely. One description of a seance has Frasier putting Betty to bed and then about an hour later, running around asking Fanny to to emerge, to show herself or make herself heard. Then when nothing happened, more, the minister told the crowd that they were just too loud. They needed to quiet down, they needed to step out for about ten minutes and just collect themselves. Of course, when they came back, sure enough, scratching Fanny was also there, the ghost, making her her presence known. So these little tactics of tricking or delaying or distracting the crowd that had come to see the ghost. So finally, with the situation that has come out of people believing in this ghast so much. I mean, on one hand, you have the mob which is spoiling for Kent's punishment, and you have the crowds also gathering outside the Parsons home, and both of these things together drive the Lord Mayor to order a special investigation. Reverend Aldrich of St John's Clerkinwell assembled a company at his home where Elizabeth had been moved. At ten, she was put to bed by a group of women, and a bit after eleven, that group, which included Dr Samuel Johnson, came to her bedside and waited for the spirit. The little girl said she could feel the spirit, but no noises came, and so Dr Johnson declared that the whole thing was a hoax, wrote an account of it published that in the Gentleman's magazine. And it was really the beginning of the end for this idea of of a ghost. And poor Betty, of course wasn't off the hook though Elizabeth Um. She was moved again put through all sorts of tests. She was at one point strung up in a hammock with her feet and hands drawn away from her body, you know, to prove she wouldn't be able to make any sounds. After scratching Fanny, the ghost failed to make an appearance. Several nights in a row after these tests, Betty was threatened pretty clearly that her father would go to prison if she could not um call up the ghost. And that did the trick. I mean, that night the girl was caught smuggling aboard under her clothes and trying to make noises with it in an attempt to save her family to stop her father from going to prison. Um which, after that point clearly the ghost hoax was over. Although one interesting note, a lot of people who had heard the earlier noises said that the ones that Betty had made with the board under her clothes, which were clearly manufactured, were entirely different. The two sounds were entirely different from each other, um either suggesting a ghost had been making the first ones and poor Betty had just been pressured this final time into trying to save her family when the ghost wouldn't really show up, or more likely um Betty had had some other means of manufacturing the sound earlier. She was right to be scared, though, because her family did end up being pretty uh strongly punished for for what had happened. Right in July sev sixty two, Richard Parsons, his wife, and Mary Fraser were all tried and convicted of conspiracy. More the clergyman as well as a tradesman named James, who was believed to have assisted in this deception, were also convicted, although they got off with reprimands and the order to pay Kent settlement. Fraser and Mrs Parsons received hard labor and Mr Parsons got two years in prison and three appearances in the pillory. So it's a testament to how many people still believed in the ghosts, though that the crowd at the pillory was unusually quiet each time, and the public actually raised a subscription for the family, and I was surprised by this because I would think that the public, having bought into this idea of a ghost so thoroughly, would be maybe embarrassed and angry at this guy for tricking them and for trying to profit. But the more I thought about it, the more thought, well, if you if you admit that you've been fooled by this hoax, then you look like a fool. Uh. If you consider this guy as a poor, unfortunate soul who's being unfairly punished when there really was a ghost in his home, then I guess you're something else entirely. But you you can kind of get yourself off the hook that way. The goose really did stick around in the public's imagination too, though. It kind of like the Mary Toft Bunny births hooks that we talked about on an earlier podcast and which was about a generation or so before this became real shorthand for gullibility, uh, just falling for things too easily. And um, I guess while we're talking about Mary Mary Toft, and you mentioned the Sisters Fox earlier, it does it's so reminiscent of the Sister's Fox story with the tappings and the wrappings and the girls playing tricks on people. Um. But I kind of think of it more in the spirit of the merry tough bunny births because the Sisters Fox one is so it's the beginning of that spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century. It's kind of a different era than this. This is really in the hoax generation almost. Um. And and like I said, you know, with the public being interested in it, people found opportunities to benefit from it as well, in a satirical sort of way. Charles Churchill wrote a satirical poem about it called The Ghost. William Hogarth, who was a famous illustrator, engraved a scene of a seance at Elizabeth's bedside so people could indulge in something like this, indulge in a hoax, knowing that it wasn't true. That was part of the fun, being able to say, how could anybody fall for this? I sure didn't. One of the other things that's very reminiscent of the Sister's Fox story is that it's still unclear exactly what was making these knocking or rapping sounds. Uh. Some suggest that it was ventriloquism, And of course later there was the board that was introduced, so maybe that played a part in it. I guess. Probably the only one who knows for sure, at least about the board part of it, as Elizabeth Parsons. But little is known about her later life. She probably got married twice, the second time to a gardener, but we don't know much of the detail. I mean, what a ridiculous childhood she right, I'm imagining maybe she'd be eager to put that behind her after so much after the crowd, the Duke of York at your bedside when you're eleven, trying to wait for ghosts to appear. I bet she probably got a lot better sleep. She probably spent most of her later life catching up on sleep. We can, we can think of it that way. Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address or a Facebook you are l or something similar over the course of today's episode, since it is from the archive that might be out of date now, you can email us at History podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else. 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