London, 1762: crowds pay admission to cram into a tiny room and listen to an 11-year-old girl's bed frame scratch and knock in the dark. This is no campfire tale. The ghost is actively testifying in a murder investigation, and it will consume the entire city.
This episode unpacks the saga of the Cock Lane ghost, an 18th-century true-crime media frenzy built on debt, blackmail, and mass credulity. We trace the forbidden love that made the victim, the indebted landlord who orchestrated the haunting, the binary knocking code that accused a man of murder, and the trial that exposed it all.
Why William Kent and Fanny Lines were branded incestuous and forced into hiding under church law forbidding marriage to a deceased wife's sister
How landlord Richard Parsons, deep in debt to Kent, revived the haunting exactly as Kent sued him over three guineas
The one-knock-for-yes code that had the ghost accuse Kent of poisoning Fanny with arsenic
The religious proxy war between Methodists and Anglicans, and Samuel Johnson's committee debunking the ghost in a church crypt
The exposure of the trick, a small piece of wood hidden in the bed, and the conspiracy convictions and damages that followed
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