Cock Lane Ghost
The supposed cause of a mysterious outbreak of rappings, apparitions, and similar manifestations which broke out at a house in Cock Lane, Smithfield, London, in 1762. The disturbance was of the usual character of poltergeist hauntings, but for some reason or other it attracted wide-spread attention in London. Crowds flocked to the haunted spot, and claimed to have witnessed the manifestations. The ghost purported to be the spirit of a former resident in the Cock Lane house, a Mrs. Kent, and stated that she had been murdered by her husband. The tenant of the house at the time of the disturbance was a man named Parsons, and it was more than surmised that he had invented the ghost for the purpose of blackmailing the deceased's woman's husband. The disturbance was finally traced to Parson's daughter, a girl of eleven, and Coleridge Parsons himself was prosecuted and pilloried. (See Andrew Lang's Cock Lane and Common Sense, (1894).