Cock Lane Ghost
The Cock Lane Ghost is a controversial ghost apparition in London in 1762.
procedure
William Kent, a moneylender from Norfolk , had started a relationship with her sister Fanny after the death of his wife Elizabeth Lynes - she died giving birth to their child. The two could not marry, but lived together on Cock Lane with the Parsons family. Cock Lane was a rather poorly reputed area in central London at the time. After Fanny died of smallpox , Kent moved out. Parsons claimed that the ghost of Fanny haunted his house and particularly plagued his daughter Elizabeth, who was just under twelve. The rest of the family was disturbed by knocking and scratching, and the family began to talk to the supposed spirit using a yes / no system. Messages were transmitted that William Kent had poisoned Fanny with arsenic and that it was not smallpox that led to her untimely death. Kent did not become aware of the allegations until some time later, he was indicted and narrowly escaped conviction.
consequences
The case attracted considerable public attention and was greeted, among other things, by London's then already emerging press public. At times, hundreds of people stood in line in the street to watch the supposed ghost appearances. Kent participated in various seances and rejected the allegations of the "ghost". An official commission, including Samuel Johnson , investigated the case and found it was a deception that Elizabeth Parsons had been misled into by her father. Richard Parsons was pilloried and sentenced to prison, but received a lot of public support. The apparition was immortalized in literature in many ways, for example by Charles Dickens or William Hogarth .
The case also played a role in the dispute between Methodists and the Church of England , namely between the Methodist John Moore and the Anglican Stephen Aldrich . The Methodists were more likely to believe in a ghostly apparition, for John Wesley had already seen ghosts in his own family. In contrast to purely materialistic worldviews, Wesley considered such phenomena to be an important argument against deism and atheism . Methodism was then assumed to believe in ghostly phenomena. The Anglicans, however, considered such incidents to be quasi-pagan relics of the Catholic past. The conflict played a role in Horace Walpole's 1845 autobiography .
literature
- Paul Chambers: The Cock Lane Ghost: Murder, Sex and Haunting in Dr. Johnson's London. Sutton, Stroud 2006, ISBN 0-7509-3869-2 .
- Owen Davies: The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2009, ISBN 978-0-230-23710-0 .
- Grant Douglas: The Cock Lane ghost. Macmillan, London 1965, OCLC 215222 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Paul Chambers: The Cock Lane Ghost: Murder, Sex and Haunting in Dr. Johnson's London. Sutton, Stroud 2006, ISBN 0-7509-3869-2 , pp. 47-54, 87.
- ↑ Owen Davies: The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2009, ISBN 978-0-230-23710-0 , pp. 12-14.
- ↑ Horace Walpole: Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third . Lea & Blanchard, 1845, p. 146–147 ( limited preview in Google Book search).