g been heard in the night, at
the officiating parish clerk's of St. Sepulchre's, in Cock Lane near
Smithfield, to the great terror of the family, and all means used to
discover the meaning of it, four gentlemen sat up there last Friday
night, among whom was a clergyman standing withinside the door, who
asked various questions. On his asking whether any one had been
murdered, no answer was made; but on his asking whether any one had been
poisoned, it knocked one and thirty times. The report current in the
neighborhood is that a woman was some time ago poisoned, and buried at
St. John's Clerkenwell, by her brother-in-law."

Instantly the city was agog, and for the next fortnight _The Ledger_,
_The Chronicle_, and other newspapers gave much of their space to
details of the pretended revelations, though they were careful to refer
to names by blanks or initials only.[H] These accounts informed their
readers that the knocking had first been heard in the life time of the
deceased when, during the absence of her supposed husband, she had
shared her bed with Clerk Parsons's oldest daughter; that she had then
pronounced it an omen of her early death; that it did not occur again
until after she had died; that, if the soi-disant spirit could be
believed, the earlier knocking had been due to the agency of her dead
sister; and that, in her own turn, she had come back to bring to justice
the villain who had murdered her for the little she possessed. In
commenting on this amazing story, the papers were prompt to point out
that the knocking was heard only in the presence of the afore-mentioned
daughter, now a girl of twelve; and while one or two, like _The
Ledger_, inclined to credence, the majority followed _The Chronicle_ in
denouncing the affair as an "imposture."

The outraged husband, as may be imagined, lost not a moment in demanding
admission to the seances which were proceeding merrily under the
direction of a servant in the Parsons family and a clergyman of the
neighborhood. He found that the method practised was to put the girl to
bed, wait until the knocking should begin, and then question the alleged
spirit; when answers were received according to a code of one knock for
an affirmative and two knocks for a negative. It was in his presence,
then, though not at a single sitting, that the following dialogue was in
this way carried on:

"Are you Miss Fanny?"--"Yes."

"Did you die naturally?"--"No."

"Did you die by poison?