while the noises
were being produced, this probable explanation was abandoned. 'The
girl was said to be constantly attended by the usual noises, though
bound and muffled hand and foot, and that without any motion of her
lips, and when she appeared to be asleep.' {166} This binding is
practised by Eskimo Angakut, or sorcerers, as of old, by mediums
([Greek]) in ancient Greece and Egypt, so we gather from Iamblichus,
and some lines quoted from Porphyry by Eusebius. {167} A kind of
'cabinet,' as modern spiritualists call a curtain, seems to have
been used. In fact the phenomena, luminous apparition, 'tumultuous
sounds,' and all, were familiar to the ancients. Nobody seems to
have noted this, but one unusually sensible correspondent of a
newspaper quoted cases of knockings from Baxter's Certainty of the
Worlds of Spirits, and thought that Baxter's popular book might have
suggested the imposture. Though the educated classes had buried
superstition, it lived, of course, among the people, who probably
thumbed Baxter and Glanvill.

Thus things went on, crowds gathering to amuse themselves with the
ghost. On February 1, Mr. Aldrich, a clergyman of Clerkenwell,
assembled in his house a number of gentlemen and ladies, having
persuaded Parsons to let his child be carried thither and tested.
Dr. Johnson was there, and Dr. Macaulay suggested the admission of a
Mrs. Oakes. Dr. Johnson supplied the newspapers with an account of
what happened. The child was put to bed by several ladies, about
ten o'clock, and the company sat 'for rather more than an hour,'
during which nothing occurred. The men then went down-stairs and
talked to Parsons, when they were interrupted by some of the ladies,
who said that scratching and knocking had set in. The company
returned, and made the child hold her hands outside the bedclothes.
No phenomena followed. Now the sprite had promised to rap on its
own coffin in the vault of St. John's, so thither they adjourned
(without the medium), but there was never a scratch!

'It is therefore the opinion of the whole assembly, that the child
has some art of making or counterfeiting particular noises, and that
there is no agency of any higher cause.'

In precisely the same way the judges in the Franciscan case of 1533,
visited the bed of the child where the spirit had been used to
scratch and rap, heard nothing, and decided that the affair was a
hoax. The nature of the fraud was not discovered, but t