The Ghost of Cock Lane's later nineteenth-century reception

Record summary

The Cock Lane ghost was an eighteenth-century London episode involving alleged spirit rapping and a dead woman known as Fanny. Although the event predates this scope, nineteenth-century spiritualist writers repeatedly revived it as a precedent for modern séances and haunted-house claims. It is a useful transmission-history lead because the original investigation, public demonstrations, skeptical exposure, and later retellings changed the case’s meaning. Researchers should treat it as a textual and historical tradition, not a nineteenth-century incident, and trace each edition’s additions or omissions.