hands.  This brilliant being lit up the figures on the dial of a clock.  ‘The noises followed the child to other houses,’ and multitudes of people, clergy, nobles, and princes, also followed the child.  A certain Mr. Brown was an early investigator, and published his report.  Like Adrien de Montalembert, in 1526, like the Franciscans about 1530, he asked the ghost to reply, affirmatively or negatively, to questions, by one knock for ‘yes,’ two for ‘no’.  This method was suggested, it seems, by a certain Mary Frazer, in attendance on the child.  Thus it was elicited that Fanny had been poisoned by Mr. K. with ‘red arsenic,’ in a draught of purl to which she was partial.  She added that she wished to see Mr. K. hanged.

She would answer other questions, now right, and now wrong.  She called her father John, while his real name was Thomas.  In fact she was what Porphyry, the Neoplatonist, would have called a ’deceitful demon’.  Her chief effects were raps, scratchings, and a sound as of whirring wings, which filled the room.  This phenomenon occurs in a ‘haunted house’ mentioned in the Journal of the Psychical Society.  It is infinitely more curious to recall, that, when Mr. Im Thurn, in British Guiana, submitted to the doctoring of a peayman (see p. 39), he heard a sound, ’at first low and indistinct, and then gathering in volume as if some big winged thing came from far toward the house, passed through the roof, and then settled heavily on the floor, and again, after an interval, as if the same winged thing rose and passed away as it had come’.  Mr. Im Thurn thinks the impression was caused by the waving of boughs.  These Cock Lane occurrences were attributed to ventriloquism, but, after a surgeon had held his hand on the child’s stomach and chest 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.