A thrill passed through London in January 1762, when a 12-year-old girl reported that she was visited nightly by a dead woman.

Elizabeth Parsons, daughter of the parish clerk of St. Sepulchre’s, said that she heard knockings and scratchings and witnessed the apparition of a woman surrounded by a blazing light. The girl said the ghost resembled Fanny Kent, a lodger in her house who had died recently of smallpox.

Witnesses too heard the knockings, which attended the girl wherever she slept. They learned to communicate with “Fanny” through a system of knocks — and learned that her husband had poisoned her.

The whole thing reached a climax when the ghost agreed to attend a gentleman into the vault where Fanny’s body lay, and to knock upon the coffin there. Unfortunately, no knock came, and the girl asked to return to her father.

She had been using a simple wooden clapper to produce the sounds; her father, who had owed money to the “poisoner,” had invented the whole scheme.