Alright, fellow Ridiculous Historians, we're returning with a classic episode for this week. I've been your nol. Y it is, dude, do you remember back in seventeen sixty two when everybody came to see something called the Cockling Ghost?
How could I forget with a name like that? It's seared into my memory, and boy, oh boy, hopefully it will be seared into years too, Ridiculous Historians. After listening to this classic episode.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to the show. This is Ridiculous History. We hope this is the podcast you're looking for. I want to start with a question that is very tangentially related. No, you're asking me, Yeah, give it to me your nol. I'm Ben. There's our super producer, Casey Pegram. Everyone say hi Casey, Great, Hi, Hi Ca. See the question is this what is what's your favorite holiday?
Ghost? Owen? Yeah?
Is that the same as Halloween?
Yeah, it's it's just a ghost of your version.
Okay, that's cool, that's cool. I'm a I'm a true fan of Halloween, and I say this in full disclosure. As we get closer to this favored holiday, I'm going to be pushing for more and more spooky stories.
You know, you push and you push and you push, and sometimes, Ben sometimes you get what you need. There we go.
If you try, sometimes you just might find Today's story is a ghost story.
Yeah, and it's also a story of people trying things yes on multiple levels.
And it's a story that I could see Guy Ritchie doing an adaptation of, oddly enough, because it has that right element of the ced underside of England.
Well, like, didn't he do one of the Sherlock Holmes movies. He did? I believe he did. Yeah, all right, that's been Casey on the case.
We always have to try to have at least one Casey on the case.
That one was unexpected. Yeah, he just kind of popped in.
I like sudden Death Court.
I like it. He has this button out there that he has to hit and it's pretty cool.
Yeah, we're all getting the hang of it, and I think it's I think it's normalized now.
So Guy Ritchie probably would do a good job with this because it's got a lot of Cockney accents too, and a lot of usury and the loan sharkiness afoot and a.
Lot of scams and cons but without further ado, let us present the story of the cock Lane Ghost. But we can't begin in cock Lane, right. We have to begin first with a pair of lovers, a William Kent and Elizabeth Lynes, who married in about seventeen fifty six or seventeen fifty seven.
That's very true. And tragically the then missus Kent died in childbirth, leaving her husband William, to take care of a newborn baby boy.
And this was in Stoke Ferry. Kent had kept an inn and then later he was running the local post office. Now, all of a sudden he was a single father, or was he? You see, because Elizabeth had a sister, and her sister's name was Francis, commonly known as Fanny's.
Right, and Fanny swooped in to help out with the childcare because Kent found himself. I don't know. There's no exact details as to why he couldn't raise the child himself, but he seemed inept at the at the whole affair, and so he needed a woman's touch.
Yeah, And unfortunately, the infant, who was a boy, did not survive for very long. And when the child unfortunately passed away, childhood mortality being at a much higher rate in those days. Fanny decided to stay on and become kind of a housekeeper for William. But soon they began having their own amorous relationship.
Yeah, and I think there was even a time where he kind of sent her away and she wrote him letters saying, you know, kind of I don't want to say begging, but you know, expressing that her love for him was real and that he should, you know, welcome her back with open arms. And eventually it worked and they ended up together. But this is interesting because she was a relative of his former wife. It was not kosher for them to get married. It was it was against the law. Yeah, it was.
Against canon law for them to be married. And this is something that they were both aware of, and it's one of the suspected motivations pushing William Kent to originally leave Fanny and move to London, but she wins him over with these passionate letters, and so he eventually says, Okay, come move with me, Come meet me in London. I live in East Greenwich. And they decide that they're gonna, you know, canon law be darned, They're going to live together as man and.
Wife, canon law being like of the Catholic Church.
Not so much Catholic, not so much Catholic. This is England. I mean, canon law can be any organized religions law, but so the c all right, So the Anglican Church and the Methodists will also appear and here later. Despite the fact that they have decided to in practice disobey canon law, they do try to keep it on what we would call in the modern day the low. They keep it on the down low. They still have wills in each other's favor, but they're trying to be discreet
about this. They don't want a bunch of people to know what they're doing. And they are not very successful with this because they moved to some rooms near a place called the Mansion House. They're renting these rooms, and historians believe the landlords may have learned about this illicit relationship from Fanny's other surviving relatives. And this is where we have to start talking about Kent's job. What does Kent do? Noel, Well, this took me.
A couple of passes of some of this research material to read until I happened upon an article by our good pals of the Daily Mail. Who you know, aren't exactly the most reputable source for stuff like this, but they had a really good write up about this party story that Real quickly called him for what he was, which is a loan shark, because he had done this
several times. Because I was reading another article where it kept saying how he was always loaning his landlord's money, and at first I thought I was misreading it, like does this do they mean the landlords were loaning him money and getting mad because he wasn't paying. No, he was loaning the money and then always got into trouble because of disputes about you know, how he was going to get paid back, And I think you use the term usury.
Yeah, he's a user, which I would phrase as a loan shark today, a user being someone who makes questionable loans with unfair interest rates. And originally usery meant any sort of interest of any kind. However, in this case it was like his job. He loaned people money and they were supposed to pay him back. This goes sour when their landlord at these rooms near the mansion house decides that, hey, these people are living in sin. I
despise this. I am not going to repay that money that you loaned me, mister Kent, and I read somewhere as the equivalent of about twenty pounds today, probably a little bit more than twenty pounds today. And so Kent moved to have that landlord arrested, which could only bring tensions to the house.
Yeah, and I think you know they were asked to leave, right, They were evicted over this dispute.
They were evicted over this dispute. They had to find somewhere else to live. Around about this time, they meet a clerk, a parish clerk by the name of Richard Parsons.
Yeah, he's a clerk at the Church of the Holy.
Sepulcher, Saint Sepulcher without Newgate.
Okay, well I made the first part up, but I was closed. I got the keyword right, which is a crazy word, a Sepulcher. I just love it. I love goth sounding dash without Newgate. Yeah, where's Newgate in all this?
It's not there, that's for sure.
I know.
Wow, Yeah, I don't understand, but yeah, that religious connection is going to come into play here pretty shortly. But yeah, no, sooner do they move in that he Kent loans this guy Parsons another sum of money with the terms of a guinea a month in interest.
Right, he's got twelve. He loans them twelve guineas and they're supposed to be repaid at that rate. Right, So oh, we should mention the most important part. When Parsons hears about their plight, he is sympathetic and he says, hey, you can use these rooms. You can live in these rooms in my home on cock Lane, which is just north of this church. And yes, Nola is absolutely right here. Shortly after, mister and missus Ken as they were calling themselves at the time, scandal casey, can I get a
gasp from the crowd? Perfect? Right as they were moving in, Kent loaned parsons is twelve guineas. And then it was shortly after that Kent goes to visit someone I think for a wedding outside like he leaves town, and then they hear these reports of strange noises.
Yeah, that's right. But before that, this landlord also discovered the nature of their relationship and held that over Kent's head again as a way of saying, I'm not paying back this money because I got some dirt on you.
Yeah, because he knew about their plight of needing a place to live, but maybe he did not know the full extent of why they were out of house and home. So at some point he found out, right.
Oh he did, he did, and it's not clear exactly how he found out, probably a very similarly to I don't know, maybe yeah, maybe another snitching relative. Because you have to remember too that this guy was doing something pretty untoward in the puritanical eyes of the time. He was carrying on with the sister of his dead wife, which would have been frowned upon in this kind of society.
In many places, it's still probably frowned upon today. Of Parsons was a family man himself.
But also apparently a bit of an alcoholic. Yeah yeah.
He was considered a generally nice guy around town, but known luckily as a drunk with money problems, so he definitely needed those twelve guineas to support his wife and his two daughters. He had one daughter in particular, is very important to this story, named Elizabeth or also called Betty by her friends and familiars, and kent. When he traveled away from town, he asked Elizabeth to stay with Fanny, because Fanny, by this point was months pregnant.
But then, yeah, as fate would have it, the story takes another unfortunate turn where Fanny dies of smallpox, taking along with her unborn child. Yeah.
So the very first reports of these noises come from Elizabeth, Betty and Fanny, and at first Missus Parsons attributes them to a shoemaker, and people are kind of creeped out, but they're trying to figure out what's happening there, and Kent decided. Here's how the death went down. Kent decided that they needed to move to another place, but the place was not suitable. The place that they were living in temporarily was not suitable for a woman so far
along in pregnancy. And as you said, on February second, seventeen sixty, Fanny Lyle, also known as Missus Kent, passed away with their child. Kent is the sole executor of the will, the living mister Kent, but he had very valid fears about being legally in hot water if people knew about the true nature of their relationships, right, and the will, he's just mister Kent.
Yeah, And I think Fanny's brother had passed recently as well, leaving her his portion of the family estate or whatever.
Yeah, one and fifty pounds.
Yeah, which was nothing to sneeze at. So Kent was due a decent little chunk of change. I want to I want to mention one thing too. There was a great podcast episode from a show called Dig a Dig podcast dot Org on the Cocklane Ghost of London, and it had a few details in it that I thought
were super interesting. One of which was and I've seen this in a couple other places too, but I like the way they put it that as Fanny was on her deathbed, there are multiple reports of people in the area in the home seeing a ghosts or as some sort of apparition manifest in the home while while Frank Fanny was still alive. So the story gets really confusing
it in places. I'm gonna go ahead and put that out there right now, because the noises happened before Fanny died, and there was a sense are some local reports that it was actually Kent's deceased.
Wife, right, his original.
Wife coming around and making trouble and rattling chains because she was unhappy about said carryings on with her sister Elizabeth Lines.
Yeah, so what's key to notice here? As we established earlier those strange sounds begin as soon as Elizabeth enters the picture, the younger, the Elizabeth Parsons.
Elizabeth the daughter Buddy. Yes, the daughter of the landlord.
Yes, the daughter of the landlord Parsons. And despite the problems that they have regarding these strange phenomenon, when Fanny passes away, the Parsons family hears no more of these strange noises, and they kind of shrugged it off as just one of the things. There's a great blog called Strange Company which builds this as a walk on the weird side of history, and they break down some of the financial stuff here. At the time the two families left.
At the time Kent moved himself and his wife out of the Parsons household, Parsons still owed Kent three guineas of those twelve v you have been loaned. So Kent takes Parsons to court, and he takes him to court successfully, he collects the three guineas. Now it's January seventeen sixty two, and guess what, the strange noises start up again, even louder and more vehemently than before.
Have we described these sounds yet been there? There were a couple of variations that we'll get into, but the main one was something of a scratch.
Right. Originally they were knocks and then they became scratch. Is the second time they surfaced.
Yeah, And it's crazy that the the evolution of this sound. You know, there's always that you think. I think've mentioned this on another show before, but remember that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry is obsessed with the house sound. Yeah, we play that clip real quick. It's the noise is you're a noise? Yeah? What is it? It's probably just a house sound or something a house sound? Yeah, what's a house sound?
It also reminds me of that trope in so many horror films where someone goes, it's only the wind. In this case, they're like, trouble, not young Betty, tis only the cobbler.
Tis but a cobbler tinkering away?
Yeah, exactly.
So cobblers can tinker, but can tinker's cobble?
Anyone can cobble. The difference is whether you can cobble well. I see, I see, if you can cobble well enough to trust trust your shoes afterwards. In this case, the shoemaker just makes that one appearance. Cobbler guy does not come back afterwards, but the noises do. As we said, they came back with a vengeance right after that court case was decided in Kent's favor.
That's right. And at this point it's become a bit of a of a local phenomenon, hasn't it. And the ghost has earned a nickname, a rather baldy nickname.
You say, you're talking about the Cocklane Ghost.
No, No, scratch and Fanny.
Scratch and Fanny, Okay, yes, they're.
Both kind of body if we're being honest.
They're body to us.
Yeah.
I think for them, Cocklane was just the name of their streets.
No, totally, But scratch and Fanny right over there, Fanny doesn't mean the same thing as it means over here. I'm just gonna put that out.
That's absolutely true. A lot of your British fins will find the term fanny pack hilarious.
And scratch and Fanny just sounds like something.
Something told me. So we can conjecture a bit on how the community and neighborhood found out about this phenomenon and how the Cockling Ghost or Scratching Fanny acquired this early renown. They had checked originally with this cobbler to see if the cobbler was working during the time that they heard these noises.
Oh, was it not on a Sunday?
It was it was at a time when he wouldn't be working. I think it was a Sunday Sunday, so that makes sense. And a neighbor named James Franzen said that he saw a strange white figure drifting through the Parsons home back when, back when Fanny was still alive.
That's the one we talked about earlier, the apparition that was when she was on her deathbed or whatever, and that's the guy.
He also said that he heard ghostly knockings in his own bedchamber. So picture this guy at the local pub around with his buddies, right. That's how these words and rumors spread. And now people are starting not only to report the ghosts, but to ascribe motive to scratching Fanny. So they said that she was not here just to make a hubbub and a hullabaloo, but that she was here with a mission. She was trying to get justice
beyond the grave. And people started to play back the details of Fanny's death and life to themselves and they started saying, eh, what Fanny might a will leave it? Everything she owned? Took Kent everything she had, every lost faulthing in it, ate it. And then they noticed that Fanny's surviving sister Anne had arrived for the funeral and was very upset that she couldn't take a look at her sister in the grave. I think they couldn't open
the coffin for her. And then she said that, at least allegedly, Anne said that Kent had done something dastardly and that Fanny's surviving siblings were all in good repair with her, you know what I mean. They got along. There wasn't any sibling hate or rivalry.
So why would she have left her fortune to this loan shark dude? Right? You know, surely that was not a respected profession in those days. He would have been seen as a bit of a confidence man, almost right.
I mean, loans in general were always a hot button issue. He was called a userer, not exactly kind words. Right, So people started thinking that mister William Kent was not quite the grief stricken widow that he appeared to be.
I don't think I think it's time we get into when the church starts getting involved, what do you think?
Sure, So let's talk a little bit about the people who are starting to observe this stuff. We have friends and walking by first and neighbor, and then we have more people in the community finding out. But the word of this spreads through London proper, beyond the neighborhoods of the entire city London Town, so strangers are stopping by, Oh totally.
And I actually saw one mention about how it had made the narrow little side street of cock Lane Versus virtually impassable because it was like, you know, just picture some sort of street side attraction and people just bequeued up outside and you know, blocking the road. I mean it was totally like that, Like it was definitely chock full of lookie.
Loose, right, and there was no assigned time at which the apparently unearthly phenomenon would occur, so people would just stay out in the street waiting and drinking. And some famous people started to observe this too.
Well that's true, but that's when really things started heating up was when Parsons himself. We remember he was a clerk at the most Holy Church of the Separate Without with you Newgate, that's the one. And he had some connects. One of these was a guy by the name of John Moore who was an assistant preacher at Saint Sepulchers without Newgate as without Newgate, and he was also the rector at a place called Saint Bartholomew the Great, which
was over in West Smithfield. And he, I don't know, for lack of a better term, was like an exorcist, right. He was coming in there because there was also talk that young Elizabeth, the daughter of the landlord, mister Parsons, was possibly.
Possessed, right, because the thing that we would refer to as a poultry geist today seem to be closely associated with her, with Elizabeth Parsons specifically. Interesting, yeah, right, And one of the things that Parsons really wanted more to help him do was to be a subject matter expert and establish first that there have been reports of Fanny's sister Elizabeth appearing in ghostly form as Fanny was laying
in her deathbed. And then they said, okay, well, the spirit that's haunting the Parsons house now, and particularly Elizabeth Parsons, must be the spirit of Fanny herself. Hence scratching Fanny. This didn't sound too out of the ordinary, impossible back then in England, because there was a widespread belief in ghost you know, Shakespeare's been around their ghost of plenty, and the literature and the folklore of the time.
Well, I certainly think folks who are a lot more willing to accept the stuff without any proof, imaginations running wild like they do. And also just the kind of zealous religious nature of the time, and the fact that a member of the clergy would take this issue that seriously speaks to the mindset I think the public. Right.
Yeah, And here's the other part. They did see themselves as rational investigators, because you see, they devised a method of attempting to communicate with the ghost, transforming back from scratchings to knocks, right, And they said, maybe we can speak with this ghost through a very simple system, and we can make sure it can hear us and respond
to us with these sounds it's making. And we'll set up a system and we'll explain it aloud to the ghost or the entity, so that the ghost then knows the rules of interaction, and we'll keep it simple, so no Morse code, nothing like that. Morse code wasn't around by that time.
What's the system?
Then?
Well, if there's a question where the answer is yes, you have one knock, there's an answer with the question is no, you have two knocks. But here's my question, like, what's the space between two knocks and right? And does it all get all gummed up when you ask things that aren't yes or no questions? You know what I mean?
That was a collap I think for the rest of the podcast, Ben, I would like to communicate back with you only with knocks, only with yes or no responses. Is that okay? So what was the line of questioning?
Ben?
That the that the the exor system? I call him that? How did he start grilling the ghost?
It's interesting because we have the we have the questions, and we're fairly certain that we have the actual exact questions because we found them in a couple of different sources. I found them in a book called The Cocklayin and Ghosts by a guy named Paul Chambers, and I think they've been printed out in another couple of places. But we're we're fairly certain these are the actual questions. Let's see,
do you want to be the priest? Or do you want to be the ghost dealer's choice, Ben, Dealer's choice, his choice, all right, I think you would be great for the character of the priest.
Ben. Thank you. First of all, I want to preface by saying that these are some pretty leading questions for this ghost, but just the same we're going to present them here without comment.
Casey, can we get some tense music?
Are you the wife of mister Kent? Did you die naturally? Was that two or three knocks?
Okay? Then by poison?
Imagine a pregnant pause here, did.
Any person other than mister Kent administer it? And then at this point somebody in the audience shouts.
Has to ask the ghost if you shall be hanged?
And the question was asked and the ghost responded lustly.
Yikes, I know, yeah, trial by ghost to maybe maybe by ghost. So this is a to some people, to the more religiously minded, this is a damning smoking gun for mister William Kent, because.
There's already that hubbub around town about why would she have left him all of her possessions when she had no falling out with her living family?
Right, So as as this ghost quote unquote ghost is answering further questions, people decide that she had not died from smallpox, but rather specifically from arsenic poisoning, and according to their theory, the arsenic had been given to Fanny by Kent himself two hours before she died, and now again allegedly her spirit had returned for vengeance.
And this experiment was repeated several additional times. On January fifth, a guy, reverend by the name of Thomas Broughton, came to the house and checked out the hauntings. And we start seeing this popping up in the papers, and them they kind of this guy's being kind of tried in the court of public opinion, because public opinion leans pretty heavily on the word of ghosts.
Apparently right, the public ledgers started publishing regular accounts of the Cockling ghost phenomenon, and more and more people would read the paper and say, you know that William Kent is a murderer. And Kent vowed to clear his name. So he brought in two of the doctors who had taken care of Fanny in her last days, along with Reverend Broughton, and took them to cock Lane and said, okay, let's do a seance. This seance did not go the
way that they thought it would. Started with a relative of the Parson family, a lady named Mary Fraser, running around the room shouting Fanny, Fanny, why don't you come, do come, pray Fanny come. Nothing happened, according to Moritz, because they were too noisy.
There's a pretty incredible article that I found that's from the Derby Mercury, which was a paper of note, and it's it's almost impossible to fully read because it really is written in like almost Canterbury Tales type language.
Yeah, and it's a large font to where the lowercase s's look like lowercase f's. This is the one from January twenty first, one twenty second.
That's right. Priced it two pence and a halfpenny.
It's a steal. You just don't know who's getting robbed.
Yeah.
The Derby Mercury reported pretty intensively on this during the time that it was happening. Are you wanna go for some interpretations here?
Know, I was thinking you might be able to. I was having a hard time. Let's see if we can find a choice graph.
It begins with for some time past, a great knacking having been heard in the night that the officiating parish clerks of Saint Sepulchers in Cocklane near Smithfield, to the great terror of the family, and all means used to discover the meaning of it. Four gentlemen set up there on Friday night, among whom was a clergyman who asked various questions. Questions is capitalized.
I feel like we have to say it that way. Yeah, And the has really thrown me for a loop. Can can I give it a try? Yeah, give it a go. On his asking if anyone had been mad dad, nothing answered, But on his asking if anyone had been poisoned, it's knocked six times. Various are the conjectures in the neighborhood of this supposed specter, but the cause as yet has
not been discovered. My accent shifting. The report current in the neighborhood is that a woman was some time ago poisoned and buried at Saint John's clerking well.
And it goes on in detail, offering these question and answer sessions across various days.
As proof.
There are some parts of the narrative where you see investigators asking the ghost to identify how many people were present in the room, and even asking to the ghost to predict the future as well. So one of the questions is how long would it be before William Kent was executed? And they said three years.
Wow.
And the ability to see into the future is another trait commonly associated with ghosts or those who dwell beyond the veil.
Yes, but it's really kind of unconfirmable, isn't it. I mean, I could he could have said thirty years, he could have said two weeks, and.
We shall us. I mentioned at this time William Kent is married. He has his third wife, not related to his previous two. And as they were holding these seances, the Lord Mayor of London becomes involved, and they also start moving Elizabeth the young Elizabeth Elizabeth Parsons two different houses to conduct seances because they say the ghost is somehow associated with her.
Huh huh interesting phua thunket.
And also, there's just no way we can get through cock Lane the crowds are too pressing, so we have to try somewhere else.
Will you do some like pop up seances? Ywhere?
Yeah?
Yeah, London Town.
So shall we get to the twist if you haven't already predicted it, here's another twist?
Yeah, let's just let's go for it.
They keep having seances, and more and more notable people come. One seance in way of seventeen sixty two, a doctor Samuel Johnson is allowed to visit the seance. And what did they find there?
No, Well, and you may recall earlier that there was some talk of the ghost being kind of emanating or being associated with Elizabeth Parsons. Well, yeah, it turns out she'd been hiding some woodblocks up her skirt and banging them together, making those knocks.
Yeah, she had hidden the wood in her clothes, and following a trial like she was busted, busted, they found the little pieces of wood, and it explained all the past imperfections of seances where they said, oh, we have to do it with the lights low, or we can't. The knocking stops if you look under the table where the kid's legs are. So Elizabeth Parsons comes clean. She says she's doing this because her dad made her.
That's right, the dad, the drunk who had apparently drunk his one guinea a month interest payments away after he tried to extort Kent. See, I don't think Kent comes off as a bully in this story I think Parsons comes off as more of the bully here. Kent's just trying to apply his trade. Man, He's not forcing anybody to take the loan, He's just offering it, you know. I don't know, maybe that makes me sound like a
bad guy, but that's how I feel. So, yeah, it was all in revenge of like him bringing legal action against this guy. And you know, if you could accuse Kent of being anything, it was cheap because a guinea isn't a lot, I don't believe. And we talked about these being usurists' rates because you know, it almost sounds like I think it was a twelve guinea loan and he was supposed to pay back that one guinea a month.
Yep, and didn't get to go didn't go to court until it was down to three guinea a month or three guinea total.
Yes, And I think that Kent took him to court even though it wasn't even that much money, was more for the principle of the thing as far as he was concerned. I think in what I'm getting at is that clearly the villain here is not Kent, despite you know, maybe maybe it's not cool that he married his uh or semi married his dead wife's sister. But I don't know. She was there for him, she helped him raise the child. They shared a tragedy together, you know, when this child died.
That seems fine to me. So, yeah, it's very difficult.
I would say, unfair to ascribe those personal motives if we don't really.
Know this story.
So I would I would say from their behavior, it seems like as a couple they were on the up and up, despite the fact that society didn't approve of them. Ultimately, society does side with mister Kent at least because Parsons goes to trial and he is sentenced to two years in jail.
Yeah, and he even has a co conspirator, which I believe was his his maid, Mary Fraser mayor Mary Fraser, not to be confused with friends. And there's a lot of a lot of characters and names in this story. It's it's a little bit of a tricky woman. This is good. She gets six months hard labor, which is no good. What happened to the daughter though she was because she was a minor, she didn't get anything. You don't hear about anything happening to her but it seems
like she was the one perpetrating the ruse. Maybe it was just because he was contributing to her delinquency. But she was like twenty years old. I believe she was of age.
She had grown by that time, but it was probably still thought to be a hapless pawn. Yeah, that's straying the wishes of her parents and additionally Parsons who said he was innocent by the way the whole time and never confessed was pilloried. A pillary for anyone who you kind of recall the term but you don't know exactly what it is. A pillary is when people are putting those weird stocks that hold them at their neck and their wrists. It's a form of public humiliation.
Does not sound like fun. Yeah they dude at the Renaissance fair though here in Atlanta.
Yes, But in contrast to the way the crowds would treat other criminals in the pillary, people didn't throw rotten fruit and meat at him. They actually took the opportunity to walk around and collect money for.
Him for his cause.
Interesting because no matter what he had done, he still hadn't married the sister of his dead wife.
Wow man full circle so it really is more of a puritanical judgment at the end of the day.
A little, a little bit more, and there's much more to the story regarding the cultural context of the time, the religious controversy between Methodists and Orthodox Anglicans, but that may be a tale for another day. We hope you enjoy the story of this early spiritual investigation skepticism versus spirituality versus scandal. But this is far from the only ghost story that we'll tell eventually, right.
Yeah, he said, we're gonna really lean into some ghost stories for the month of October.
Maybe, I say, I would love to. Well, we are nothing if not a democracy, right, so that's fair. Write to us and let us know if there are any spooky stories from history that you think your fellow ridiculous historians would like to hear. And also, you know, write to us if you're like, no, don't tell any spooky stories.
Yeah, you can write to us at ridiculous at HowStuffWorks dot com. You can hit us up on Facebook or Instagram or we're Ridiculous History. Please also join our Facebook group where we have lots of fun discussions and that's a good place to post any suggestions for us as well, because we do kind of hang out in there and that's called ridiculous historians on Facebook. Big thanks to super producer Casey Pegram and Alex Williams, who composed our theme.
As well as Christopher ajaciotis our research associate erstwhile cameo expert on the show. We need to have him back on soon, as well as Eve's Jeffcoat. And big thanks to you NOL and big thanks to.
You listeners, and please stick around for our next episode where we talk about what happened to the mad hatter who killed the man who killed Abraham Lincoln. It's a doozy, folks.
That's all for today. I guess we could end on a knock knock joke.
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