In the second week of January 1762, an advertisement appeared in the London daily newspaper the Public Ledger reporting that a young lady had been lured to London, and then imprisoned and murdered by poisoning. Sensational though this was, it was nothing to the revelation which followed a few days later: the source of the story was the victim herself, returned to the world as a ghost. She was even then holding nightly interviews at a house in Cock Lane near Holborn and, though invisible, was able to give evidence through a system of knocks, one knock signifying yes, and two knocks, no.

Fanny Lynes died in Clerkenwell, in East London, in February 1760, after an illness diagnosed as smallpox. She was bearing the child of William Kent, the husband of her deceased sister. Earlier that year they had briefly rented a room in the house of Richard Parsons in Cock Lane, before moving on after a quarrel with their landlord. Kent had enemies who had no objection to seeing him publicly disgraced: Fanny's family, on the grounds of her illicit relations with him, and especially the will by which she left most of her property to him; and Parsons himself, who had borrowed money from Kent, and had been threatened with a lawsuit when he failed to repay it punctually. It was almost always in the vicinity of Parsons' daughter Elizabeth, aged 12 in 1762, that the ghostly visits began to occur; and it was Parsons who alerted a group of clergymen, henceforth the self-appointed ‘managers’ of the haunting, who sparked the scandal that led to the item in the Public Ledger.