A folklorist with a long reach across the archive's haunted houses. Andrew Lang read old cases closely and weighed fraud against the witnesses. At Glenluce in 1654 he named Thomas Campbell as the likely trickster. At Cideville in 1850 he abstracted the court record for the Society for Psychical Research and saw a poltergeist set off by nervous shock after a witch's threat. The Cock Lane Ghost, he wrote, remains a puzzle. In his 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica entry on poltergeists, he accepted fraud as a real cause. Yet he trusted the gamekeeper Newman at Durweston.
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Pro earlyFolklorist who analysed the case in Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894)
Pro earlyFolklorist who suggested the phenomena were fraudulent
Pro earlyWriter who dismissed Sinclair's Glenluce case as fraud
Pro earlyWriter who reportedly discussed the case in Cock Lane and Common-Sense (1894)
Pro earlyAuthor of "The Truth about 'Fisher's Ghost'" in The Valet's Tragedy, 1903
Pro earlyAbstracted the court record for the Society for Psychical Research and proposed the nervous shock theory
Pro earlyAuthor of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article disputing Podmore's fraud theory
Pro earlyAuthor of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica entry 'Poltergeist'
Pro earlyOpposed Podmore's view of poltergeists