London, 1762. A haunting tied to a reputed murder victim drew crowds to Cock Lane. The case became the yardstick for ghost scares that followed. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable points readers to it from the Stockwell Ghost of 1772, and Brewer called the Sampford Ghost of 1810 a kind of exaggerated Cock Lane ghost. In 1894 the New York Times opened its mocking report on Brooklyn's Twenty-seventh Ward Ghost Hunt with a comparison to it. The Golden Lane Ghost Riot of 1880 fits the same pattern.
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