A ghost story.
A considerable number of elderly females which, in ungallant phraseology are styled “old women,” and a very considerable number of very young gentlemen, commonly called “little boys,” have been refreshing themselves in Bridewell Lane with a Ghost Story. Bridewell Lane has many claims to notoriety. For instance – it is one of the dirtiest and stoniest lanes in the borough, and it now lays claim to a share of popularity for having a kind of “Cock Lane Ghost” of its own. The pity is, there is no Dr Samuel Johnson to record its marvels. As it is, we will do our best to supply his place.
Rumour (that is the lady with the thousand tongues) has been busying herself by reporting that at a small cottage in the lane, occupied by one Gent, a strange knocking was to be heard upon a partition and a door which divided the front portion of the first floor from the back, and that this knocking occurred periodically, at half-past seven in the morning and again at half-past seven in the evening.
Rumour had no sooner given utterance to this enlivening detail than away came the aforesaid elderly females and very young gentlemen from all parts of the town. “Night’s ‘ebon wing,” as the poet says, had scarcely been spread over the mud and the stones of Bridewell Lane before from North and South, and East and West, came the lovers of the marvellous of both sexes to look at Mr Gent’s door, and to listen to Mr Gent’s knocking. They did look at Mr Gent’s door, and they looked at it too, very long and very ardently; but the door expressed nothing; and they listened too for the knocking, but the knocking was not heard.
It was a knocking – so to speak – which evidently betrayed an antipathy to much company, and confined its harmonious alarms to the ears of a private and select few. The next door neighbours said they had heard it, and could not account for it, and that the knocks upon the partition commenced first faintly, and then rose, by degrees, to what would sound like the blows produced by a heavy hammer, and that then the door would be shaken “from its propriety” and that then all again was still: quite still, till half-past seven the next morning, or half-past seven the next evening, as might be determined upon in the Ghost’s caprices.
Mr Gent said he had searched the adjoining untenanted cottage and so did his neighbours, but they could find no partition upon which sounds could be produced like those which were heard on his partition. For the last few nights these sounds had ceased, and the suspicion is, that some foolish wag, or more crafty individual had been playing off a trick, either to excite alarm or to promote interest.
At all events, the story was told by the inmates and their neighbours as a true one, and, for the most part believed in by the crowds who have nightly made a promenade of Bridewell Lane. Discussions, grave and long, have been held upon the question in the middle of the lane, in the middle of a shower; and one old lady had a faint recollection of some one of suspicious character dying at the cottage forty years ago and of strange noises having been heard then.
Bury and Suffolk Herald, 24th January 1844.