Cock Lane and Common-Sense — Reading Notes

A Methodological Manifesto

Lang does not merely collect ghost stories; he establishes criteria for admissible evidence. He rejects testimony from the habitually hallucinated, the drunkard, the grief-stricken, the religiously excited, and anyone whose senses are “vicious.” A single hallucination in an otherwise sane and healthy witness, especially if it coincides with a crisis in the life of the person seen, becomes the crux of his inquiry. He cites the apparition of Claverhouse to Lord Balcarres on the night of Killiecrankie, the ghost of a mother to Miss Lee in 1662, and Dr. Donne’s vision of his wife in Paris as classic cases that demand explanation. Lang’s approach is forensic: he wants to isolate the evidential core from the mass of dubious narratives.

Folklore vs. Psychical Research

The preface lays out a disciplinary divide that still resonates. Folklore, Lang writes, will register vague savage beliefs but turns a deaf ear when “educated living persons vouch for phenomena which (if truly stated) account in part for the origin of these popular or savage beliefs.” Psychical research, meanwhile, neglects historical and traditional evidence—witchcraft, classical oracles, crystal-gazing—except for a few scholars like Gurney, Myers, and Miss X. Lang’s own method is to draw on both archives: the savage and the modern, the legendary and the documented. He calls for anthropology to consider humani nihil a se alienum, nothing human alien to it, including the abnormal experiences that challenge its ready-made theories.

The Problem of Coincidence

Lang zeroes in on the statistical and logical puzzle of coincidences between apparitions and deaths. He criticizes Dr. Hibbert’s 1825 Philosophy of Apparitions for making too little of such coincidences. Hibbert, dedicated to Sir Walter Scott, attempted a physical explanation of three “most authentic” stories but ignored contemporary cases like Scott’s own sighting of a tall man in brown on the moor near Ashestiel. Lang insists that the rarity of a single hallucination in a healthy life, when it matches a real event, cannot be dismissed by generic theories of illusion. He frames the question: when several witnesses simultaneously share the same hallucination, what are we to think? This is, for him, “the true question of ghosts and wraiths.”

Lang’s book is not a collection of spooky tales but a sustained argument about how to weigh evidence for the unseen. Readers should attend to his methodological distinctions—between admissible and inadmissible witnesses, between folklore and psychical research—rather than expect a narrative of hauntings. The excerpts show a writer more concerned with logic and disciplinary boundaries than with raising goosebumps. Those interested in the history of science, skepticism, and the study of anomalous experience will find Lang a sharp, if opinionated, guide.

Lang's careful weighing of old ghost-lore brings me back to my grandfather’s kitchen, where he’d tell the same Fenland tales, half-smiling. The pocket George Borrow — Reading Notes once gave me that same unhurried shimmer—walking with Borrow through wild places, listening to him listen, the past and its strange faiths breathing right beside me.