resented this. Legal problems with Lynes's sale meant that each of Thomas's beneficiaries had to pay £45 in compensation to the purchaser, but Kent refused, claiming that he had already spent the money in settling Fanny's debts. In response to this, in October 1761 John Lynes began proceedings against Kent in the Court of Chancery. Meanwhile, Kent became a stockbroker and remarried in 1761. Haunting Echoing the actions of Kent's previous landlord, Parsons had not repaid Kent's loan—of which about three guineas was outstanding—and Kent therefore instructed his solicitor to sue him. He managed to recover the debt by January 1762, just as the mysterious noises at Cock Lane began again. Catherine Friend had lodged there shortly after the couple left but moved out when she found the noises, which had returned intermittently and which were becoming more frequent, could not be stopped. They apparently emanated from Elizabeth Parsons, who also suffered fits, and the house was regularly disturbed by unexplained noises, likened at the time to the sound of a cat scratching a chair. Reportedly determined to discover their source, Richard Parsons had a carpenter remove the wainscotting around Elizabeth's bed. He approached John Moore, assistant preacher at St Sepulchre's since 1754 and rector of St Bartholomew-the-Great in West Smithfield since June 1761. The presence of one ghost, presumed to belong to Fanny's sister, Elizabeth, had already been noted while Fanny lay dying, and the two concluded that the spirit now haunting Parsons' house must be that of Fanny Lynes herself. The notion that a person's spirit might return from the dead to warn those still alive was a commonly held belief, and the presence of two apparently restless spirits was therefore an obvious sign to both men that each ghost had an important message to disclose. Parsons and Moore devised a method of communication; one knock for yes, two knocks for no. Using this system, the ghost appeared to claim that Fanny had been murdered. It was conjectured that the mysterious figure in white which so terrified James Franzen, presumed to be the ghost of Elizabeth, had appeared there to warn her sister of her impending death. As the first ghost had seemingly vanished, this charge against Kent—that he murdered Elizabeth—was never acted on, but through repeated questioning of Fanny's ghost it was divined that she had died not from the effects of smallpox, but rather from arsenic