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150 the birthplace of John Wesley (1716–7); the Cock Lane Ghost (1762).

In a small and now rare book, called Bealings Bells, published in 1841 by Major Moor, F. R. S., for sale at a church bazaar, accounts are given, mostly at first hand, of some twenty cases of the kind. The disturbances described in Bealings Bells consisted generally of bell ringing, but they included also noises of other kinds, movements of furniture, throwing of crockery and small objects. One of the most characteristic disturbances which is reported in the Tedworth and Epworth cases, and formed the chief manifestation in the case of the Cock Lane Ghost, is the occurrence of raps on the woodwork of the bedstead, or, as in the Tedworth case, scratches as if made by nails on a bolster. In all cases the bedstead in the neighbourhood of which the noises occurred was occupied by a child, or children, to whom other circumstances point as the centre of the disturbance.

These "Poltergeist" disturbances, as they have been named, are of some historical importance, as it is to an outbreak of this kind in America that the beginning of the movement of modern Spiritualism may be traced. A farmer named John Fox occupied a frame house in Hydesville, a small hamlet in New York State. One night in March, 1848, raps were heard as if proceeding from the bedstead in which his two young daughters, Margaretta and Katie, were sleeping. The disturbance was repeated night after night and the neighbours crowded