Chicken & Bacon Flap: A Poultry Affair on Pond Square
Updated: 7 hours ago
“Whenever it is seen, it is shivering” – Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson, The Lore of the Land (2005)
“Do you know about the ghost?” challenged an elderly local resident who had taken an interest in my interest in the square upon which he resided. And indeed, much to his apparent satisfaction, I did. Pond Square, you see, is supposedly where Sir Francis Bacon caught his death while stuffing the world's first frozen chicken with snow. As with many places associated with the sudden and tragic demise of a significant historical figure, it has acquired its own tradition of spectral sightings. What makes this haunting rather unusual (and perhaps goes some way to explaining my interlocutor’s apparent glee at our shared knowledge of the tale), however, is that the ghost in question is not that of Bacon, but rather that of the chicken.
Heading into Pond Square with my new found informant
Shivering, half-plucked, flapping in frenzied circles, passing through solid objects and with its beak chattering from the cold, the spectre was rather vividly introduced into the popular public consciousness by not-always-reliable ghost hunter Peter Underwood in his bestselling survey Haunted London (1973). His additions to this North London folkloric flap included unsourced encounters with two stock urban legend characters: a stranded motorist (unidentified) in January 1969 and a courting couple (equally unidentified) in February 1970. These tales were subsequently dismissed by paranormal investigator Della Farrant in Haunted Highgate (2014) as among the least credible of the many bizarre stories circulating in Highgate at the time (and as the wife of Highgate Vampire hunter David Farrant, she should know). Admitting that these more recent sightings lacked the vivacity of the earlier wartime encounters of Aircraftman Long and the Greenhills (of whom more later), Underwood speculated that this ancient haunting was, after some four centuries, running down like a battery. Folklorists Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson in The Lore of the Land (2005), however, urged caution, observing that although spectral creatures are common in British folklore, this case was unusual in identifying the spectre with a specific animal whose circumstances of death were supposedly known. And far from establishing a continuous lineage back to the death of Bacon (or, more precisely, that of his chicken), Underwood's chronology contains a seemingly insurmountable 300-year gap.
“I think I have found the answer to putrefaction,” announces an elderly Lord Bacon to an astonished crowd of locals, having ordered his coachman to make an unexpected stop in snow-covered Pond Square and stuffed a freshly killed and partly plucked chicken with snow. Such is the particularly dramatic (though suspiciously unsourced) retelling by Leslie Thomas (of whom more later). A decidedly more pedestrian account can be traced back to the seventeenth-century gossip John Aubrey, who, writing in his Brief Lives (compiled 1669–1696, first published in part in 1813) decades after Bacon’s death (possibly on account of having only been 28 days old at the time), recalled being told of the chicken experiment by his lordship’s occasional assistant, Thomas Hobbes. This account, however, quite explicitly situates the experiment in the home of a poor woman at the foot of Highgate Hill (some considerable distance from Pond Square at its summit). This might go some way towards explaining the three centuries between the bird’s death and its supposed emergence as a ghost in Pond Square: far from spending that time as a tortured soul in some icy hell, as Westwood and Simpson fear, it was probably just climbing that steep hill (no mean feat for a flightless and fearful fowl). Farrant, meanwhile, ponders philosophically which came first to Pond Square: sightings of a spectral chicken or the siting of Bacon’s fatal experiment.
The sound of hoofbeats, a carriage pulling to a sudden stop and a terrifying shriek provide an almost literary foreshadowing of the spectre’s most formative appearance. According to a Christmas ghost story by Leslie Thomas in the London Evening News (10 December 1957), Aircraftman Terence Long (who has eluded my attempts to trace him) had been crossing Pond Square after drinks at a friend’s house one wartime December night, 14 years earlier, when he saw the frenzied fowl appear and then, as he took a moment to sober up, disappear. Thomas, who would go on to find fame as a comic novelist with The Virgin Soldiers (1966), a humorous exaggeration of his own National Service experiences, seems a curiously omniscient narrator here, with apparent access to Long’s inner thoughts, feelings and fully formed dialogue, while giving no indication that any of this came from Long himself. Equally conveniently, the local fire-watcher Long happens to encounter delivers a perfectly timed expositional dump of background lore that seems almost too good to be true. There is also that odd auditory introduction (absent from all other encounters), which allows Thomas to connect the chicken so confidently to Bacon and launch into his dramatic retelling of their entwined deaths, locating the experiment, for the first time I can find in print, in Pond Square. The overall narrative architecture is, in fact, so tidy that one might almost suspect a feature writer charged with producing six festive ghost stories in the run-up to Christmas had raided some old reports and embellished them with more than a little stylistic flair.
A sudden bout of shivering and coughing cuts the ageing lord’s victory short; collapsing to the ground, he is swept up and carried by the crowd of gathered locals to the nearby home of his friend Lord Arundel, at least in the ever-evocative narrative of the omniscient Thomas. While Aubrey’s claim that the conditions so chilled him that he immediately fell extremely ill, and that this was exacerbated by being placed in a damp bed, resulting in death by suffocation, may have passed muster in those pre-germ-theory days, a twentieth-century journalist should surely have checked the sources. William Rawley, Bacon’s personal chaplain and literary executor (and thus perhaps better placed to know), writing a mere three decades after the event (as opposed to Aubrey’s five or more), likewise records death by suffocation but attributes it to a gentle fever accompanied by a great cold, with no mention of either the snow or the damp bed. While both descriptions are consistent with pneumonia or perhaps bronchitis, neither condition would have been caused simply by frolicking in the flurries. Bacon’s own account, given in a letter to Arundel, alternatively attributes his arrival at Arundel House to a sudden bout of vomiting, which he puts down to kidney stones, overeating or a cold (none of which should have been fatal). Speculation has thus been rife, most notably the suggestion by historians Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart in Hostage to Fortune (1998) that Bacon died from an overdose of self-administered opiates, and less notably the occultist claim that he faked his own death and subsequently reappeared as the immortal Count of Saint-Germain. Sidestepping that last rabbit hole, about all we can agree is that Bacon died on Easter Sunday 1626 at Arundel House, remnants of which survive in The Old Hall, now home to Terry Gilliam (leading one to ponder what the former Python would make of this ex-chicken, to which we now return).
Read all about it!
A large white bird, perched and huddled on the lower boughs of an old elm on moonlit nights, is how the earliest and only directly cited reports (that I can discover) depict the spectre. Farrant had largely dismissed the wartime tales, noting that chickens were commonly kept in the area at the time and suggesting that one escaping a fox might have run, flustered, into the square before disappearing down a narrow back alley. These descriptions from Mr and Mrs Greenhill of St Michael’s Terrace (opposite the elm, just off the square on South Grove), however, cause Farrant to waver; a white, rose-combed ancestor of the later Dorking would, she concludes, have been the most common domesticated hen in Bacon’s time. Her concern, though, seems misplaced. The descriptions can be traced to a short piece appended to the Islington & Holloway Press and St Pancras Gazette’s more substantial reporting on an entirely separate haunting (25 December 1942), in which Mr W. D. Greenhill (whom Thomas and subsequently Underwood familiarly, and one suspects falsely, refer to as John) concludes that the bird was an owl, before jokingly conceding that it might have been a very cold chicken. A similarly humorous piece in the Sunday Dispatch (20 December 1942) considers how wartime austerity was apparently affecting even Christmas ghost stories, ending with Mrs Greenhill’s wry observation that, whatever the bird was, it would be the only one they would be having that festive season (a context curiously absent from the later retellings). While both reports connect the bird to the haunting of Pond Square and Bacon’s experiments in the Highgate area, there seems little reason to suppose these sightings had much, if anything, to do with the supposed supernatural goings-on.
“The frozen chicken had cost the life of a great Englishman,” concludes Thomas; but this conclusion now seems to be on decidedly shaky ground, as the story of this experiment only emerges at best second-hand, several decades after the fact. An earlier account by Pierre Amboise in Discours sur la vie de M. Bacon (1631) does describe Bacon succumbing to the cold while investigating the effects of a severe frost, but makes no mention of any poultry. Bacon’s own writings, particularly Sylva Sylvarum (published posthumously in 1627), confirm he was indeed conducting experiments into the preservation of bodies at this time, but these were systematic investigations in a dedicated laboratory space. As such, the idea of him jumping out of his carriage for a sudden ad hoc experiment with a principle known since antiquity, already being put to use in royal icehouses and which he himself had some six years earlier acknowledged as common knowledge with the line “cold preserves meat from putrefaction, no less than fire” in Novum Organum (1620) seems extraordinary. Bacon, in his final letter to Arundel, even extols his successful experimentation on the “conservation and induration of bodies” and likens his fate to that of Pliny the Elder, whom he portrays as having martyred himself to science during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Jardine and Stewart suggest that this was a veiled reference to experiments on himself with opiates and nitre (saltpetre), in an attempt to prolong his own life. Whatever the truth, it’s looking more and more as if, far from a noble martyrdom to science, Bacon died from quack self-cures and that damned chicken never even existed.
Ghost hunting in Pond Square (am I doing this right?)
My local contact, whom in accordance with the tradition of reporting on this haunting I shall inaccurately refer to as John, noted somewhat mournfully that few of the square’s current residents were aware of this haunted heritage (presumably not having read its mention on the square’s information board). This seems consistent with Farrant’s survey of locals, which turned up no known sightings, and even John could only recall a neighbour’s plumber or electrician (he couldn’t remember which) claiming to have spotted it on the far side of the square near the public toilets, though he took this to be more indicative of the unreliability of local tradesmen than anything supernatural. We then moved on to discussing those cottagey-looking toilets instead (but that’s another story, and one entirely unsuited to this forum).
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