The Phantom Chicken of Highgate: How the Death of Francis Bacon Unleashed a Demonic Chicken on a London Suburb in 1626

  As the horse-drawn carriage rumbles over the rutted road in the London suburb of Highgate, renowned Enlightenment scientist and philosopher Francis Bacon is insistent.

“It is most definitely possible,” Bacon turns and asserts to his carriage companion.

Dr. Winterbourne, Royal Physician to King James I, is nonplussed.  He shakes his head and mutters, “Anything is possible.”

Bacon, who is considered one of the most intelligent and learned men on the planet at the time, isn’t used to having any of his ideas questioned and he is rarely ever proven wrong.

“Definitely possible,” Bacon repeats as he motions for the coachman to stop the carriage at the side of the road.  He then hastily jumps out of the coach and tells Winterbourne, “And now I’m going to prove it to you!”

It is early April 1626 and a surprise springtime snow is falling.  It is bitterly, unexpectedly, cold for that time of year.  What Francis Bacon and Dr. Winterbourne are arguing over is the concept of frozen food.  Bacon believes that by freezing fresh meat it can remain edible and be kept from spoiling almost indefinitely.

His companion, Dr. Winterbourne, despite his own advanced medical knowledge is not convinced because the seventeenth century is still a time when meat is preserved through either curing, or smoking, and knowledge about the nature of refrigeration or freezing as a method of food preservation is limited at best.

Bacon walks through the falling snow towards a small house at the bottom of a hill with his companion in tow.  When he reaches the house his knock is answered by an old woman.  From the old woman Francis Bacon buys a live chicken.  He then pays the old woman to slaughter and pluck the chicken.

After the chicken is slaughtered, plucked and gutted Bacon proceeds to stuff the carcass with freshly fallen snow.

He plans to keep the chicken frozen in this way for days and to then eat it as proof to Dr. Winterbourne, and to the world, that meat can be preserved by freezing.

Sir Francis Bacon

Sir Francis Bacon was perhaps Europe’s most well known philosopher of the seventeenth century.  He is known as the father of inductive reasoning and of the philosophical theory of empiricism.  Empiricism is the philosophical belief that knowledge comes almost exclusively from sensory experience and reason.

Bacon’s theories are radical for their time because they largely discount the influence of an omnipotent God, or the influence of either good, or evil, unseen spiritual forces.  In large part, many of Francis Bacon’s philosophical ideas are what led to the Age of Reason and a revolution in scientific experimentation.

However, this particular spontaneous experiment that Bacon conducts in the early spring of 1626 will prove to be the death of the great philosopher and may have unleashed demonic forces that can still be seen to this day.

As a result of walking through the snow Bacon catches a cold which quickly turns into pneumonia.  He is brought to the nearby Arundel Mansion, just off of Pond Square, in the London suburb of Highgate.

Today the details of Francis Bacon’s spontaneous experiment with frozen chicken and subsequent mortal illness comes to us largely from a work called Brief Lives by John Aubrey, which as the title indicates, is a collection of biographical sketches of famous Englishmen from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In Brief Lives Aubrey states, “The snow so chilled him (Bacon) that he could not return to his lodging but went to the Earl of Arundel’s house at Highgate where they put him into a bed that had not been layn in where, as I remember, he died of suffocation.”

While at Arundel Bacon’s condition continues to worsen.  He is wracked by chills and fever and is reported as being unable to get warm despite being covered by layer upon layer of blankets before a blazing fire.

After a week-long battle with pneumonia Francis Bacon passes away at the age of sixty-five, but the story doesn’t end there.

The Grounds of Arundel Mansion in the 17th Century

Almost immediately after Bacon’s death locals in Highgate begin to report sightings of a strange ghastly apparition in the town center around Pond Square.  The eyewitnesses report that as they walk through the square the ghost of a plucked chicken suddenly appears out of nowhere and runs around in frenzied circles before vanishing into thin air right before their eyes.

When it spontaneously appears the Phantom Chicken of Pond Square seems to be furious at anyone who passes by.  Residents of Highgate report that the phantom plucked chicken will uncontrollably flap its wings and loudly cluck at anyone who comes near it until it scares them away.

The Phantom Chicken of Pond Square is first reported to history by the same John Aubrey who chronicled Bacon’s sudden death from illness in his work Brief Lives.  For the next century after Bacon’s death the Phantom Chicken is seen at night running, for lack of a better term, like a chicken without a head throughout Highgate.  But by the eighteenth century, sightings of the Phantom Chicken of Pond Square became more and more rare and sporadic until it is largely forgotten.

For nearly two-hundred years the story of the Phantom Chicken of Pond Square in the Highgate suburb of London stays relegated to the forgotten pages of quaint ghost lore until the Second World War.

On a snowy night in the winter of 1943, off duty soldier Terrence Long is walking through Pond Square, when as he reports it, from out of nowhere a plucked chicken appears.  The chicken squawks loudly and runs around in frantic circles before disappearing into thin air.

After an absence of nearly two-hundred years the Phantom Chicken of Pond Square has appeared once again!

For the next thirty years sightings of the Phantom Chicken are reported fairly regularly by pedestrians crossing Pond Square in the middle of the night.  In 1970 a young couple who had stopped to make out in a desolate corner of the square had their kissing interrupted when the spirit of a featherless chicken flew at their faces to separate the lustful.

It would appear as if the Phantom Chicken that Sir Francis Bacon’s experiment unleashed definitely has a moral conscience, that perhaps the famous philosopher/scientist who was reported to be one of history’s first moral relativists, may have been lacking.

Despite being relatively frequent from the end of World War Two right until the mid 1970’s, there have been almost no reported sightings of The Phantom Chicken of Pond Square during the past forty years.   But that doesn’t mean that the Phantom Chicken of Pond Square isn’t still somewhere out there inhabiting the unseen spiritual realm, which Sir Francis Bacon perhaps so flippantly discounted as nonexistent through his theory of empiricism, 

Sir Francis Bacon, one of Europe’s most renowned intellectuals of his time, would never have believed that he could be proven wrong to history by the ghost of a plucked chicken--but perhaps he has!

Pond Square Park in Highgate