Elizabeth Canning disappeared on 1 January 1753, before returning almost a month later. She claimed to have been kidnapped and held against her will in a hayloft. Susannah Wells and Mary Squires were ultimately tried and found guilty. Crisp Gascoyne, Lord Mayor of London, was unhappy with the verdict and began his own investigation. He interviewed witnesses whose testimony implied that Squires and her family could not have abducted Canning. He ordered Canning’s arrest, following which she was found guilty of perjury. Canning was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment and seven years of transportation.
About Elizabeth Canning in brief
Elizabeth Canning disappeared on 1 January 1753, before returning almost a month later. She claimed to have been kidnapped and held against her will in a hayloft. Susannah Wells and Mary Squires were ultimately tried and found guilty. However, Crisp Gascoyne, Lord Mayor of London, was unhappy with the verdict and began his own investigation. He interviewed witnesses whose testimony implied that Squires and her family could not have abducted Canning. He ordered Canning’s arrest, following which she was found guilty of perjury. Canning was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment and seven years of transportation. She died in Wethersfield, Connecticut in 1773, but the mystery surrounding her disappearance remains unsolved. She was described as a plump 18-year-old, about 5 feet tall with a face pitted by smallpox, a long, straight nose, and wide-set eyes. The case pitted two groups of believers against one another: the pro-Canningites and thePro-Squires ‘Egyptians’ Canning’s disappearance was one of the most famous English criminal mysteries of the 18th century. She is buried at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Her family lived in two rooms in Aldermanbury Postern, in the City of London. She worked as a maidservant in the household of nearby publican John Wintlebury, who considered her an honest but shy girl. Her father died in 1751 and her mother and four siblings shared a two-room property with James Lord, an apprentice.
James Lord was an apprentice and lived in the building’s front room, while Canning and the rest of the Canning family lived on the back room. She disappeared at about 10pm on January 29, 1753. No clues were found as to her disappearance, and only a few minutes later was she sent to fetch James Lord from a hackney coach. Once she recovered, James Lord sent Canning to fetch several neighbours, and she was only inside the house for several minutes before fainting and being taken to a nearby hospital. Her mother sent her other three children to Moorfields to search for her, while James Lord went to the Colleys, who told him that they had left Elizabeth at about 9: 30 pm near Aldgate church in Houndsditch. The next morning Mrs Canning also travelled to Colleys’ but to no avail, as Elizabeth was still missing. A few weeks passed and weeks passed before she returned to her mother’s home. She had not been seen for nearly a month, and was emaciated and in a “deplorable condition’”. Her mother asked her relatives to scour the neighbourhood for her daughter, while her relatives scoured the newspapers, read aloud in churches, and read aloud from a report of a woman’s shriek from a meeting in the other houses, but no other information was found. She returned to the house on January 30, 1754.
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This page is based on the article Elizabeth Canning published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
