Alas! It is the anniversary of Francis Bacon dying because he tried to stuff a chicken with snow by the side of a road in Highgate. For science.
Apparently, he was in a carriage with a Dr Winterbourne, discussing how to preserve meat, and the doctor was sceptical of Bacon’s notion that it could be frozen, so they did what any normal people would do and curtailed their journey there and then in order to stop at a poor woman’s house and buy a hen. Bacon packed snow in and around the late fowl, but did not succeed in testing his hypothesis because he caught a chill and had to go to the Earl of Arundel’s house to get warm.
Unfortunately, the bed he was given wasn’t warm enough and he snuffed it. The story is told in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, which may not be entirely accurate because there is, apparently, no record of snow in London in April 1626:
Mr. Hobbs told me that the cause of his lordship’s death was trying an experiment: viz., as he was taking the aire in a coach with Dr. Witherborne (a Scotchman, Physitian to the King) towards High-gate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord’s thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poore woman’s howse at the bottome of Highgate hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate it, and then stuffed the bodie with snow, and my lord did help to doe it himselfe. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not returne to his lodgings (I suppose then at Graye’s Inne), but went to the earle of Arundell’s house at High-gate, where they putt him into a good bed warmed with a panne, but it was a damp bed that had not been layn-in in about a yeare before, which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 dayes, as I remember he told me, he dyed of suffocation.
The best bit of the story, though, is the haunting of Pond Square in Highgate for several centuries afterwards — and not by an old geezer in Elizabethan dress, but… a half-plucked ghost chicken. Obviously.
According to various sources, Aircraftman Terence Long heard horses’ hooves and a carriage in December 1943. He turned and saw… a chicken, shrieking and running in circles, which suddenly disappeared.
He reported this to an Air Raid Precautions fireman, who said another ARP had chased it the other night with a view to eating it, but it disappeared into a brick wall.
Local resident, Mrs J. Greenhill, saw it several times and described it, unimpeachably, as a “large whitish bird”.
A 1960s motorist also saw it vanish into thin air, but tragically it hasn’t been seen since it surprised a courting couple in 1970 by dropping to the ground beside them, squawking and flapping a bit, and disappearing for ever.
Yes, this is nonsense, but if you’ve enjoyed it at all, you may like the story of Mike, the chicken who stayed obstinately alive for 18 months after his head was cut off.
