The name Fanny Adams attached to this Soho haunting carries a genuine complication worth flagging honestly: a real historical Fanny Adams was the victim of a notorious 1867 child murder in Alton, Hampshire, a case so widely reported at the time that her name entered British slang, grimly, as a phrase for something worthless or nonexistent, sweet Fanny Adams. Whether the Old Compton Street haunting is meant to represent this same, historically documented Hampshire victim relocated to a Soho setting, or an entirely separate, locally invented figure who simply happens to share her name, is not clarified in the sources consulted for this entry, and the two possibilities point to quite different stories.
What is reported consistently is the haunting itself: a shadowy figure seen along Old Compton Street at night, accompanied by the sound of a child's laughter carrying faintly through the street, an eerie juxtaposition of the sound of innocent play against the implication of a violent or tragic death somewhere behind the story. No specific date, more detailed circumstances of her supposed death in Soho, or independent corroboration beyond repeated ghost-tour retellings has been traced for this entry.
Given the likely confusion between a genuine, well documented Victorian murder case from an entirely different part of England and whatever locally specific tragedy, if any, actually occurred on Old Compton Street itself, this entry is recorded at the lower end of this register's confidence scale, an atmospheric and frequently repeated Soho ghost story whose own central identity remains genuinely unclear.
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