Once known as England’s most haunted house, latterly
dismissed by sceptics as merely the scene of an elaborate hoax, the story of
Borley Rectory continues to stir controversy seventy years after the building
itself was demolished.
The small Essex village of Borley stands on a hillside
overlooking the valley of the River Stour. Its church dates to the twelfth
century, while the famous rectory, a rambling Victorian building, was
constructed in 1863 on the reputed site of a mediaeval monastery. Its first
occupants, the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, his wife and children, moved
in shortly afterwards. Over the following decades, so it is claimed,
innumerable strange happenings took place at the rectory. There were sightings
of a headless monk, a spectral nun, a phantom coach and the ghost of a former
priest. There were reports of poltergeists, bells ringing, mysterious writing
appearing on walls and strange monastic chantings. There were phantom lights, sudden
temperature drops, unexplained smells, objects mysteriously appearing, and
countless other inexplicable phenomena.
The happenings reportedly began not long after the Bull
family had moved in. They started with mysterious footsteps and taps in the
night, and progressed to phantom voices and the inexplicable noise of ringing
bells. Then one of the daughters claimed to have seen the figure of an old man
in a top hat in her bedroom, and another daughter was reportedly awakened by a
slap in the face from an unseen assailant. A ghostly nun was sighted on several
occasions.
The nun apparently became quite a nuisance, startling
visitors by peering in through the rectory windows. Sightings of her were said
to pre-date the rectory’s construction. She was said to be a wayward sister
from a nearby convent, who had eloped with a monk from the monastery that once occupied
the site of the rectory. When the pair were caught, so the story went, the monk
was beheaded and the nun was walled up alive.
Despite the unnerving phenomena, the family stayed. In 1892
Henry’s son, Harry Bull, succeeded his father as parish rector, and continued
to live in the house with several of his siblings. The younger Bulls seem to
have enjoyed telling servants and villagers that the house was haunted. As he
grew older, Harry Bull spent much of his time in the summerhouse, from which
vantage point he claimed to have seen the ghostly nun, a phantom coach and
other apparitions. By the time he died in 1927, the rectory had gained a strongly
established reputation as a ‘haunted house’ in local folklore.
After Harry Bull’s death, the house stood empty for more
than a year, until the new rector, the Reverend Guy Eric Smith, took
possession. Soon after moving in, while cleaning out a cupboard, the vicar’s
wife found a brown paper package containing the skull of a young woman.
Following this, the couple reportedly experienced phenomena including
unexplained footsteps, phantom lights in windows and ringing bells, and Mrs
Smith reported sighting the phantom carriage. The Smiths contacted the Daily Mirror, which sent a reporter and
published the first in a series of articles about the rectory. The paper also arranged
for a paranormal researcher, Harry Price, to visit the house. Several new
phenomena apparently coincided with Price’s initial visit, including
poltergeist activity and ‘spirit messages’ tapped out from the frame of a
mirror. Objects also began to mysteriously appear, including pebbles, keys and
medals. The Smiths had apparently had enough and left Borley in July 1929.
The house again stood empty until the following year, when
the Reverend Lionel Algernon Foyster (a cousin of the Bulls) moved in with his
wife Marianne and their adopted daughter Adelaide. The Foysters too were soon
claiming to have experienced paranormal phenomena. In 1935 the priest wrote an
account of various strange happenings during his time at Borley, including servants’
bells ringing of their own accord, objects being thrown about, shattering
windows and Adelaide being locked in a room with no key. Marianne Foyster
claimed to have been thrown out of bed by the poltergeist, and to have seen
various apparitions. On two occasions, her husband had attempted an exorcism
with no success. Various writings appeared on the walls, most of them addressed
to Marianne. These were mostly illegible, but one was a plea to ‘get help’
while another asked for ‘light, mass, prayers’. Two small fires also
mysteriously broke out in the house, and there were often strange smells,
especially of lavender. The hauntings continued to attract public attention,
with further articles being published in the Daily Mirror and several
paranormal investigators visiting the house. Harry Price himself returned to
the rectory in October 1931. The Foysters left Borley in October 1935 due to
the vicar’s declining health.
The next priest of the parish chose to live elsewhere, and
the rectory stood empty until 1937. In May of that year Harry Price took out a
lease on the house, and advertised for ‘responsible persons of leisure and
intelligence, intrepid, critical and unbiased’, to join a rota of observers.
Out of a total of more than two hundred applicants, he chose forty-eight.
Various paranormal happenings were reported by different members of the team,
including moving objects, unexplained noises, a piece of soap being thrown
across a sealed room, and a sudden and inexplicable temperature drop of ten
degrees recorded on a thermometer. A medium who conducted a séance in the
building claimed to have made contact with the spirit of a 17th
century French nun. This unfortunate lady, the medium claimed, had left her
convent and travelled to England to marry a member of the Waldegrave family,
who had occupied Borley’s manor house at that time. She was said to have been
murdered in an earlier building on the site of the rectory. The medium also
claimed to have made contact with a second spirit by the name of Sunex Amures, who said he would burn the building
down at nine o’clock on the evening of 27th February.
After Price’s one-year lease came to an end, the rectory was
purchased by a Captain W.H. Gregson. While he was in the process of moving in,
the rectory caught fire and was gutted. Gregson blamed an oil lamp being
knocked over in the hall. The insurance company believed the fire had been
started deliberately, but were unable to prove it. A Miss Williams from nearby
Borley Lodge claimed to have seen the ghostly nun in an upstairs window while
the house was burning. Other witnesses spoke of seeing spectral figures moving
about in the flames. The date was 27th February 1939.
In 1940 Harry Price published a book, entitled The most haunted house in England, which
set the seal on the rectory’s national and international fame. In August 1943
Price conducted a brief excavation in the ruins of the house and discovered
bones, which he believed to be those of a young woman. Local opinion, however,
held them to be animal bones. The remains were eventually buried in the churchyard
at Liston, after Borley church refused to accept them. Price published a second
book about the house in 1946, entitled The
end of Borley Rectory, further cementing the fame of both the rectory, and
Price himself.
After Price’s death in 1948, the Society for Psychical
Research (SPR) investigated the Borley case, and their findings were published in
a 1956 book entitled The Haunting
of Borley Rectory.
It concluded that Price himself had fraudulently produced some of the phenomena
and that others had been faked by Marianne Foyster. Other phenomena, it was
concluded, were due to natural causes, such as rats, and the unusual acoustics
of the house.
Some of the legends surrounding the house definitely appear
to have been false. In 1938 the Essex Archaeological Society stated that the
monastery that had supposedly once occupied the site had never existed. There
was no known historical basis either for the tale of the beheaded monk and the
walled-up nun. The stories may have been made up by the Bull children to
romanticise their home, possibly inspired by similar stories in fiction.
In later years Marianne Foyster admitted to having faked
some of the phenomena herself. She also admitted to having an affair with the
lodger and using paranormal explanations to cover up their activities. Louis
Mayerling, a member of Price’s team, also admitted many years later that Price
and his associates, including Mayerling himself, had faked many phenomena. Yet
even he claimed to have experienced genuine paranormal activity in the house on
at least one occasion. Charles Wintour, another member of Price’s team who
later became a well-known newspaper editor, concluded that the house was genuinely
haunted, but also stated that Price was exaggerating the phenomena and
destroying the credibility of any genuine paranormal activity captured.
Whatever the truth is, it should be remembered that reports
of paranormal activity at the rectory started long before Price and Marianne
Foyster came on the scene. Spectral happenings are still reported to this day,
from the site of the rectory and in the nearby churchyard. While it does appear
that the Borley stories have been exaggerated, and at least some of the
phenomena were faked by Price and others, some people still believe there is a
core of truth in the rectory’s reputation as England’s most haunted house.
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