Borley Rectory
An unattractive
Victorian brick building of many rambling rooms, damp, dark and uninviting, in the parish
of Borley on the Essex-Suffolk border, made famous because of the violent controversy it
stirred among modern psychical researchers, after Harry Price's
"ghosthunting" investigations and his claim that it was "the most haunted
house in England."
Local tales concerned a mysterious
coach and horses which galloped along the roads;
visions of headless men; a girl in white;
sounds of dragging footsteps and other weird noises in the house. Above all, there was the
apparition of a nun who occasionally walked the house and grounds.
The rectory was built in 1863 on the
site of a much older building.
In 1929, Mr. Price was asked by a national newspaper to
look into the strange events which were occurring there. Mr. Price heard many of these
stories from the Rev and Mrs. Eric Smith — who eventually left the house, partly
because they could no longer stand the atmosphere there (their experiences included Mrs.
Smith finding the skull of a young woman wrapped in brown paper in a cupboard).
Price concerned himself with the
rectory for some years, particularly between 1930 and 1935, when it was occupied by the
Rev Lionel Foyster and his wife Marianne. He saw keys shoot from their locks, heard bells
ring (sometimes when he requested the spirits to ring them), had an empty bottle thrown at
him, heard footsteps, saw materializations. He estimated that while the Foysters were in
residence, at least 2, 000 poltergeist phenomena were observed at the rectory.
Leasing the building for a year, Price
not only kept watch himself, but invited many interested people to visit the house,
organizing a rota of 48 observers to occupy it day and night. In his book The End of
Borley Rectory (1946) he lists 100 other people who noted improbable things.
Some of the experiences were distinctly
worrying: while Mark Key-Pearse, a British proconsul at Geneva, was eating his evening
meal in the rectory, "he heard the key in the lock turn. Something had locked him in.
The extraordinary thing was that the key was on the inside of the door. Consequently,
whatever locked him in remained in the room. " In February, 1939, the rectory was
burned to the ground. Captain W. H. Gregory, who had bought it, had been sorting some
books when a pile of them — which he was nowhere near — threw itself over,
knocking over an oil lamp which set fire to the place. He had also been plagued by strange
events.
A month after the fire two local ladies
took some friends to the ruin — and all four saw a woman dressed in blue, walking in
all upstairs room. As the room now had no floor, they regard this as unusual. For six more
years, strange events continued to occur in the ruins.
The phenomena gradually ceased. Perhaps
coincidentally, they died away after the burial, on May 29 1945, of the skull of a young
woman which had been found below the floor of the cellar of the rectory. Interestingly, a
dental surgeon reported that the condition of the jaw indicated severe infection which
would have been responsible at best for toothache, and at worst persistent severe
neuralgia. Many people who saw the ghostly nun reported that she looked pale, haggard and
miserable, her face drawn, "as though she had been crying. "
The ruins of the rectory were razed to
the ground in 1944. The haunting spirits made one farewell gesture. Price made a final
visit to the place with some friends. As one of them, a photographer for Life Magazine,
was taking a photograph, a brick picked itself up and posed in midair, conveniently in
front of a dark passage.
Marianne Foyster survived her husband,
and later became an American citizen. In 1979 she gave an interview to two representatives
of the British Society for Psychical Research in which she claimed that the Rev Foyster
himself was largely responsible for the poltergeist activities at Borley, although she
gave no detailed description of how they were counterfeited. She also agreed that a number
of inexplicable events did occur, for which she could offer no explanation. And of course
her explanations could not account for the phenomena observed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith, or by
the many people who visited the rectory after she and her husband had left it.
Related
videos.
Related
books:
The Enigma of
Borley Rectory.
The ghosts of
Borley; annals of the haunted rectory.
The Most Haunted
House in England: Ten Years' Investigation of Borley Rectory.
More
books.
Click
here for more related
books.
Further
info:
Borley Rectory.
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