Borley Rectory

Borley Rectory does not exist anymore. It was badly damaged by fire in 1939, the remains were eventually demolished, and yet people are still arguing about what happened there more than eighty years after the building disappeared.

That is impressive longevity for a house that no longer has walls.

During its lifetime, Borley acquired almost everything a respectable haunted house could want: footsteps in empty corridors, servant bells ringing by themselves, objects travelling through rooms, unexplained writing appearing on walls, a phantom coach, a ghostly nun, alleged messages from the dead and, eventually, a prediction that the rectory would burn down.

Then it did.

The problem is that Borley also accumulated almost everything that makes a paranormal case difficult to untangle. Some witnesses were remembering events years afterwards. Some incidents appear to have been exaggerated. At least some people connected with the case probably played tricks, and the most famous investigator involved was an enthusiastic self-publicist whose methods would later come under serious attack.

This is not going to end with me announcing that Borley Rectory was definitely haunted.

It is considerably more interesting than that.

THE HOUSE WAS ALREADY HAUNTED BEFORE HARRY PRICE ARRIVED

The rectory was built in 1862–63 for the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull and his large family beside the parish church in the tiny Essex village of Borley.

Later accounts from members of the Bull family described unexplained footsteps, bells and strange figures around the grounds. The most famous was a woman dressed as a nun who supposedly appeared along a path that became known as the Nun’s Walk.

There was also a phantom coach.

Naturally.

By 1929, when Borley first attracted national attention, a local newspaper was already repeating a wonderfully elaborate explanation for the haunting. According to the story, there had once been a monastery or convent at Borley. A nun had fallen in love with a man, attempted to escape with him in a horse-drawn coach and been caught. The man was executed and the nun disappeared back inside the convent, after which her ghost and a spectral coach began appearing around the village.

It is excellent Gothic material.

Historically, it has a few problems.

Researchers have found no convincing evidence that a medieval convent or monastery of the required kind ever stood at Borley, nor for the doomed couple, execution or walled-up nun that later versions of the legend supplied. Even in 1929, somebody wrote to the local newspaper pointing out that the story’s chronology did not make much sense.

That does not mean nobody ever saw a strange woman near the rectory. It means that seeing a woman and knowing she was a murdered medieval nun are two very different things.

Borley would spend decades struggling with that distinction.

THEN THE SMITHS MOVED IN

In October 1928, the Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife moved into the rectory.

They had not been there long before strange incidents were being reported. There were footsteps, whispering or moaning sounds, bells ringing, keys disappearing and unexplained lights. Mrs Smith also found a human skull wrapped in brown paper inside a cupboard.

I have moved house several times and complained about things previous owners have left behind, but I concede that nobody has ever left me a human skull.

The identity and origin of the skull were never satisfactorily established. Reverend Smith eventually buried it in the churchyard, but the discovery inevitably became folded into Borley’s growing reputation. The Smiths also reported seeing what looked like a horse-drawn coach and hearing sounds that they could not explain.

Eventually, they contacted the Daily Mirror because they wanted help investigating what was happening.

That decision changed Borley Rectory completely.

ENTER HARRY PRICE

The Daily Mirror sent a reporter to Borley in June 1929 and brought in Harry Price, who was already one of Britain’s best-known investigators of alleged psychic phenomena.

Price is a fascinating figure because he does not fit neatly into either the believer or fraud category. He investigated mediums, exposed tricks, used cameras and measuring equipment, and wanted psychical research to look scientific. He was also extremely good at publicity and understood perfectly well that the British press enjoyed a good ghost.

Borley gave him an excellent one.

When Price visited in June 1929, reports became more dramatic. Stones and other objects were said to have been thrown, bells rang and additional strange incidents were recorded. Critics would later make much of the fact that this more spectacular activity appeared when Price became involved, although that alone obviously does not prove that he caused it.

The Smiths left the rectory soon afterwards, but it is worth correcting one of the tidier versions of the story. They do not appear simply to have fled because the haunting became unbearable. Contemporary material indicates that the practical shortcomings of the house and the enormous nuisance created by the sudden publicity were important reasons for leaving. Mrs Smith would later publicly express scepticism about the idea that Borley was haunted at all.

So, by 1930, we already have a house with a local ghost tradition, a skull in a cupboard, newspaper attention and Harry Price.

Borley was only warming up.

THE FOYSTERS ARRIVED AND EVERYTHING ESCALATED

The Reverend Lionel Foyster moved into the rectory in October 1930 with his much younger wife Marianne and their adopted daughter Adelaide.

The following years produced the most extraordinary period in Borley’s history.

Footsteps and whispers were reported. Servant bells rang. Stones, bottles and pieces of soap allegedly flew through rooms. Doors locked and unlocked themselves, windows broke, furniture moved and small fires appeared. Marianne said that she had been thrown out of bed and physically struck by unseen forces. Price later claimed that roughly two thousand unexplained incidents had been reported during the Foyster period.

That number should immediately make us cautious.

It comes through Harry Price, and the records underlying the Foyster years are complicated. Lionel did write detailed accounts, but later researchers pointed out that some material described as a diary had actually been reconstructed afterwards rather than recorded event by event at the time.

That does not automatically make the reports false. It does make them harder to treat as pristine contemporary evidence.

Then the walls started writing back.

“MARIANNE, PLEASE HELP”

During the Foyster years, strange writing appeared on walls and scraps of paper around the rectory.

Some of it seemed to address Marianne directly. Among the most famous fragments were phrases resembling “Marianne please help get” and “Marianne light mass prayers”. The writing was crude, incomplete and sometimes barely intelligible. Marianne herself apparently wrote responses beneath some of the messages in an attempt to encourage whoever or whatever was supposedly communicating to explain itself.

These markings became some of the most recognisable pieces of Borley evidence because photographs survive.

Unfortunately, photographs of writing prove that writing existed. They do not tell us who held the pencil.

Marianne inevitably became a suspect. Many disturbances clustered around her, and later researchers argued that she may have produced at least some of the phenomena herself. Her private life was also more complicated than the early Borley books suggested, which provided plenty of material for people looking for motives involving boredom, attention or marital unhappiness.

There were other witnesses, however. Visitors described incidents they found difficult to explain, and Lionel himself remained convinced that at least some of what happened in the rectory was genuine.

This is where Borley becomes annoying.

Every time you think one person might explain everything, somebody else reports something inconvenient.

IT LOOKS LIKE THE DEAD REALLY LIKE THROWING THINGS

The Foyster accounts contain an extraordinary quantity of airborne household equipment.

Bottles were thrown. Stones appeared. Tools moved. A flat iron was reportedly hurled. Marianne was struck by objects, and visitors sometimes found themselves caught in whatever was happening.

I remain fascinated by how often alleged spirits in these stories choose throwing as their preferred means of communication.

If I successfully survive death with my personality intact and discover that I can interact with the physical world, I am not wasting that opportunity launching soap across a drawing room.

Borley’s object-throwing also creates a practical problem for us because the household contained several possible sources of deliberate mischief. Marianne later acknowledged that some people around the rectory played tricks and that village children sometimes joined in. She also maintained that a smaller number of incidents genuinely puzzled her.

So even one person saying, “Yes, some of it was faked,” does not necessarily tell us whether every incident was.

The Foysters eventually left in 1935. Again, the popular version sometimes implies that they were finally driven from the rectory by supernatural attack, but Lionel’s worsening health appears to have been the main reason for their departure. Marianne later said that she had loved living there.

Borley then stood empty.

Harry Price saw an opportunity.

WANTED: PEOPLE WILLING TO LIVE IN A HAUNTED HOUSE

On 25 May 1937, an advertisement appeared in The Times seeking volunteers to help investigate an allegedly haunted house. Price wanted people who were, in his words, responsible, intelligent, critical and unbiased.

I would have applied immediately.

Any pretence that I was there purely in the interests of science would have lasted until the first unexplained noise.

Price rented Borley Rectory for a year and assembled a group of forty-eight official observers who stayed in the building at different times. They included people with professional backgrounds such as medicine, engineering and the military. Participants were given an instruction booklet that became known as the Blue Book, explaining how they should conduct themselves and what they should record. Objects in the house were marked so that movement could be detected, and observers were encouraged to note anything unusual.

At first glance, this sounds considerably stronger than a family sitting around afterwards comparing ghost stories.

Unfortunately, the experiment had problems.

THE BLUE BOOK MAY HAVE MADE THE HOUSE MORE HAUNTED

The volunteers were entering a building they already knew was supposed to be one of Britain’s most haunted houses.

Price’s Blue Book then directed their attention towards particular places and particular kinds of phenomena.

After Price’s death, critics argued that this created an obvious problem of suggestion. If you tell somebody that a ghostly nun is known to pass a particular part of the garden and then ask them to spend several nights watching that location, you have not exactly created a neutral experiment.

There was another major weakness: no single systematic official log was maintained throughout the year. Different groups of observers came and went, sometimes with limited knowledge of what previous groups had experienced. The 1956 Society for Psychical Research review criticised this heavily.

Some volunteers nevertheless reported knocks, footsteps, strange markings, moving objects and other experiences they could not explain.

Others experienced absolutely nothing; I genuinely like those people.

Imagine sacrificing a weekend to live in “the most haunted house in England”, sitting in a freezing Victorian rectory all night and returning home with the scientific conclusion that the place was draughty and you should have stayed in bed.

Those negative reports matter just as much as the exciting ones.

THEN SOMEBODY GOT THE PLANCHETTE OUT

During Price’s investigation, Sidney Glanville became one of the more committed Borley researchers.

In March 1938, his daughter Helen took part in a series of planchette sessions away from the rectory. Through the board, a supposed communicator eventually identified herself as Marie Lairre, a French nun who claimed to have left her religious life, travelled to England and married into the Waldegrave family before being murdered at Borley.

Conveniently, this sounded remarkably like the ghost story already associated with the rectory.

The details were different enough to create an entirely new version, but close enough to strengthen the idea that the Nun’s Walk really was being haunted by a specific dead woman.

Attempts to prove that Marie Lairre existed have never produced convincing historical evidence. So, at this stage we have acquired a named ghost whose historical existence cannot be demonstrated, linked to a convent that probably never existed, through a planchette session conducted decades after the nun legend was already circulating.

I would not be submitting that to court.

THEN THE GHOST PREDICTED A FIRE

Another communicator during the planchette sessions called itself Sunex Amures.

On 27 March 1938, the supposed spirit predicted that Borley Rectory would be destroyed by fire at nine o’clock that evening and that the remains of a murdered person would then be discovered.

The rectory did not burn that evening, but eleven months later, it did.

By then Price’s lease had ended and the rectory had been bought by Captain William Gregson. On the night of 27 February 1939, an oil lamp was overturned and fire spread rapidly through the building. The rectory was badly damaged and never properly occupied again.

This is regularly presented as one of Borley’s eeriest moments: the spirit predicted that the house would burn, and then the house burned.

It is certainly a lovely piece of storytelling, but the slight problem is that the prediction specified the wrong night by almost a year.

If my weather app tells me that my house will be struck by lightning tonight and it happens eleven months later, I am not giving the app full marks.

I would still absolutely have been standing outside the burning rectory shouting, “DIDN’T THE GHOST SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THIS?”

THE WOMAN IN THE BURNING WINDOW

The fire immediately acquired its own supernatural story.

Witnesses were said to have seen the figure of a woman looking from an upper window while the rectory burned, even though Captain Gregson was living there with his sons and no woman was supposed to have been inside.

A photograph taken during the fire has also been interpreted as showing a face or figure at a window.

Accounts of the sighting differ, and some later research makes the story considerably less tidy. One woman associated with the report apparently expected payment for her account, which does not prove that she was lying but is the kind of detail I would quite like mentioned before somebody shows me the photograph and announces that it contains the murdered nun.

I am still looking at the window. Obviously.

THEN PRICE DUG UP SOME BONES

The ruined rectory continued to attract attention after the fire.

In 1943, Harry Price organised excavations at the site after the planchette communications suggested that human remains might be found there. Bone fragments were recovered, including part of a jaw which was identified at the time as human and possibly belonging to a young woman.

Price believed this supported the Marie Lairre story.

The difficulty, once again, is connecting the evidence.

Finding human bone does not establish whose bone it was, when it arrived there or whether the owner had anything to do with a fictional French nun. The location had a long history, and the remains could not provide the neat identification the Borley story wanted from them.

Even so, the bones were ceremonially buried in Liston churchyard in 1945. By then Borley had become too famous to require the actual rectory.

HARRY PRICE MADE BORLEY ENORMOUS

Price published The Most Haunted House in England in 1940, followed by The End of Borley Rectory in 1946.

Those books transformed a complicated collection of family stories, witness accounts, newspaper reports, séances, investigations and local folklore into one of Britain’s best-known supernatural cases.

Price was extremely good at constructing a narrative, but it doesn’t automatically mean he fabricated it.

The phrase “most haunted house in England” itself was already circulating when Price became involved, and Price later claimed he first heard it from a man in Sudbury when asking directions to Borley. What Price unquestionably did was popularise the description so successfully that it remains attached to the house today.

Then Price died in 1948. Without him controlling the story, other researchers went through his files and things became uncomfortable.

THE 1956 REPORT TORE THE CASE APART

The Society for Psychical Research asked Eric Dingwall, Kathleen Goldney and Trevor Hall to conduct a major re-examination of the Borley evidence.

Their report, The Haunting of Borley Rectory, appeared in 1956 and it was devastating.

The researchers argued that Price had presented evidence selectively, overstated some testimony and ignored or minimised ordinary explanations when they weakened the haunting. They criticised the lack of systematic records during his tenancy and suggested that a considerable amount of Borley could be explained through natural causes, suggestion, exaggeration and deliberate trickery. Some of their criticism went further and raised the possibility that Price himself had manufactured or manipulated incidents.

One example often cited in later criticism involved a photograph of a “flying brick” taken during demolition work. Correspondence from the photographer later indicated that the brick had actually been thrown by a workman as part of a joke, yet Price subsequently treated the image far more seriously.

That is not a good look. The 1956 report led many people to consider Borley effectively solved. Except, because this is Borley, the argument did not end there either.

THE DEBUNKING WAS ITSELF CHALLENGED

Later writers and psychical researchers argued that Dingwall, Goldney and Hall had sometimes gone too far in the opposite direction.

They pointed out that Price was not present for many reported incidents, that stories of unusual events existed before he ever visited the rectory and that some witnesses appeared sincere even when there was no obvious reason for them to invent what they described.

Critics of the 1956 report also disputed whether every accusation made against Price was adequately supported. The result is that Borley developed a second argument layered over the first one: not merely whether the rectory was haunted, but whether the man accused of exaggerating the haunting had himself been treated unfairly by the people who investigated him.

At this stage the ghosts could probably have gone home and nobody would have noticed.

The humans were doing quite enough.

THERE PROBABLY WAS FRAUD AT BORLEY

I think we can say that without ruining the story.

Some incidents were almost certainly tricks. Marianne later acknowledged that practical jokes occurred during the Foyster years. Elizabeth-style poltergeist activity involving thrown objects always provides opportunities for human intervention, and Harry Price’s presentation of the evidence was certainly more dramatic than a modern controlled investigation would allow.

The nun legend also developed far beyond anything the historical record can support, and Marie Lairre remains essentially a character supplied through psychic communication rather than an identifiable woman from Borley’s past.

None of that requires anything supernatural, but saying “there was fraud” is not the same as saying “one person invented everything”. Borley lasted too long for that explanation to fit comfortably.

PERHAPS THERE WAS NEVER ONE BORLEY HAUNTING

This is where I have landed after going through the case again.

I do not think we need to imagine a single ghost responsible for everything that happened at Borley Rectory.

There may have been ordinary house noises. Old bell systems can misbehave, buildings settle, animals get into walls and large draughty houses produce sounds that are extremely convincing at two o’clock in the morning.

There were probably tricks. There may have been different tricks played by different people for completely different reasons.

Some witnesses may have exaggerated. Others may have remembered things inaccurately. Harry Price undoubtedly understood how to turn an intriguing story into a national sensation, while later sceptics were equally determined to dismantle the case he had created, and there may have been experiences that genuinely puzzled the people who reported them.

Those possibilities can all exist together. That is much messier than blaming everything on a murdered nun, but history usually is.

THE HOUSE ACQUIRED A STORY AND THE STORY STARTED DOING SOME OF THE WORK

This may be the most interesting thing about Borley Rectory.

Picture arriving there after 1929. You already know there is supposed to be a nun in the garden. You know bells are said to ring without anyone touching them. You know people have heard footsteps. You have read the newspaper reports, and perhaps Harry Price has handed you a Blue Book telling you which rooms deserve particular attention.

Then you hear something upstairs, which could be completely ordinary. But it is not just a noise anymore, it’s a Borley noise.

That changes what happens next.

Somebody tells another person, who adds it to the growing collection. The collection makes the next visitor pay closer attention. More experiences are reported, newspapers repeat them, books organise them into a history and eventually the reputation of the house becomes evidence for the haunting that created the reputation in the first place.

It is an extraordinary little loop.

SO, WAS BORLEY RECTORY HAUNTED?

I do not know.

I do not think the evidence gives us a particularly convincing case for a murdered French nun called Marie Lairre wandering around Essex. We cannot demonstrate that she existed, the medieval convent story is unsupported, and several major parts of Borley’s history have perfectly human problems attached to them. I also do not think the case is improved by pretending Harry Price was a neutral scientist who arrived, observed everything cleanly and simply reported what he found. He was much more interesting than that.

What Borley gives us instead is nearly a century of overlapping testimony, folklore, family stories, newspapers, séances, investigators, practical jokes, genuine disagreements and people who seem to have experienced things they could not explain.

Somebody may have thrown a stone. Somebody else may genuinely have heard footsteps. A child might have seen a figure in the garden. Years later, somebody gave that figure a history. Harry Price arrived, newspapers became interested and suddenly people across Britain knew exactly where the nun was supposed to walk.

Eventually, the rectory itself burned down and the ruins were demolished in 1944.

Borley Rectory has therefore been gone for more than eighty years, while the argument about what happened inside it is still going.

I think that might be the most successful haunting of all. The house disappeared. The story did not.