Mabel Smith was at death’s door.

Her husband Guy Eric Smith did what many of us would do in the same situation: he offered up his life to God in exchange for his wife’s. He was a man of his word. When Mabel recovered the Smiths left Kolkata and moved back to England, where he enrolled in a seminary. After graduating he accepted the post of vicar of Borley, a small village in Essex.

The cosmopolitan Smiths hadn’t quite realized how tiny, rural, and remote Borley was before they arrived on October 2, 1928. The couple resolved to keep a stiff upper lip, though even they couldn’t hide how disappointed they were in the state of their new home.

Built sixty years earlier by a previous rector to accommodate his enormous family, Borley Rectory was a red-brick monstrosity once described by a real-estate agent as “as ugly as the bad taste of 1863 could make it.” It had been vacant for years and was suffering from decades of neglect. The roof leaked, there was no central heating, there was no plumbing, there was no electricity. Many rooms, including most of the upper floors, had been abandoned because they were unfit for human habitation.

On top of all that, it was haunted. 

A Bunch of Bulls

At least, that’s what their 15-year-old maid Mary Pearson claimed. Her sources were unimpeachable — Ethel and Millie Bull, the elderly sisters of the previous vicar, who had years of first-hand experience with the ghosts of Borley.

The Bull family had a long and complicated history with the region. They were distant kin of the noble Waldegrave family, who had owned most of the land since Elizabethan times, and had been the hereditary vicars of Pentlow for longer than anyone living could remember. In the 1860s two of the family’s sons became clergymen, and since they couldn’t both be the vicar of Pentlow, the eldest left and became the vicar of nearby Borley.

The Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull’s family quickly outgrew the converted farmhouse they were living in, so in 1863 they built Borley Rectory across the street. It was built overtop of an older rectory, which had in turn been built over an older rectory, which had been built over several other buildings including a Benedictine Monastery which was rumored to have secret underground tunnels running down to a nunnery in nearby Bures so the priests could get their wicks dipped.

The Bulls soon ran out of space again — hardly surprising, as they had fourteen children. In 1875 they added another wing to the building, which now took on a lopsided U-shape with a central courtyard.

Like many young Victorians, the Bull children were obsessed with ghosts. Henry encouraged them, sharing tales of his own brushes with supernatural — being tormented by faint whispers in strange voices, being stalked by shapes lurking on the fringes of his peripheral vision, almost being run over by a phantom coach driven by two headless coachmen, being startled by the ghost of a screaming girl who had once fallen off the Rectory’s roof. He even claimed to have encountered the spirit of Simon of Sudbury, a former Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor of England who had been beheaded during the Peasant’s Revolt and whose relics were in a church just down the road.

When Henry died 1892, his son Henry Foyster Bull (who we’ll call “Harry” to avoid confusion) took over as vicar. Just like his father, Harry couldn’t escape the ghosts of Borley; over the next several years he ran into the phantom coach; the family’s fondly remembered gardener Amos, still hard at work despite being dead for a hundred years; and several other assorted spooks. On one memorable occasion he awoke from a nap and gave chase to what he thought was a poacher — until he realized that the “poacher” was just a pair of legs without a torso, arms, or head.

Harry’s younger sisters were the first ones to encounter Borley’s most famous ghost. While returning to the Rectory one evening they spotted the robed figure of a Catholic nun walking in the courtyard. The Bulls rushed over to greet her, but she had disappeared.

The phantom became a regular sight around the Rectory grounds and was eventually seen by every member of the Bull family as well as numerous friends and neighbors. She could always be found meandering down a garden path, later known as “the Nun’s Walk,” before vanishing into thin air. For some reason she could always be counted to make an appearance on July 28.

The Bull sisters had spirited debates about the nun’s true identity.

Some thought she might be Arabella Waldegrave, who had gone into exile in France with King James II and taken holy orders in Paris, finally returned to her ancestral home in Essex.

They eventually decided she was a young nun from the convent that had once stood on the Rectory grounds, who had fallen in love with a nobleman and tried to elope with him. Alas, the two lovers were caught trying to escape, the nobleman and his servants were beheaded, and the nun immured (which is to say, bricked up alive in the walls). They believed she returned each year on the anniversary of her death, pacing back and forth as she nervously awaited the arrival of her lover in his phantom coach.

When Harry Bull died he, too, became one of the ghosts of Borley. His sisters, who had lived in the house for a few months after his death, occasionally spotted him puttering about as if he were still alive.

That is a lot of ghosts for one house. [record scratch]

The Saturday Night Live Band

The Smiths heard these stories from their young maid and laughed. There was no such thing as a haunted house! They soon had cause to regret being so flippant. Strange and unexplainable thing happened around Borley Rectory on a regular basis.

They heard strange voices and whispers engaged in hushed conversation. They heard muffled footsteps and dragging noises in the attic. The Rectory’s call bells, disconnected decades earlier, would spontaneously ring at the strangest hours. They noticed that windows and doors would never stay closed. They saw eerie lights shining in the windows from outside, but could not find any light sources inside. They woke in the middle of the night to be tormented by sinister shadows lurking above them.

They also kept finding morbid little surprises in the strangest places. Once Mabel found a forgotten parcel on a shelf and unwrapped it to reveal a human skull. They had no idea whose it was, so G.E. buried it in the churchyard with all due solemnity.

Now, the Smiths were intelligent people who believed there were perfectly rational explanations for all of this, but eventually it started to get to them.

One night G.E. found himself wandering the halls in his pajamas, brandishing a hockey stick while he searched for the source of a loud noise which had roused him from his sleep. He realized he was half-believed that the Rectory really was haunted, and then worried that his parishioners fully believed it. Was that why they hadn’t been coming around? How could he help them with their spiritual problems if they were being scared off by ghosts? Clearly, he needed to prove that Borley Rectory wasn’t haunted.

But how? G.E. felt silly calling his bishop about this sort of problem, and performing an exorcism felt uncomfortably Catholic. He would have to make do with some sort of secular skeptic or psychic researcher. He had no idea where to find one, though, so he wrote the Daily Mirror and asked for help.

The Daily Mirror sent him Britain’s greatest ghost-buster: Harry Price.

Price was born on January 17, 1881 in Shrewsbury, the oldest son of a well-to-do paper manufacturer. After an uneventful childhood and a brief stint in the family business he retired to Sussex in his early forties. A life of leisure bored him, though, so threw himself headlong into some of his childhood hobbies. He published a few papers on numismatism, then spent a few years as an antiquarian and a gentleman archaeologist, before becoming obsessed with stage magic. He was never more than an enthusiastic amateur but won the respect of professionals, eventually becoming a member of the Magic Circle, the Magician’s Club, and the Society of American Magicians. 

That interest in magic eventually evolved into an interest in the supernatural. That was hardly surprising. The horrifying tragedy of the Great War traumatized Europe and led many people to seek something greater than humanity and more enduring than death.

Stage magicians were also interested in the supernatural —  interested in debunking it and exposing the charlatans who preyed upon the weak-minded. Their knowledge of stagecraft made it easy for them to sniff out hoaxes and frauds, which they did as sort of a public service.

Harry Price joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1920. His magical training  made them one of their most effective paranormal investigators. He researched numerous phenomena, including mediums and spirit photographers; poltergeists; haunted houses, beds, bathtubs, and telephones; possessed Rumanian peasant girls; psychic Austrian farmers; and, of course, Gef the talking mongoose.

Now he was on his way to Borley Rectory.

Well, not immediately. First he had to throw together a travel kit with everything he would need for his task: post office seals, electric buzzers, walkie-talkies, string, a bowl of mercury, a fingerprinting kit, a flask full of brandy, Daily Mirror reporter V.C. Wall, and of course his nubile young secretary Miss Lucie Kaye.

Then he was on his way to Borley Rectory.

The Smiths had hoped that this could all be done quietly, and those hopes were quickly dashed. V.C. Wall stuck around for only a day, interviewed as few people as possible, and then published a sensationalistic article that presented local legends as fact and proclaimed Borley Rectory “the most haunted house in England.” The public’s attention was well and duly grabbed, and amateur ghost-hunters started turning up at the Rectory day and night.

To make matters worse the entire character of the haunting changed shortly after Price’s arrival. The silent phantoms of yesteryear were replaced with violent poltergeist activity. Stones were hurled through windows; small objects went flying across the room; keys popped out of their locks; residents were pelted by small showers of pebbles, coins, and curiously enough, Seventeenth Century religious medallions.

Price blamed himself. After all, he was a known magnet for poltergeist activity. He wasn’t bold enough to claim that he had some sort latent telekinesis, but it seemed spirits sensed his presence and skepticism and started to lash out. He would have to get bottom of this case quickly before it escalated.

The easiest way to commune with spirits is to hold a seance, but if Price wasn’t careful he would just be opening a path for malevolent dark forces. He decided to reach out to the only benevolent spirit he knew would be near: the Reverend Harry Bull. He assembled Ethel and Millie Bull in the Rectory’s “Blue Room” (which sounds sinister but just had a distinctive paint job) and they reached out to their late brother. What he revealed was so shocking that it was never revealed to the general public.

This was all a bit much for the Smiths. They sent Price packing and tried to get on with their lives, but spirits and ghost-hunters continued to harass them. Eventually they could take no more and moved out of the Rectory and into a rented house in nearby Long Melford. In April 1930 G.E. Smith accepted another position and left Borley forever. [record scratch]

Australian for Beer

After the Smiths’ departure the parish began searching for a new vicar. They eventually offered the job to Lionel Algernon Foyster, a distant cousin of the Bulls, and he accepted. Lionel moved into Borley Rectory on October 16, 1930 bringing along with him his beautiful young wife Marianne; her son Ian from her first marriage; and their adopted daughter Adelaide.

The Rectory had been vacant for several months, but the locals had noticed tell-tile signs that the haunting was still active: windows would open and close at random, mysterious lights danced behind the windows, that sort of thing.

When the Foysters moved in the level of activity spiked dramatically. Lionel Foyster kept a detailed journal of his time at Borley and the amount of paranormal activity he recorded is staggering: furniture moving about; doors locking unexpectedly; small household items being thrown at his head; food disappearing; long-lost items suddenly reappearing; whispering voices; strange odors and aromas.

The ghosts of Borley seemed to be especially drawn to Marianne Foyster. Crude handwritten messages began materializing on the walls, most of them simple variations on the phrase “Marianne please get help.” When no help was forthcoming, the ghosts got violent. Rocks were hurled through windows and small fires broke out in abandoned rooms. Marianne was thrown out of bed on multiple occasions and received black eyes, bruises, and cuts from items hurled by invisible assailants. Once the spirits locked her in a bathroom for several hours, and she was only freed when Lionel performed an impromptu exorcism.

In 1931 the Foysters invited Harry Price to see if he could set things right with the spirits, but Britain’s greatest ghost-buster was completely stumped and left after only a few days.

The next year the Foysters accepted help from a Spiritualist Circle in nearby Marks Tey, led by the wonderfully named Guy l’Estrange. During their visit to the rectory the Spiritualists were confused by mysterious slithering noises and ringing bells, assaulted by glass bottles that materialized next to them and exploded, baffled by ghost writing, and chased from room to room by sinister shadows. At midnight they retreated into the chapel, where Lionel broke out some relics of St. John Vianney and led everyone in a combination exorcism and seance.

The manifestations came to an end, this time for good. Lionel continued to note occasional poltergeist activity in his diary, but it looked like 1932 would be the high water mark of the haunting of Borley Rectory. [record scratch]

The Price is Wrong

After Lionel’s forced retirement the Church of England decided that Borley was too small to have its own vicar, and merged the parish with that of Liston. The vicar of the combined parish was not keen on country living and chose to stay in town instead. In 1937 Borley Rectory was put on the rental market, but due to its age and decrepitude there was only one person interested in renting it.

Harry Price’s earlier visits to Borley had ended poorly, but he felt the old place still had potential. The haunting was unusually extensive, and while the general story was widely known it could still be expanded on. Price figured that if he was the one expanding the story he could control its direction and use it to promote himself.

Price immediately realized it would be impossible for him to investigate the rectory on his own, so he went out looking for assistants. He was shocked by the number of people who offered to volunteer, and eventually winnowed the applicant pool down to four dozen truly dedicated individuals. Price gave them a boot camp on how to notice paranormal activity, set up a rota that guaranteed someone would be on the property at all times, then handed them field journals and set them loose in the Rectory.

The observers proved to be surprisingly thorough, and accumulated a truly staggering amount of data over the next year. Alas, the phenomena they observed were generally low-level and unremarkable: mysterious lights, strange shadows, cold spots, warm spots, ringing call bells, muffled footsteps, whispers, and other strange noises. Price only visited the Rectory a handful of times, but his visits usually corresponded with a spike in paranormal activity. (Remember, he was a poltergeist magnet.)

Price and his observers did make one extraordinary discovery. The walls of the Rectory were still littered with ghost writing from the Foyster years which had never been erased. They discovered that if they responded to the ghost writing by writing beneath it, some unseen spirit would eventually reply. The replies were often illegible and nonsensical, but they were something. The observers began noting the locations of ghost writing, and realized that they were continuing to appear at a truly startling pace.

Every now and then Price would bust out the ouija board and conduct a seance. On various occasions he called forth the spirit of someone named “Carlos” (later identified as Henry Bull); a maid named Katie Boreham, who claimed to have been impregnated by Henry and then murdered by him; Harry Bull, who revealed where the phantom nun’s body was buried; and the phantom nun herself, who spoke only in cryptic and unhelpful generalities.

Alas, just as price was starting to make real breakthroughs, his lease expired and he was compelled to leave Borley once again. [record scratch]

Always Fresh, Always Delicious

After Price’s lease expired in the Fall of 1938, Borley Rectory was put up for sale and purchased by Captain William Heart Gregson. He and his two sons moved in and began extensive renovations.

The Gregsons did not see anything supernatural, but that may have been because they had to deal with all the looky-loos who came in droves to see “the most haunted house in England.” The curiosity seekers, souvenir hunters and amateur ghost-breakers still believed that the Rectory was abandoned and had no qualms about breaking and entering. They seemed intent on damaging the property faster than the Gregsons could repair it. 

Gregson couldn’t complain too much because he eventually planned on exploiting that fascination with Borley Rectory. Once his renovations were complete he planned to convert the house into a haunted bed-and-breakfast and sell tickets for self-guided ghost tours.

He never got the chance. On February 27, 1939 — Gregson’s first full night in the house — he accidentally knocked over an oil lamp while doing some work in the library.  When the lamp hit the floor the flame turned a bright blue and then suddenly exploded into a huge fireball. The furniture caught fire and books began leaping off the shelves to feed the flames. It spread quickly, faster than any normal fire should.

As the Gregsons and other locals shivered in the cold and waited for the fire brigade to arrive they noticed strange shapes moving around in the flames, and some of them witnessed a lady in gray walk out of the inferno and across the courtyard. The fire brigade eventually arrived to extinguish the fire, but it was too little, too late. A whole wing of the Rectory collapsed and had to be condemned. As he surveyed the damage Gregson noticed a single pair of footprints leading away from the smoldering ruins and down the Nun’s Walk… in one direction only.

The press had a field day, running headlines like “England’s Most Haunted House Commits Suicide.” [record scratch]

The Most Haunted House in England

After the fire, Harry Price realized that he had a short window of time where he could exploit Borley Rectory, and that window was quickly closing. He pulled together his notes into the 1940 book The Most Haunted House in England, the definitive work on the haunting.

It’s awful. It’s a bad sign that one of the chapters begins with the phrase, “What is evidence?” Whenever a writer starts asking you what the definition of a word is, they’re going to try and shift your understanding of that word. In Price’s case, he redefines “evidence” to mean “data.” 

In that vein, Price uses stilted language and highly specific terms to paint a vivid picture in your mind; but while his descriptions are all technically true, they are extremely misleading.

• When he says that a phenomena happened “in the presence of observers,” he does not mean that his observers were there and watched it happens. He means they were present on the property, even if they were far away.
• When an object “suddenly materialized” somewhere, he did not mean that it slowly faded into view like the TARDIS. He meant that it moved from one place to another and an observer did not see it happen.
• An object that “apported” across the room he did not teleport or levitate to its new location. It was thrown and the observer did not see what threw it.
• Any phenomena that cannot immediately assigned a cause is “ghostly” or “unearthly” or “unexplained” — though given Price’s failure to look for or consider mundane causes, a better adjective would be “uninvestigated.”

I won’t get into the specifics (we’ve covered most of the highlights already) but it’s worth noting that Price had so little material to work with the he had to throw in everything he had. The middle of the book is padded with meaningless bizarre anecdotes like “someone saw a weird insect in the garden once” which somehow manages to go on for pages and pages and pages.

At least Price saved the best for last, like the consummate showman he was. You see, something had happened during his time at Borley that had been sitting on until the time was right. During a seance conducted at the Rectory on March 27, 1938 he and several reliable witnesses received the following message:

Sunex Amures and one of the men mean to burn down the Rectory tonight at nine o’clock end of the haunting go to the Rectory and you will be able to see us enter into our own and under the ruins you will find bone of murdered wardens under the ruins means you to have proof of haunting of the rectory at Borley the understanding of which game tells the story of the murder which happened there

A series of further questions revealed that the fire would start “over the hall.”

A chilling prophecy, isn’t it? Too bad it’s meaningless.

Oh, there’s no reason to doubt that the seance happened as described, but let’s be honest: a prophecy that’s only revealed after it’s come true is no prophecy at all. And even if the prophecy was true, Sunex Amures (who ever that is) was wrong of all the particulars. He had the date wrong, he had the time wrong, he had the outcome wrong. He was right that the fire started “over the hall” but given the layout of the rectory that’s like saying “an important event will happen in the Western Hemisphere” — a 50/50 shot. The only thing he was right about was that the rectory was burned down, so of course everyone just focuses on that.

Anyway, The Most Haunted House in England was the right book at the right time. It became an international best-seller and made Borley Rectory more famous than ever.

So Price was none too happy when shortly after publication his former assistant Sidney Glanville wrote to him with the bad news that almost everything he had written about the history of the Rectory was wrong. There had been no convent or monastery in Borley or Bures. This… was problematic because the last half of the book was focused on retelling the legend of the phantom nun in its most sensationalistic form. 

Fortunately, Price was able to revisit his notes and come up with an alternative theory, which was published in his 1946 follow-up The End of Borley Rectory. 

The phantom was a Roman Catholic nun named “Marie Lairre,” who had left a Le Havre convent in 1667 to marry one of the Waldegraves and then had been strangled by him and buried at the site that would eventually become Borley Rectory. That would conveniently explain why there was a nun where there hadn’t been a convent, and also why there was a nun in England a century after Henry VIII got rid of them all.

There was just one problem: this was just nonsense, which had been revealed to a psychic during a seance and then elaborated on by a vicar obsessed with the hauntings. As usual no one could find historical documentation or evidence to back it up, so Price either manufactured new evidence or reinterpreted his old data in a more flattering light.

Some of the coins that had hurled about in 1929 were revealed to be religious souvenirs (basically pressed pennies for pilgrims), though it was not great that they post-dated Marie’s supposed murder. The fact that a French to English dictionary disappeared in 1885 and reappeared some fifty years later was offered as proof that the ghost had been trying to learn English so it could communicate with Marianne Foyster. (Because clearly only a ghost could lose something for fifty years.)

Once that became the new story it was amazing how quickly it caught on and Marie Lairre became a common visitor to seances. It was a lot like how all aliens became little grey man with big eyes after the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Anyway, The End of Borley is garbage. The sole purpose of the book is to get the revised nun story into print, and the other chapters are padded out with material that wasn’t strong enough to make it into the first book. Which is saying something because the first book wasted pages and pages and pages on a weird insect.

The End of Borley Rectory

The Rectory had been gutted by fire, but there were still occasional manifestations at the site. These were usually encounters with the phantom coach and nun, most of them witnessed by a single person and completely unverifiable.

Ghost hunters continued to explore the property (after giving Captain Gregson his due, of course). They unearthed relics and ruins and made wildly optimistic claims which always had to be walked back when actual archaeologists and historians took an interest.

A group of Spiritualists once claimed to have broken into the ruins, climbed up to the ruins of the “Blue Room” on the second floor and conducted seances there. They were almost certainly lying; the floor of the Blue Room mostly gone and the rest of the structure was highly unstable. It was a nice touch that one of the spirits they called forth was that of Harry Price, who had died in 1948.

After Price’s death the Society for Psychical Research went through his papers and realized that he had been pulling the wool over their eyes. They assembled a thorough report, The Haunting of Borley Rectory, detailing how he had exaggerated or manufactured most of the phenomena he had encountered. Price’s supporters fired back, correctly pointing out how SPR reviewers had done exactly what they accused Price of doing, leaping to unsupported conclusions based on on little or no evidence.

For two decades a debate raged back and forth on whether Harry Price was an honest if sometimes misguided investigator, or a charlatan faking psychic phenomena to increase his own fame. Which side you were on seemed to boil down to whether you already believed in the supernatural, which was never a good sign.

The argument was mostly settled by Trevor Hall’s 1978 biography The Search For Harry Price, which finally exposed the tangled web of lies that Britain’s greatest ghost-buster had spun around his private and public lives. Ever since then it’s been hard to take Price seriously, at least for scholars. True believers just act like the biography was never published and reflexively deny its evidence.

As for Borley Rectory itself, most of the ruins were leveled in the 1940s and the property was completely redeveloped in the 1970s. Nothing of the original structure remains. Paranormal activity and manifestations on the site seem to have completely ended, with no reports from long-term residents and only occasional reports from disturbed and over-excited individuals who have made the long trek out into the countryside and seem determined to have some sort of story to take home with them.

That hasn’t stopped crowds of amateur ghost-hunters from assembling each year on July 28 to see if they can catch a glimpse of the phantom nun. As usual, though, she only seems to show herself when there’s no one looking for her.