GREAT BRITAIN: The Ghosts of Borley

By October 1928 the ministry at Borley parish had stood vacant for some time. Borley Rectory, a rambling, ramshackle Victorian barn of a house, sprawled on an Essex hillside, had little to offer the wife of any rector. Its roof leaked; its plumbing was in hopeless disrepair; its corners and closets were cluttered with the detritus of ages; rats and mice infested its secret corridors; and many of its rooms were unfurnished. To the Rev. Guy Eric Smith, a man of middle age newly ordained to the ministry, all this was of little account—a parish was a parish. But what the Rev. Mr. Smith did not know was that Borley Rectory was the haunt not only of mice and cobwebs but the headquarters as well of what seemed to be the busiest set of ghosts in all England.

Borley’s haunts included a tall stranger in a top hat who paid bedside calls on unsuspecting parlor maids, an aged family retainer long since dead, a lurking prowler who went without a hat and without a head as well, a phantom coach that rolled wildly through the front yard behind a brace of phantom horses. Also in the ghostly cast: a wistfully mourning lady variously identified as 1) Arabella Waldegrave, daughter of a 17th century local lord, 2) an English nun whose weakness for a monk in a monastery, said to have occupied the rectory site, had led to her being sealed up alive in a wall, and 3) a French nun, Marie Lairre, who had renounced her vows to become the bride of a Waldegrave only to be strangled and buried in a cellar for her devotion.

Sixteen Hours. All or most of this was well known to the villagers of Borley when the Smiths took over their parish. In local pubs the rectory was known as “the most haunted house in England.” Within a year, thanks to Rector Smith himself and an enthusiastic ghost hunter named Harry Price, its infamy had spread throughout the nation. Harry Price, an affable hobbyist of independent means, was far and away Britain’s best-known investigator of psychic phenomena. His books on the subject were legion and readable, and his spectacular exposures of fake spiritualists were invariably good for pages of newspaper copy.

Called in by a London newspaper to investigate Parson Smith’s complaints, Harry sped to Borley Rectory on June 12, 1929. Soon the old place began acting up as it never had before. Keys shot out of their keyholes like projectiles. Bells rang with no one to ring them. Pebbles and candlesticks hurtled through the air. Rappings and tappings sounded from all sides like a telegraphers’ convention. Even the ghostly nun Marie put in a polite appearance in honor of the visitor. Altogether, wrote Price later, “it was a day to be remembered even by an experienced investigator . . . Sixteen hours of thrills!”

From that time on, Borley Rectory’s position as the No. 1 haunted house of the land went virtually unchallenged. Tenants came and went, but scarcely a year passed without some new and startling account of Borley’s restless specters. Even the destruction of the old place by fire in 1939 failed to calm the ghosts who were seen by some disporting themselves in the flames. If there were any skeptics left, Price’s own volumes, The Most Haunted House in England and The End of Borley Rectory, soon dispelled them. Even Sir Ernest Jelf, Senior Master of His Majesty’s Supreme Court, examined Price’s evidence and confessed himself “at a loss to understand what cross-examination could possibly shake it.”

Pebbles & Pranks. Only Britain’s learned and incorruptible Society of Psychical Research, to which Harry Price himself belonged, held out. An institution as fussily scrupulous about the authenticity of English ghosts as are the royal heralds over English titles, the society appointed three researchers to check Price’s facts. Just published in England in a volume worthy to stand on any bookshelf alongside the best of Dorothy Sayers’ adult mysteries, their findings seem destined to lay for all time the ghosts of Borley Rectory. At the least, say Researchers Eric Dingwall, Kathleen Goldney and Trevor Hall, Price was guilty of “overtelling” his tale.

In retracing Price’s steps, Dingwall & Co. have found many explanations for the goings-on at Borley that require no ghosts to support them. An early rector, to whom some of the first visions appeared, was found to have been a chronic victim of a disease which caused him to sleep, perchance to dream, almost constantly. Price’s own unpublished papers reveal that Mrs. Foyster, the young and restless wife of the aged and ineffective rector who followed the Smiths into Borley Rectory, showed a naughty tendency to fake ghostly manifestations. And Price, himself, it turned out, was not above tossing a pebble or two from a well-stocked pocket to enliven a ghostless séance.

In the close fellowship of British ghost hunters, whose passionate efforts to expose psychic hoaxes are coupled with an ardent desire to believe in the real thing, there was no more joy over the exposure of Harry Price than there was among anthropologists over the fall of the Piltdown man (TIME, Nov. 30, 1953). “Our criticisms have given us no satisfaction,” wrote Price’s accusers. Harry Price himself, having died in 1948, was beyond making any rebuttal, unless by further spiritual manifestation. The whole business, mourned the Glasgow Herald, “is a melancholy proof of human frailty.”