Borley Rectory

Borley Rectory was a rambling red-brick house of some twenty-three rooms built in the early 1860s by the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, rector of the small parish of Borley, on the Essex side of the border with Suffolk. It stood opposite the parish church, and a wing was added to hold Bull’s large family of fourteen children. His son Harry Bull succeeded him as rector and lived there until his death in 1927. The house never had gas or electricity.

The ghost story began with the Bull family. On July 28, 1900, four of the Bull sisters said they saw a nun-like figure gliding through the garden at dusk. Local tales added a phantom coach and a legend of a medieval monk executed for loving a nun, who was walled up alive — a story with no historical basis, which may have been borrowed from Victorian fiction and was dismissed as early as 1938. When the Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife moved in in 1928, they reported ringing bells, footsteps and lights, and asked the Daily Mirror to put them in touch with psychical researchers.

The paper sent Harry Price, a well-known ghost hunter and accomplished amateur conjuror, in June 1929. As soon as he arrived, pebbles and a vase flew and messages were tapped out on a mirror frame; when he left, the activity stopped. Mrs. Smith later said she suspected Price himself. Under the next rector, Lionel Foyster, and his much younger wife Marianne (1930–35), the reports exploded: bells, smashed windows, thrown bottles and pencil scrawls on the walls addressed to “Marianne.” Investigators who visited came to suspect that Marianne was producing much of it, and she later admitted she had seen no apparitions and that some events were her own jokes or the wind.

In 1937 Price rented the empty house for a year and recruited 48 volunteer “official observers” through an advertisement in The Times. A planchette séance in 1938 produced a French nun, “Marie Lairre,” supposedly murdered on the site, and a spirit who promised to burn the house down. On February 27, 1939, the new owner, Captain W. H. Gregson, knocked over an oil lamp and the rectory was gutted by fire; the insurers suspected the blaze was deliberate. Price dug in the cellars in 1943 and found fragments of bone, which were buried in nearby Liston churchyard; locals said they were a pig’s. The ruins were demolished in 1944.

After Price died in 1948, the Daily Mail journalist Charles Sutton said that on a 1929 visit he had been hit by a pebble and found Price’s pockets full of stones. Three Society for Psychical Research members, Eric Dingwall, Mollie Goldney and Trevor Hall — two of them former associates of Price — re-examined the whole case and published The Haunting of Borley Rectory in 1956. They concluded that Price had distorted the record and probably manufactured some phenomena, and that many others could be put down to rats, the house’s odd acoustics, imagination and pranks. Price’s defenders, notably Robert Hastings in an SPR report of 1969 and the ghost writer Peter Underwood, disputed the fraud charges, but the consensus among ghost historians is that the “most haunted house in England” was largely a creation of its investigators and the press.

A gliding nun in the garden, a phantom coach, footsteps, ringing servants’ bells, lights in windows, thrown stones and bottles, smashed glass, writing on the walls, and Marianne Foyster reportedly thrown from her bed — reported by the Bull sisters, the Smiths, the Foysters, Price and his observers.

The rectory garden and the “Nun’s Walk” (the nun, usually at dusk), the Blue Room (raps and séances), the passages and bedrooms (wall writing and poltergeist activity in the Foyster years), and the cellars, where Price dug for bones. Ghost hunters also visit Borley Church across the road.

Price’s books The Most Haunted House in England (1940) and The End of Borley Rectory (1946) made the house a legend; the BBC shelved a 1956 program for fear of a lawsuit from Marianne Foyster, and later documentaries, novels and films — including Borley Rectory (2017) and The Ghosts of Borley Rectory (2021) — keep the story alive. Price’s papers are held at Senate House Library, University of London.