Borley Rectory · Apparition · 49:47
1975: Meet THE GHOST HUNTERS | Classic BBC Documentaries
BBC Archive · YouTube
The BBC’s own 1975 documentary ends at Borley, where Ghost Club president Peter Underwood makes the case for “the most haunted house in England” and plays tapes recorded in the church.
About this video
The Ghost Hunters was first shown on BBC One on December 4, 1975, and the BBC Archive put the full programme on YouTube in 2024. The reporter Hugh Burnett travels around England meeting people who spend their spare time chasing ghosts: the parapsychologist Benson Herbert testing a Wiltshire pub with a negative-ion pistol, the investigator Andrew Green in Sussex, a retired naval commander in Hampstead with cameras rigged to fire when the air moves, a ghost-tour guide in Bath and the rector of Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire.
The last fifteen minutes belong to Borley. Burnett stands with Peter Underwood, president of the Ghost Club, opposite the site of the rectory that burned in 1939, while Underwood argues that the evidence for the haunting is “absolutely shattering.” Then a local investigator, Mr Croom-Hollingsworth, describes watching the Borley nun for about eleven minutes, and Burnett and Underwood sit in the church to listen to the knocks and sighs his team recorded there.
Key moments
- 1:04Benson Herbert investigates a reputedly haunted pub in Wiltshire
- 8:54Andrew Green in Sussex, who thinks most ghosts are tricks of the mind or the past
- 14:43Commander John Cutton’s automatic ghost cameras in Hampstead
- 19:05Mrs Royal and her husband Ken, ghost tours in Bath
- 29:10Bolton Abbey, Yorkshire, and the rector who has seen its priest
- 34:31Borley: Peter Underwood makes the case for “the most haunted house in England”
- 38:10Croom-Hollingsworth describes watching the nun for about eleven minutes
- 42:25Recordings made at night in Borley church
What to look for
Burnett is a good-humoured skeptic — when Underwood describes a skull found at Borley with an abscess in the jaw, Burnett asks whether this is the ghost of “a nun with toothache” — but the film gives Underwood the floor, and he was the most energetic defender of Borley’s reputation. Some of what he says on camera was already contested in 1975. In 1956 three members of the Society for Psychical Research, Eric Dingwall, Mollie Goldney and Trevor Hall, had concluded that Harry Price distorted the record and probably faked some phenomena, and the legend of a nun murdered on the site rests on a 1938 planchette séance rather than any historical document.
Underwood also says the Smiths arrived in 1937; in fact the Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife moved in in 1928 and called in the Daily Mirror, which sent Price, in June 1929. The church recordings are interesting as an artefact of 1970s ghost hunting, but the programme offers no way to rule out ordinary causes such as the building settling, animals or the wind.
Background: Society for Psychical Research, Psi Encyclopedia: Borley Rectory · Wikipedia: Borley Rectory
