Borley is a tiny little village in Essex, situated almost entirely on one single road. But, while the village may be small, its history is long and infamous. Borley is home to Borley Church, naturally, portions of which are thought to date back to nearly a thousand years ago.
And, like any thousand-year-old church would, Borley Church has had its fair share of alleged hauntings. Phenomena reported there include sightings of ghostly monks and nuns wandering the grounds, and phantom music—both ghostly organ music and disembodied chanting.
In the church's later years there were even reports of messages left on the church's walls, and of bells ringing late at night without human intervention. These strange reports led to an investigation by none other than Ed and Lorraine Warren, the famous paranormal investigators who are probably most well-known in the 21st century for their fictionalised portrayals played by Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson in The Conjuring film series.
But despite all this, Borley Church is not the reason this little village is famous among ghost hunting circles and purveyors of the paranormal like you and I.
That infamy comes instead from the neighbouring Borley Rectory, a house built to serve as home to the Rector of Borley Church which, depending on who you ask, is often considered the most haunted house in England.
When Henry Bull was named rector of Borley Church in 1862, he set to work constructing a new home for him and his family, moving in a year later.
The house was designed to be the family home for generations of Anglican clergymen who served the church. But the site itself had a history.
Local legend told of a 14th-century tragedy. A monk from a nearby monastery had fallen in love with a nun from a convent across the river. When they tried to elope, they were caught. The monk was executed and the nun had been bricked up alive within the convent walls.
There's no historical record of this, but the story, as they do, made an impression.
The Bull family—Reverend Henry, his wife, and their 14 children—lived at the rectory for more than 60 years. During that time, they claimed to hear phantom footsteps and catch sight of a ghostly nun, wandering the grounds in silence. One of Bull's sons even built a garden summerhouse just to watch for her.
Locals also reported that they had seen a coach being driven on the grounds of the rectory at night, seemingly driven by two coachmen who were both missing their heads.
Henry Bull died in 1892 and the house passed to his son Harry. Upon Harry's death on June 9th 1927, the house became vacant until October 2nd 1928 when the Reverend Guy Smith and his wife moved in.
Shortly after moving in, the couple reported that they had been cleaning out a cupboard when they'd come across a brown paper package. Inside, they'd found a human skull. Following this, the Smiths began to experience the strange phenomena that previous residents and guests had reported--phantom footsteps, the ringing of servants bells that had long-since been disconnected. They even reported a sighting of a horse-drawn carriage moving through the grounds at night—could this be the same carriage from decades earlier, with its cranially-lacking pair of drivers?
Unnerved by this activity, the Smiths contacted the Daily Mirror. The newspaper, intrigued, sent a reporter—and a paranormal researcher named Harry Price.
The Smiths were disappointed—they had asked The Mirror to put them in touch with the society for psychical research. Price, however, assured the couple that he was a representative of the US branch of the SPR.
While the Mirror's reporter, V.C. Wall, had happily published exaggerated stories despite witnessing nothing first-hand, Harry Price took his role as paranormal investigator much more seriously.
Harry Price was born in London in 1881 and seems to have had an interest in the paranormal since he was very young, writing a play in his teenage years about a poltergeist he once claimed to have encountered, and getting local press attention due to his experiments trying to contact extraterrestrial life.
Price himself would later claim that his interest began when he was eight years old and met a native American magician who went by the name the Great Sequah while working for a travelling troupe of performers. The Great Sequah was a magician and performer, a trickster skilled in sleight of hand, a skill Price himself would become fascinated by and would train himself to be skilled in.
Price would claim that this simply acted as a gateway drug to his true passion, exploring and studying the paranormal with genuine belief. One has to wonder, however, how much a role his skill at sleight of hand might have played in his later career.
Price joined the Society of Psychical Research in 1920 and while he may now be known as a believer, his initial work was debunkings. Price exposed the spirit photographer William Hope as a fraud by covertly marking his photographic plates with a logo that would then appear in any photographs produced with those plates. When the logo did not appear, Price was able to prove that Hope had been swapping out his plates for plates provided to him with pre-prepared spirit images.
He also played a role in exposing notorious fraudulent medium Helen Duncan, proving that her seances were faked and the ectoplasm she claimed to be producing were various concoctions fashioned from chemicals, egg whites, and cheese cloth.
In Borley, though, Price seemed unusually quick to accept the claims of supernatural phenomena, reporting vases crashing to the floor, mysterious rapping sounds, and even fleeting sightings of apparitions.
Price wouldn't have much time to study the house, however, as the Smiths soon ran out of patience and moved out on July 14th, 1929, scarcely more than nine months after they had moved in.
It had taken more than a year before Borley Church would find a replacement, but on October 16th 1930, Reverend Lionel Algernon Foyster and his wife Marianne moved in to the rectory with their adopted daughter, Adelaide. The family had a personal connection to the property, with Lionel being a cousin of the Bull family who first built the house in 1862.
After they moved in, it began again. There were phantom footsteps, loud knocks, and disembodied whispers. And again there was an unnerving ringing of bells that were no longer connected to anything. Doors were found open or locked without explanation and furniture moved on its own.
Marianne quickly became the focal point. She claimed to be pushed, slapped, and thrown from her bed by an unseen force. Household objects were hurled across rooms, often narrowly missing her, but leaving her, on at least one occasion, with a black eye. Once, Marianne said her wedding ring vanished from her hand, only to reappear hours later on the floor.
Visitors reported being scratched or touched. Strange odours—of burning, or of rot--would suddenly fill a room and then disappear. And, sometimes, ghostly figured appeared at windows, or walked silently past doorways.
Then came the writing. Messages began to appear on the walls and on scraps of paper, often in a childlike scrawl. The most notable message read: "Marianne, please help me.”
Marianne was frightened, and deeply confused. But she stood by her story. Her husband, Lionel, attempted exorcisms, and wrote to Harry Price to report the increasingly violent phenomena.
Price stayed in touch with the Foysters, but he didn't conduct an in-depth investigation while they lived at the rectory. Instead, much of what we know from this period comes directly from letters and interviews with Marianne, which Price later used in his books.
Over 2,000 incidents were recorded during the Foysters' five-year stay, far more than any other era in the house's history. Skeptics would suggest that the phenomena had been staged, or psychologically driven--possibly even by Marianne herself, whether consciously or not.
Comments made later by Marianne seem to support this. There had been a considerable age difference between Lionel and Marianne, 21 years in total, and their relationship doesn't seem to have been a smooth one. Marianne would ultimately admit that she had conducted an affair with a lodger while living at the rectory, and had used the haunting to cover this up.
Marianne would eventually move out of the house, relocating to London with her lover to set up a business, though she would eventually return, moving back into the Rectory with a new husband, living with Lionel as her elderly father.
There are not many details available to shed much light on these strange details. Perhaps it was a marriage of convenience, or it started with genuine love and soured over time. Lionel's health was failing towards the end, so perhaps difficulties with his memory contributed to the unusual situation he found himself in towards the end as he felt unable to stand up for himself.
But before we paint him out to be a victim, let's not forget the black eyes that Marianne would so quickly blame on the ghosts—were these actually Lionel's doing? Or perhaps they were the work of Marianne's first lover?
Whatever the truth behind this strange story, there are many explanations more likely than a haunting.
But then... The Foysters weren't the first to have these experiences, and how do we explain the story of the Smiths, or of the Bulls before them?
Harry Price was not satisfied that he'd gotten to the bottom of the mystery and in 1937, he leased the property himself for a whole year in order to conduct a formal investigation.
He assembled a group of volunteers—scientists, students, enthusiasts--and set up nightly vigils hoping to capture irrefutable evidence of paranormal activity.
The results were mixed. Some witnesses recorded strange lights, moving objects, cold spots, and unexplained sounds. Others saw nothing at all. Still, Price compiled their reports into books and articles, further cementing Borley Rectory's reputation as a ghost hunter's dream, and ultimately leading to its christening as the most haunted house in Britain.
Then, in 1939, disaster struck. The new owner, Captain W.H. Gregson, accidentally knocked over an oil lamp, setting fire to the building. The blaze destroyed much of the structure, leaving it a charred, skeletal ruin.
In 1943, Harry Price, still refusing to give up, returned one last time to examine the rubble. He claimed to have uncovered human bones in the cellar, possibly those of a young woman, and held a Christian burial for the remains. He implied, of course, that they might belong to the tragic nun of legend.
After Price's death in 1948, the story began to unravel. The Society for Psychical Research re-examined his work and concluded that much of the phenomena could be explained--or were simply exaggerated.
Still, the legend lived on.
Even now, the grounds where the rectory once stood draws ghost hunters. The house is long-gone, its remains demolished in 1944, and the village has returned to quiet normality.
But the question remains. Was this haunting real, or at least, was the phenomena real? Or were they exaggerations made by people with something to gain?
Or maybe Borley Rectory is just an example of how stories grow in the telling—an innocent urban legend about a monk and a nun sharing a doomed affair can, one hundred years later, escalate to an exorcism.
