Built
in 1863 for the Reverend Henry Bull, the Borely Rectory now has the reputation
as The Most Haunted House in England. In fact, when a later owner, Capt.
W. H. Gregson addressed an envelope with those words and mailed it from
overseas, it arrived at his home with no problem.
According to legend,
a monk and a num who resided in the Rectory ran off together, but were
soon apprehended. The monk was Summarily executed, the nun was walled
up and allowed to starve to death. (The picture to the left shows Gregson
standing outside of this room.) Sightings of their ghosts persist to this
day.
The most famous residents
of Borely Rectory, excluding the ghosts themselves, were the Reverend
Lionel Foyster and his wife Marianne. The Foysters moved into the rectory
on Oct. 16, 1930, and departed exactly five years later after numerous
poltergeist and other paranormal events.
Mrs.
Foyster was the target of most of the ghostly activity, and the subject of various
writings on the walls and scraps of paper around the building. Examples are
pictured above, below, and to the left. The evening after Mrs. Foyster wrote
the question "What do you want?" an answer was scrawled below--"rest."
Taking the bull by the horns, the Revd Foyster
had Borley Rectory exorcised. The result was
positive at first and the manifestations stopped.
However, it was not long before they reappeared
in a new form. Strange music would be heard from
the nearby Church, communion wine would
unaccountably turn into ink, the servants bells
in the house rang of their own accord and the
Foyster's child was attacked by "something
horrible". The rector had had enough. The
family left and all successive incumbents refused
to live in the house.
Intrigued
by the further reports of psychic activity at
Borley, Harry Price returned in 1937 and rented
the building himself. He advertised in The
Times for trustworthy assistants and, in a
prolonged psychic investigation, he attempted to
get to the bottom of the hauntings. With a team
of forty-eight observers he logged an
extraordinary number of psychic phenomena. The
most bizarre was perhaps the results of a seance
held on 27th March 1938. A ghostly communicant
from beyond the grave claimed that the the
rectory would catch fire in the hallway that
night and burn down. A nun's body would be
discovered amongst the ruins. An extraordinary
assertion, particularly as nothing happened.
Harry Price's
lease ran out later that year, and the building
was taken on by one Captain Gregson. He too was
subjected to continuing mysterious happenings,
including the disappearance of his two dogs.
Then, exactly eleven months to the day after the
curious ghostly warning, an oil lamp
unaccountably fell over in the hall and Borley
Rectory burnt to the ground. Witnesses claimed to
have seen ghostly figures roaming around and
through the flames, while a nun's face peered
down from an upper window.
Harry Price returned again in 1943. Digging in
the cellars, he discovered the jawbone of a young
woman. Convinced that it was part of the body of
the spectral nun, he attempted to end the
hauntings by giving the bone a Christian burial.
It
does not seem to have worked. Supernatural
happenings are still reported from the site of
the rectory and the nearby churchyard. And Borley
has an eerie air about the place that visitors
cannot help but remark upon.
