Borley Rectory: Haunting or Hoax?

Welcome to Weird Wednesday! Today we’re headed to another World’s Most Haunted House (sure are a lot of those), this time in Essex, England. Borley Rectory’s claim to fame is a years-long investigation by professional parapsychologists. So what did they find out about this spookiest of houses? Let’s step inside and see…

Okay, so first of all, we can’t actually step inside, because Borley Rectory no longer exists. The house was torn down in 1944, after being largely destroyed by a fire in 1939. But before that, the rectory led a full life.

A rectory is a house for a rector, a member of the Church of England clergy. Borley Rectory was built in the town of Borley in 1862, next to Borley Church, for Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull and his 14 children. (Unlike Catholics, Church of England clergy are allowed to marry.)

The first reports of hauntings came from Bull’s children and locals who heard footsteps, saw ghostly nuns, and witnessed carriages with headless horsemen in the drive. Rumor said there had once been a monastery on the site, where a priest had an affair with a nun, who ended up walled up alive in her convent as punishment. However, there are no historical records to back this up.

Bull was succeeded as rector by his son, and in 1928, after the son’s death, a new family moved in: Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife. They also reported spooky stuff, especially after the wife supposedly discovered the skull of a young woman in a cupboard. 

The Smiths didn’t mess around: fed up with phantom lights, footsteps, bells, and that creepy coach, they called in the pros: The Society for Psychical Research. The SPR, which still exists, performs scientific studies of paranormal phenomena. The Smiths were also put in contact with another paranormal researcher, who would give Borley Rectory its fame: Harry Price. Price, among other things, was an expert in sleight of hand and conjuring. How coincidental that when Price showed up, Borley Rectory went wild.

The Foysters left Borley Rectory in 1935, after which Harry Price took out a year-long lease himself. Borley Rectory was about to be investigated for genuine hauntings by a man who was already suspected of faking phenomena (for instance, a reporter hit by a poltergeist-hurled stone in 1929 discovered a whole bunch more stones…in Price’s pockets).

Price recruited volunteers who held seances and reported making contact with that phantom nun and another strange presence who claimed he would burn down the building in 1938. The ghost was late by a year: in 1939, a new owner moved in and accidentally overturned an oil lamp, sparking a fire that consumed much of the house.

But Harry Price wasn’t done with Borley Rectory. He wrote two books on the case, claiming the hauntings were real. In 1943, he dug through the ashes of the house and found two bones which he asserted were human. Locals figured they belonged to a pig.

Price died in 1948, after which, some former colleagues from the SPR conducted their own investigation, which concluded the paranormal phenomena were either natural (as in, created by animals or the wind) or faked, mostly by Harry Price.

But real or not, Borley Rectory is a great starting place for stories! Here are some directions you could go:

• Case 1: It’s all real. Straight-up horror in a gothic mansion: the horrific murder of a nun who took a lover, knocking on mirrors, stones flying through the air, headless horsemen—there’s so much to choose from. Typically a haunted house story involves characters who won’t or can’t leave a haunted location, and there’s good reason for that here: a rector whose house comes with the job is hardly able to relocate. The backstory of your rectory is up to you: you can get into detail about the doomed nun, or you can leave it up to the imagination: the reader only knows there is something very wrong with this house.

• Case 2: It’s all fake. The opposite end of the spectrum: somebody has staged a haunting. It could be the family living in the house: Mrs. Foyster admitted faking phenomena to cover up an affair she was having with a lodger. It could be a parapsychologist trying to make a name for himself. It could be locals who don’t like their new rector and want to chase him out, a reporter looking for a big story, or a few local business owners who need a tourist draw. Bonus if anybody’s talented at sleight-of-hand! The question is, who buys the story? The faker runs the risk of terrifying the family, dividing the locals, and bringing publicity the town and church may not want.

• Case 3: It’s all real but no one believes it (until it’s too late). This is the classic horror set up for a tale of ghost hunting. You’ve either got psychic investigators who are secretly skeptics (and may incidentally be good at stage magic), or a bunch of teens wanting to party in an abandoned hospital who like the thrill of a definitely-not-really-haunted hookup. But everybody soon realizes, to their terror, that there’s a real haunting going on. Normally this ends up with most characters dying, but you can have them escape if you like. But it may become their life’s mission to prove they really saw a ghost…and that may not end well.

• Case 4: It’s all fake but everybody believes it’s real. That is, everybody except the person who figured out the nun is just a lady who walks to her night shift job in a dark cloak five times a week, the noises in the walls are rats, and the ghostly moaning is the wind in the courtyard where the acoustics are weird. But they can’t convince anybody they’ve solved it. Why not? Well, parapsychological investigators may desperately want to discover something real. The family might be so terrified they’re beyond reach of logic. Or the locals might just be fond of their ghost. They’ve named a sandwich after him at the cafe, come on, you can’t debunk him!

• Case 5: Pious fraud. Pious fraud is when a believer in a paranormal phenomenon is engaged in faking that phenomenon. The classic example is that of a church with a weeping statue of a saint: a certain congregant truly believes the statue miraculously weeps, but when observers come to test it, the statue remains dry. The believer is thus tempted to fake the crying, just this once, if it’s necessary to make others believe. So in a haunted house, this would be someone who believes there is a ghost, but fakes the haunting when the researchers are around, in order to prove what they think is the truth. As author, you get to decide: is there a ghost or not? If there is, why does the ghost not perform for the researchers? If not, what (or who) convinced your pious fraudster so completely?

Thanks for spending your Weird Wednesday here! I’d like to point out the most dangerous thing ever to occur in Borley Rectory was the house fire, so check those smoke detectors, folks.

Sources & further reading:

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. “Borley Rectory.” The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits. Facts on File, 1992. On Goodreads 

The Most Haunted House in England: Borley Rectory: Burials and Beyond

The Haunting of Borley Rectory: University of Maryland, Baltimore County Library

Borley Rectory: Wikipedia

Harry Price: Wikipedia