Borley Rectory: Harry Price's Year in the Most Haunted House in England (1937-1938)

Borley Rectory stood on Hall Road in Borley, north Essex, near the Suffolk border. Red brick. Gothic Revival. 23 rooms on nearly 4 acres, with Borley Church across the road.

On 28 July 1900, four Bull sisters saw a nun on the lawn. Ethel Bull said she "half walked, half glided, along the Nun's Walk", head bowed. When the eldest sister went to meet her, "the nun turned and came as it were to meet her". The sisters fled to the house. A maidservant later saw a coach drawn by two brown horses "gallop through the hedge, sweep across the lawn and vanish into thin air".

In 1928 Rev. Guy Eric Smith and Mabel Smith moved in. In a cupboard they found the skull of a young woman. Servants' bells rang although disconnected. On 12 June 1929 Harry Price arrived, and the Daily Mirror reporter V.C. Wall was there too. A glass roof was broken, and pebbles were thrown.

Then came Rev. Lionel Algernon Foyster and his wife Marianne. Price counted "at least two thousand inexplicable phenomena". Stones and bottles were thrown. Doors locked and unlocked. One wall writing read "Marianne, please help me get out".

May 1937. Price rented the rectory for one year. An advertisement in The Times sought "responsible persons of leisure and intelligence, intrepid, critical, and unbiassed". Price recruited 48 "Official Observers", mostly students, working a rota. Among them were an army colonel, a doctor and the engineer Sidney H. Glanville.

They logged cold spots, taps, footsteps and lights. On 6 October 1937, Mark Kerr-Pearse was locked in the Base Room "with the key on the inside". From October 1937, planchette séances told of "Marie Lairre", a French nun supposedly murdered in 1667 and buried under the cellar. On 27 March 1938 an entity calling itself "Sunex Amures" said the rectory would burn "at nine o'clock that night". Nothing happened that night.

27 February 1939. The new owner, Captain W.H. Gregson, upset an oil lamp in the hall. The rectory burned. Miss Williams of Borley Lodge said she saw the figure of the ghostly nun in the upstairs window. The insurers concluded the fire seemed to have been started deliberately.

In August 1943 Price excavated the cellar and found a female human jaw bone and medallions. Locals thought the bones belonged to a pig. The house was demolished in 1944.

In 1956 E.J. Dingwall, K.M. Goldney and T.H. Hall published their report for the Society for Psychical Research. The evidence, they wrote, "appears to diminish in force and finally to vanish away". They pointed to rats, acoustics, suggestion, memory distortion and fraud. The famous "flying brick", photographed by David E. Scherman for Life on 5 April 1944, was, Scherman said, thrown by a workman hidden behind a wall. Marianne Foyster admitted some fakery, yet insisted some incidents stayed unexplained.

In 1969 Robert Hastings found the charges against Price "largely unfounded". Price held the phenomena genuine until his death in 1948. Today his claims are generally discredited by ghost historians. Yet Borley endures, in books, in the 1975 BBC documentary The Ghost Hunters, and in films such as The Banishing. Price titled his 1940 book with the phrase the Daily Mirror is said to have coined. The Most Haunted House in England.