Borley Rectory

The story

Borley is a village in Essex, near Long Melford. The rectory there was built in the early 1860s for the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull and his family; sources give 1862 or 1863. Wikipedia mentions an earlier rectory that burned in 1841, from a single source. The big Gothic-style house passed to Bull’s son Harry, whose death on 9 June 1927 left it empty. On 2 October 1928 the Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife moved in.

What we read about the first decades is mostly retrospective. What turned a village rectory into a national story was the press. On 10 June 1929 the Daily Mirror ran a report, and two days later the psychic researcher Harry Price made his first visit. The Smiths left on 14 July 1929. From 16 October 1930 to October 1935 the rector was the Reverend Lionel Foyster, with his wife Marianne; the heaviest reported activity falls in 1931 and 1932. In May 1937 Price rented the house for a year, and a notice in The Times of 25 May 1937 (one source, Wikipedia) asked for volunteer observers.

On 27 February 1939 the house burned. Press reports quoted by Price blame an oil lamp that overturned while the new owner, Captain Gregson, was sorting books; Wikipedia says the insurer concluded the fire seemed deliberate. Price dug in the cellar in 1943 and bones he found, a jaw among them, were buried at Liston. The ruin was demolished in 1944. Price died in 1948.

The legend

The central figure is a nun. Price wrote in The Most Haunted House in England (1940) that three daughters of the Bull family, Ethel, Freda and Mabel, saw a nun-like figure on 28 July 1900; he records interviews with the sisters on 13 June 1929 and 29 March 1939 (Mabel died in 1936). Price then says one girl ran to fetch a fourth sister, Elsie, who also saw the figure, and he later writes of “the four sisters,” so Wikipedia’s four daughters agrees with him. The figure was said to glide along a garden path called the Nun’s Walk, mostly in the evening and always on 28 July, as the tradition Price collected had it; of the every-year claim he wrote, “I do not think this is correct.” One entry in the Psi Encyclopedia mentions reports of stone-falls and the nun in 1885 and 1886, but that rests on a single source and we could not check it. A romantic back-story, tied to a monastery supposedly built around 1362, has a monk executed and a nun from a nearby convent bricked up alive. It was judged in 1938 to have no known historical basis and may have been invented by the rector’s children. Wikipedia suggests it could come from Walter Scott’s poem Marmion or from Rider Haggard’s novel Montezuma’s Daughter.

The nun gained a name only late. At sittings with a planchette in Streatham in late October 1937, specifically those of 28 and 31 October with a participant named Helen Glanville, the name “Lairre” and then “Mary Lairre” appeared in Price’s transcript (later accounts say Marie), a French novice said to have been murdered at the site. That is eight years after the press attention began. The Society for Psychical Research, reported in the Evening Star of Washington on 24 December 1954, said the nun “never existed” and that studies identifying her as Marie Lairre did not stand up to close scrutiny; we did not see their archive work ourselves. A canon, Phythian-Adams, thought a French woman of that name might have been the victim, according to the Psi Encyclopedia.

Other reports include a coach and horses, dragging footsteps, bells ringing by themselves, objects moving, flying bricks, writing on walls during the Foyster years (as Price describes it), and a young woman’s skull in a parcel found by Mrs Smith in 1928. The Daily Mirror of 10 June 1929, as quoted by Price, spoke of the “sound of slow, dragging footsteps” and a maid who said she had seen “a nun walking in the wood.” Wikipedia adds that, when Price arrived on 12 June, new phenomena such as thrown stones and a vase and tapped messages from a mirror frame began, and stopped when he left; Mrs Smith later said she suspected him, an expert conjurer, of faking them.

Press retellings escalated. The Detroit Evening Times of 11 October 1942 wrote: “the heartbroken nun still glides through the glades of Borley Rectory, the most haunted house in England.” The Wilmington Morning Star of 14 October 1946 claimed a transparent nun had been seen by at least 200 people. Meanwhile the judgment of specialists turned. In 1956 an SPR report by Dingwall, Goldney and Hall, The Haunting of Borley Rectory, concluded that Price had presented a distorted account and that the phenomena were explained by illusion, rodents and trickery (we have read only summaries; the report itself is access-restricted). The Psi Encyclopedia says Marianne Foyster told the investigator Iris Owen in a 1977 interview that Price knew the so-called “Diary of Occurrences” was fictitious and that her husband had faked some events; we know this only through that summary, and a 2000 book, We Faked the Ghosts of Borley, is one we have not read. In 1969 Robert Hastings defended Price in part in the SPR’s Proceedings, and in 1973 Tabori and Underwood published Ghosts of Borley. On this evidence, the fame of the 1929 events owes much to a newspaper and one investigator.

What remains today

The rectory no longer exists. A fire badly damaged it in 1939 and what was left came down in 1944. Four bungalows built in the 1960s occupy the former grounds, which are private. What we can place in the area is the parish church of St Mary and the remains of Borley Hall; the Psi Encyclopedia also mentions a cottage from the old stable block that escaped the fire, but we did not verify that it still stands. The Psi Encyclopedia says the church is monitored by video because of visitors, though it does not date that statement. So the main thing you can see today is a village, a church exterior and the countryside, not any part of the famous house; nothing marks where it stood that we could verify.

Visiting

There is nothing of the rectory to see and the land where it stood is private, so please do not go looking for it or enter gardens. The church has drawn rowdy visitors and has closed-circuit television, according to the Psi Encyclopedia; we did not verify whether it is open, so check locally before you go, and treat it as a place of worship. The best way to follow the case is through Price’s 1940 book, which is on the Internet Archive and gives his own account, set against the Psi Encyclopedia entry and the 1956 findings.

Sources

1. Wikimedia Commons category : Borley Rectory — Wikimedia Commons
2. Borley Rectory — Psi Encyclopedia (Society for Psychical Research)
3. The Most Haunted House in England (Harry Price) — Internet Archive, 1940
4. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.