England’s Most Haunted Mansion?

The story of Borley Rectory is a nexus point between the human experience and the paranormal, combining death, sex, lies, ghosts, mysterious messages and a psychic researcher who might not be quite what he seems. While it burned down in dubious circumstances in 1939, Borley Rectory staked its claim in the history books as being “the most haunted house in England”, so let’s take a spooky glide along the Nun’s Walk and see what the spirits have to say about this most curious of buildings.

The History of the Mystery

In case you didn’t know, a rectory is a home set up for the clergyman in charge of a parish, otherwise known as a rector, and his family. Borley Rectory was built in 1862 and was quite a huge, sprawling thing, noted by Harry Price in his book “Borley Rectory: A Century of Poltergeists” as:

a large, rambling, uncomfortable and inconvenient house built (…) by the Rev. Henry Bull (…)who was incumbent of the parish. This red brick monstrosity was enlarged in 1875, the new wing converting the existing structure into a rectangular building, containing thirty-five rooms, almost completely enclosing a bricked courtyard. This very large house was needed for Mr. Bull’s very large family.

Indeed, the Reverend Henry Bull had 14 children.

This colossal house, basically in the middle of nowhere, soon gained a reputation for the supernatural. The figure of a ghostly nun was seen in the grounds, the Bull children saw a spectral figure in their garden that disappeared into the ether as they approached. Eventually, the story of the history of the land where the rectory stood was uncovered. In the 1300s, a monastery had stood on the grounds at Borley.

A monk from the monastery had fallen in love with a nun from the nunnery at Bures, about 9 miles southeast of Borley. When their forbidden love was discovered, the monk was hanged and the poor nun was bricked up into the walls of the monastery, the place where Borley Rectory would later be built.

Another nun met a horrible fate in the 18th century. Marie Lairre, a young nun from France, travelled to England to the nunnery at Bures but met local manor-owner, Henry Waldengrave. They married, but Waldengrave ended up killing Lairre in a fit of rage, burying her in the basement of his manor house. One hundred years later, Reverend Henry Bull had Borley Rectory constructed on this same patch of ground.

The ghostly nuns were a well-known sight around Borley, as the Bull children found out, with the route that one of them was seen on being referred to as “Nun’s Walk”. As well as these unsettling visitations, a ghostly carriage driven by two headless coachmen was reported as being seen on the rural roads around the area. Reverend Bull died in 1892, but the Bulls remained at Borley Rectory as his son, Harry Bull, took over as rector.

Harry reportedly saw headless men around the grounds, and the house was full of strange noises such as unexplained crashes, footsteps and creaking. Harry Bull died in 1927, and ownership of Borley Rectory passed to two of his younger sisters.

Filling the vacant position at the rectory in 1928 came Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife, Mabel, recently returned from working in India. They too saw the ghost coach and ghost nuns, as well as hearing dragging footsteps coming from an empty room, mysterious lights shining without an apparent source and doors opening and closing by themselves. One day, when Mabel was cleaning out some cupboards, she found a brown paper parcel. Inside was a human skull. The activity started ratcheting up, with objects flying across rooms and disconnected bells ringing by themselves. In need of help and without knowing where to turn, the Smiths contacted the Daily Mirror newspaper which sent one Harry Price to investigate. More on him later. Price was known as a ghost hunter and psychic researcher who had a track record of discrediting fake spiritualist mediums. When he arrived at Borley Rectory, Price was pelted with stones, tapping sounds were heard coming from behind a mirror and the Smith’s daughter was locked into a room that nobody had a key for. Price left without getting to the bottom of anything and after only 9 months at Borley Rectory, the Smiths left too.

The next incumbents were Reverend Lionel Foyster, a man in ill health, and his wife Marrianne, who was in fine health and twenty years his junior. Foyster was related to the Bulls, and the pair, plus their adopted daughter, had come from Canada to take up the position at Borley in 1930. Right from the start, the Foysters were plagued with incidents of objects moving and strange noises.

On their very first night in the rectory, they heard a voice calling out Marrianne’s name and witnessed a ghostly grey figure on the stairs. Marrianne seemed to be the focus of much of the activity, stating that she had been thrown out of her bed on several occasions. Strange messages started appearing on the walls of the rectory, some addressing Marrianne by name and asking her to get help.

The writing was messy and scribbled over itself, making it almost impossible to decipher. She wrote underneath asking for more information, but the messages were never clear enough to understand. Reverend Foyster kept a detailed diary of the occurrences, and here are a few extracts to give you an idea:

October 16, 1930. Jugs and other utensils disappearing and coming back. Peculiar smells - especially one most nearly resembling lavender noticeable particularly in our bedroom. Bells rung.

A bracelet detached from wrist-watch while Marianne is in room only a few feet away, and no one else in the house, besides Adelaide, who was in her own room. Bracelet was taken and has never been seen since. Lavender bag, which no one has ever seen before, discovered on mantelpiece of Marianne’s sewing-room. Lavender bag disappears and again appears in my pocket: discovered when putting on coat one morning.”

“February 26. Books found under our bed in the morning. A consignment of hymn books, unknown before, discovered on the rack over the kitchen range in the afternoon. In the evening Marianne is given a terrific blow in the eye - a cut under it; black eye next day - by an invisible/assailant on the landing outside bedroom. She was carrying a candle.”

“June 7. Stones thrown in the evening. A chair in spare room (in which Marianne was lying in bed, very unwell) twice thrown over. Strange noises heard on landing during the night: bangs, taps on door, etc.

Trying to get to the bottom of these visitations, Reverend Foyster reached out again to Harry Price. Price came back to Borley Rectory but was suspicious of the Foyster’s story and blamed Marrianne for pranking everyone and being behind the whole thing. The Foysters didn’t take this too well and sent Price packing. Eventually, after putting up with all the paranormal activity for several years and due to Lionel’s worsening health, the Foysters left Borley Rectory in 1935.

Foyster’s diary, which he stopped writing in after a while, contained over 2000 instances of unexplained phenomena.

After giving the place time to air out a bit, there didn’t seem to be any available rectors willing to come and stay in Borley Rectory, so eventually, in 1938, who should rent the place out for a year to carry out his very own investigations but Harry Price himself. He put an ad in the papers for volunteers and ended up with 48 people to come and stay in the house for various periods of time, and note any observations of unusual activity. During this time, Price and some other researchers carried out automatic writing sessions with a planchette, which is a small wooden plank thing like you would use in a Ouija board.

It has a hole in it to hold a pen or pencil, and this creates the writing that is channelled from the spirit world. They managed to contact the spirit of murdered nun, Marie Lairre, and found out that her bones still lay in the grounds of Borley somewhere, unable to find rest. They also contacted someone who called themselves “Sunex Amures” and declared that the rectory would burn down, revealing the bones of a murder victim.

Borley Rectory did burn down in 1939, due to the carelessness of the new owner, Captain W.H. Gregson. A neighbour reported seeing a ghostly nun in the window as the flames took hold. Remembering Sunex Amures’s prophecy, Harry Price returned to the rubble of Borley Rectory and discovered some bones in the wreckage of the basement. These were buried in the church grounds of the nearby village of Liston, and thus the story of what was called “The Most Haunted House in England” came to an end.

Or Did It?

As we’ve revived the story of a building that burned down the best part of 90 years ago, there’s obviously more going on than the legend suggests. And yes, there was a LOT going on behind the scenes of the purportedly haunted house, most of it, you might be unsurprised to hear, of a rather more earthly nature.

The story we heard has come together mainly through the research and writings of Harry Price—more details on whom later. While he did visit and indeed live at Borley Rectory for a bit, he didn’t get involved until the end of the 1920s when the Smiths asked for some professional ghostbusting help. Can we cast any non-supernatural light on the events at the rectory before Price entered the picture? Yes, of course we can.

The Bulls

Let’s go back to the very beginning. Borley Rectory was built in 1862 and was allegedly haunted right from the get-go. Is it strange that a new build should attract ghostly visitors? I suppose we can overlook this by pointing out that the rectory was built on the grounds of the old monastery where the monk was hanged and the nun was walled up, so the ghosts were already there. Apart from the fact that Borley Rectory was not built on the grounds of a former monastery. That’s just elaborated backstory in what is, essentially, a local ghost story. The forbidden love of a monk and a nun is great fodder for these kinds of stories, and I’m sure there are plenty of similar ones to be found in villages and towns all over the country. But what about the murdered nun called Marie Lairre? Well, there are a couple of stories about the murdered woman whose identity sometimes isn’t a nun at all. Also, the name “Marie Lairre” seems to have been inserted into the story retroactively after it came up during the Harry Price seance in the late 1930s.

But what of all those ghostly sightings and unexplained activities the original occupants, the Bulls, experienced? Again, this information appears to have been added on long after the fact. In a report made in October 1986 called “Borley Rectory - ‘The most haunted house in England’ - A Report by New Horizons Foundation of some Investigations made into this alleged Haunting”, it states that the Bulls didn’t really see much of anything during their time there:

The two Misses Bull, and their brother Mr. Alfred Bull maintained that they themselves had experienced no objective phenomena during the whole of their lives there, and that poltergeist activity was reported for the first time by the Smiths. They had, however, on one occasion collectively seen something which they took to be the ghost of the nun.

If you recall, there were 14 Bull children, and there was at least one Bull family member living there for a total span of 65 years, so one possible sighting, probably by a bunch of bored kids in all that time, isn’t that exciting. Just after writing this, I myself spotted a ghostly white figure in my back garden, but upon closer inspection, realised it was the reflection of some thin knotted curtains that are hanging by the patio door. See—easily done.

I think we can put the ghostly nuns down to local spooky tales, but what about the coach that was apparently seen going along the lanes? That might just have been a real coach. Further on in the New Horizons Foundation report, there’s an interview with Marrianne Foyster, and it notes:

Incidentally, Marrianne has told us that the Misses Bull kept an old-fashioned coach which was used frequently by an elderly cousin in her visits around the neighbourhood. Marrianne says they used to joke about this, and refer to it as the ‘phantom’ coach or the ‘headless’ coach (presumably referring to the alleged state of the coachman!). Marrianne says that she and Lionel used to say they ‘wished the headless coach would give them a ride to Sudbury’ - the local bus service was pretty poor.

So there you go, probably nothing to that story either. Harry Bull, who took over from his father as rector of the parish, was known to have seen some strange things, including a headless man in the grounds, but here, there are at least two possible explanations for his sightings. The first is that Harry Bull apparently had narcolepsy and would basically fall asleep all over the place, so not much stock can be put into any of his supposed paranormal experiences.

The second is that someone, let’s call him “Harry Price” for the sake of argument, totally misrepresented things he had been told in order to create more sensational stories in his books. The Council of the Society for Psychical Research carried out an investigation into Price’s works in 1955, although Price himself died in 1948. They found significant differences in the original notes Price had made when interviewing the younger Bull sisters to what he actually ended up publishing in one or other of his several books concerning Borley Rectory. Here’s one example:

Miss Bull’s recollection was, that ‘Rev. Harry Bull saw coach. Juvenal, (his) retriever, terrified and growled. Saw man’s legs, rest hid by fruit trees, thought poacher, followed with Juvenal, gate shut, but saw legs disappear thro’ gate’. When published, Price alleged of this incident that Harry Bull saw a headless man, without mention of the suspicion that he might have been a poacher, or tramp. Incidentally, tramps and poachers were very common in the neighbourhood.

As you can see, these exaggerations and the selective wording only end up highlighting the fact that when the Bulls lived there, nothing unusual at all was going on at Borley Rectory.

The Smiths

Now we come to the Reverend G.E. Smith and his wife, Mabel. If you recall, they experienced all sorts of poltergeist-type activity that seemed to be triggered after Mabel found a skull in a cupboard, as you do.

As far as I could tell, the skull story is real, although, as Reverend Smith supposedly buried it, we don’t have any evidence of its existence. There are never any details given about this, just that she found it in a cupboard. Apparently, it wasn’t that unusual to find bits of old skeletons in the vicinity of church grounds, as victims of things like plagues would have been hurriedly buried, probably not that deep.

The cupboard detail might have been tacked on later as Mabel might have found it in the garden, or maybe it had been found during the Bulls’ tenure, been set aside for reburial and forgotten about. Was it even a real skull? We’ll never know now, but we do know a lot about what was really going on at Borley during their 9-month stay.

By the time the Smiths moved to the rectory, it was in a really bad state. It had also been enlarged to accommodate the ever-expanding Bull family in the past, so the whole setup was really weird. As per the report by the New Horizons Foundation:

Mrs. Smith described the Rectory as being an enormous house, with 23 rooms, connected by 3 staircases on the two main floors, with considerable cellarage in the basement, and storage room in the roof. There was no central heating, no gas, or electricity, or main water. The water supply was a well in the yard.

The house was cold, draughty and depressing. It was in a considerable state of disrepair, and infested with rodents. Attached was a cottage, stables, harness rooms, and there were nine acres of garden! It was a daunting prospect for an elderly couple coming straight from the warm climate of India, and the comparative luxury of the life of an Englishman in the days of the Raj!

As you can tell, the place was falling apart, and we can 100% put things like strange noises and the ringing of servants’ bells down to mice and rats, especially as it turned out that the bell system hadn’t been disconnected after all. Other strange phenomena are also easily explained by the way the house was built, and therefore the acoustics that occurred. People walking past or talking outside could sound like they were coming from somewhere else.

Other entities that might be opening and closing doors could be put down to local youths who had started hanging out in the interesting old building between rectors. It was big enough that intruders could remain undetected and, as Marrianne Foyster mentioned later on, the front door keys had been lost “long ago” so it might not even have been possible to lock the place up when the Smiths were there. There was a railway line running near the rectory, and it was, in fact, the reflections of passing trains and cars that caused the mysterious lights in the windows.

The Smiths contacted the papers because they were more worried about losing their congregation due to a combination of factors. These factors were the continued stories about ghosts in the rectory, spread to the Smiths mainly by their housemaid, but also the fact that the Smiths weren’t local and weren’t particularly popular. They thought that a show of an investigation into the stories might help ease fears over the scary rectory and bring more of the public in to see them. Unfortunately, it seems the Smiths weren’t that media-savvy. They wrote to the Daily Mirror, asking them to put them in touch with some sort of psychic investigator and for ill or for good, the paper sent them Harry Price.

This is a good place to introduce him properly, as he was an interesting character. He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research and the Ghost Club, which he was the chairman of after a relaunch in 1938. On the face of it, he did believe in psychic phenomena and the paranormal, and it seems quite admirable that he was investigating so-called mediums and exposing them as frauds.

However, he used his own skills as a magician with a semi-well-educated background and the gift of the gab to turn events to suit him. Here’s a quote from the Ancient and Esoteric Order of the Jackalope’s website, which gives a bit more insight into the man:

Nothing better illustrates Price’s true nature than his fraught relationship with Austrian psychic Rudi Schneider. Price and the SPR subjected Schneider to numerous tests and proclaimed that the young man had genuine spiritual powers. The problem was that at the same time Price was also serving as Schneider’s British booking agent, an obvious conflict of interest. The two men eventually fell out over money and Schneider started looking for an agent willing to take a smaller cut of his earnings.

Price struck back by publishing a series of photographs revealing how Schneider faked his act. He had known about the photographs for years, but sat on them until it was more profitable to expose Schneider than work with him.

So into this haunted house goes Harry Price, probably with more than half an eye on how he can turn this into a money-spinning opportunity. There’s a slight fudge in the story we originally presented, as the poltergeist activity the Smiths experienced didn’t actually start until Harry Price arrived on the scene. Cue stones being thrown, objects being hurled across rooms and the appearance of strange-looking medallions.

The Smiths said afterwards that they knew Price was behind these activities the whole time, as they only started when he got there and only happened when no one was actively looking at him. You can just imagine him yelling, “What’s that over there?” and lobbing a candlestick across the room when everyone was looking the other way.

A reporter went with Price to the rectory and at one point was hit with a stone. He was over Price’s shenanigans and grabbed hold of him to empty his pockets, which turned out to be full of pebbles and stones. Of course, Price claimed he didn’t know how they got there, but nobody really believed him. The medallions thing seems a bit weird, until you learn that Harry Price also had a past of faking Roman coins and the like, so this seems right up his alley.

He turned up with a pocket full of stones on one side and a pocket full of medallions on the other.

Price claimed that the poltergeist was attracted to his energy, which is why the activity increased when he was there, but while the Smiths seemed to have been a little daft to begin with, they didn’t fall for this either. They did leave Borley Rectory after only about 9 months there, but it wasn’t the spirits that drove them out; it was the poor condition of the house that we mentioned earlier. In correspondence found between Price and Reverend Smith, Smith wrote:

Mrs. Smith and I would rather be left out of it…we really did not believe there were any such things as ghosts.

In October 1945, Mrs. Smith wrote to a Church newspaper stating: “I would like to state definitely that neither my husband nor myself believed the house haunted by anything else other than rats and local superstitions. We left the rectory because of its broken down condition, but certainly found nothing to fear there.”

I feel like the summing up of this whole story could just be “rats and local superstitions”.

She spoke to the Society for Psychical Research in 1949, after Harry Price’s death and said:

I have no reason at all to think Borley was haunted. Of course our minds were turned towards the subject, owing to so much gossip, but in spite of this nothing occurred which could not be explained. One or two items occurred which were not explained and I thought ‘That’s funny!’ but surely such things occur in all people’s lives, and only means they were unable to trace the cause.

Quite so, thank you, Mabel Smith. I think we can also put anything happening in the Smith era down to confusing acoustics, rodents in the walls and Harry Price quickly chucking out a handful of stones when nobody’s looking.

The Foysters

Reverend Lionel Foyster and his wife Marrianne, along with their adopted daughter, Adelaide, were the last family to serve the parish in Borley Rectory. They arrived in 1930, about 6 months after the Smiths had left, and there had been some renovation work carried out in between, so the place wasn’t as bad as it had been before. This is an interesting era in Borley’s haunted history as it’s when the writing appeared on the walls, apparently trying to communicate with Marrianne.

Is there some non-supernatural explanation for this? Yes, there could be, and the story of the Foysters at Borley is actually one that could fill a book, or a year’s worth of gossip columns, by itself.

We mentioned before that Reverend Lionel Foyster was in pretty poor health when they arrived at Borley. He was in his 50s but had suffered a heart attack and then started having really bad arthritis, so they had moved back to England from Canada to get out of the winter chill a bit. It’s also mentioned a great deal that he was about 20 years older than his wife, Marrianne.

In fact, he had been a friend of Marrianne’s family and had baptised her as a baby. While this sounds extremely creepy, he didn’t have anything to do with her while she was growing up, and they met again later in life. He did bring up this jolly anecdote when they got married, though, and the priest performing the ceremony took real offence and said that while they were legally married, it was “void in the church’s eyes” due to the supposed spiritual relationship between the two.

That’s not really what you want to hear on your wedding day, so maybe the officiant should have kept his judgments to himself, but, yes, it does swing more towards “creepy” than “funny coincidence from the past”.

Rev Foyster started keeping a diary of the strange happenings right from the start of their tenure at Borley, but this is also not quite as it seems. There are two things to do with this diary. The first is that both Lionel and Marrianne have confirmed that he wrote it with the idea of making money from it.

Why? Because they knew of the reputation of Borley before they moved there. Lionel Foyster was a relative of the original occupants, the Bulls, and had visited Borley Rectory before, so he was well aware of the haunted stories surrounding it.

The Foysters had also lived just a few miles from a place called Amherst in Nova Scotia, where there was something which is now referred to as “the great Amherst Mystery”. This was alleged poltergeist activity that happened to a woman called Esther Cox between 1878 and 1879 and was widely known about and is still reported on today, so it’s more than likely that the Foysters knew of the story and the potential lucrative nature of having their own supernatural experiences. They were also hurting for money, so Lionel was trying to get a book written to provide for Marrianne and their daughter in the case of his loss of work due to his increasing frailty and potentially, his demise.

The other thing to do with his diary is that he sent it to Harry Price, yes, it’s that man again. This was quite a canny move on the rev’s part as he obviously knew that Price had been involved in trying to hype up the reputation of Borley Rectory in the past, and that he would have the necessary media contacts to publicise the book. Foyster sent Price his diary to ask his opinion, but when he tried to follow up later, Price said he’d lost it.

Foyster wrote his supposed recollections out again for publication but never managed to finish them. Harry Price subsequently published “The Most Haunted House in England - Ten Years’ Investigation of Borley Rectory,” in 1940 which gave the impression that he’d been at the rectory and witnessed and researched all these supernatural goings-on, when in fact he only went there twice at the max when the Foysters lived there and was basically using Lionel Foyster as a literal ghost writer.

Foyster never managed to publish his manuscript, and when he died, he left it to his sister. Price then seems to have managed to get hold of it and published another book in 1946, the year after Lionel’s death, called “The End of Borley Rectory”, which was apparently pretty similar to the previous book. Any discrepancies between it and his earlier works are probably down to the fact that Lionel had to write out his diary twice, as Price allegedly “lost” the first one.

Lionel obviously wouldn’t be able to remember everything he’d originally written, so there would be different, potentially conflicting information in his second manuscript. The differences between Price’s books on Borley Rectory have been pointed out, and, in fact, details in the second one more or less render the first book moot, but he died not long after “The End of Borley Rectory” was published so probably didn’t give two craps.

The fact that Lionel was making this stuff up for money has been confirmed by Marrianne, so really, it’s not in question, and she ended up with nothing to gain from it either way. The only thing she wasn’t sure of was whether Harry Price believed it or not. She didn’t know if Lionel had presented it to him as a work of fiction or as a genuine record of paranormal activity. As per the New Horizons Foundation report:

It is not possible to ascertain so much later in time whether Foyster actually told Price that the account was fictional, or whether he deliberately allowed Price to believe it was genuine, or whether, as is most likely, Price was aware of its fictional nature, but it suited his purpose to pretend to believe it as truth. Marrianne describes Price as ‘a clever one’ and is herself of the opinion that Price must have known that the Diary was fictional. However, Foyster was hoping that Price would endorse the book when it was completed (a foreword perhaps?) and he may have been uncertain as to how Price would react to a purely fictional account, and so he may have deliberately left the matter open.

Whatever the circumstances, I think that we have a compelling case for there being no genuine paranormal behaviour at Borley Rectory while the Foysters were there, seeing as how Lionel immediately started logging things that supposedly happened from day one and his wife later confirmed he was making up the story intending to cash in on it. There were so many incidents, however, that maybe some of them did happen, they just weren’t caused by ghosts.

One of the main things that happened while the Foysters were at Borley was the strange messages that appeared, seemingly out of thin air. They started off on scraps of paper and later migrated to the walls, mostly addressed to Marrianne. She tried to communicate with the sender by writing underneath the scribbles, but a coherent message never materialised.

When you look at it, the writing looks like it was done by somebody who was a bit unhinged and always seems to be pleading for help. It’s too hard to decipher some of the messages, but one might say: “the well bothers me,” which is a bit chilling when you remember that the nun Marie Lairre said her body might be in a well. Maybe Marie’s full name was Marianne, and she’s trying to say what happened to her. Oh, sorry, I forgot, the nun’s backstory wasn’t real, and the seance with the name “Marie Lairre” coming up didn’t happen until after these events.

What the ghost story version of the Borley Rectory tale leaves out, you may be unsurprised to learn, is a lot of details. There was, for example, a troubled young man spending a lot of time with the Foysters during the time these writings appeared. Edwin Whitehouse had been in the First World War, and his nerves had taken a battering, so he was hanging out with Lionel Foyster to get a bit of a spiritual bearing. While he was at the rectory, however, there was an alleged uptick in the amount of poltergeist behaviour.

Could the spirits be attracted to Edwin’s fragile psyche? Maybe, or he could have just done the messages himself. He was described as an “emotionally disturbed young man”, and according to the New Horizons Foundation report:

he was obsessed with discussing religion, could not decide whether to become a spiritualist or a Roman Catholic at one time, and he was always praying and holding long serious conversations.

Sounds like a riot. He actually ended up becoming a Benedictine monk, so there you go.

Marrianne thought it was suspicious that the messages appeared when Edwin was around and stopped after they had a cleansing ceremony at the rectory. By this point, Lionel Foyster was in a wheelchair, so he wasn’t able to carry out any practical jokes he might have perpetrated in the past, either. The couple also had a young daughter who I saw described as “an inveterate scribbler”, so maybe she wrote the notes. Basically, there are at least four good mortal candidates for who wrote the creepy notes before we need to peel off into the realm of dead nuns.

And a fake dead nun at that.

After he was unable to continue with his pranking, Lionel still liked to stoke the fires of the ghosty-talk. Here’s what the New Horizons Foundation says about it:

Foyster’s intention was not to frighten and deceive so much as to observe and test people’s reactions to the phenomena. Marrianne also says he would relate, with great relish, stories of phenomena that were alleged to have happened, and which the family members present knew were not true, in order to observe his visitor’s reactions.

In addition, the house was always wide open, the villagers came and went, some of the rooms in the house were used for parish and church business and meetings - the only toilet facilities were upstairs, thus affording excuse for people to wander all over the house, and much of the time she did not know who was in the house, or where they were. She tells us that Lionel was very fond of children, and of the local tramps and down-and outs. These people were fed at the back door, and allowed to sleep in the outhouse.

She believes that on cold nights they crept into the kitchen for warmth. The house was never locked; the keys had long been lost; the house had 4 outer doors and 3 staircases. They also possessed a dog, and a stray cat or two.

One can understand how easy it would be for anyone to produce fraudulent phenomena, and it is equally easy to realise that if any genuine phenomena took place they might not be recognised as such.

Big “if” there. And there’s yet another character who lived at Borley Rectory for a time who we haven’t mentioned yet, and yes, his story is also a bit of a weird one. This is where the assertions we’ve made also get a little murky. We’ve been saying that Lionel was intentionally writing a fictional story, however, we only have Marrianne’s word for this, long after Lionel’s death, and as we’re about to find out, she may not be the most reliable of narrators.

It might be that Lionel did actually believe the things he was seeing and hearing, and Marrianne just played it down afterwards. For the best example of this, enter: François D’Arles.

If there weren’t enough candidates for causing mischief around Borley Rectory, here’s another one to throw into the mix. Early on in their stay, the Foysters decided that their young daughter was in need of a playmate, which seemed to result in them having a little French boy over to stay for a month or so. Here’s Marrianne’s account of the arrangement:

Adelaide was lonely without other children. We answered an ad in the Times, and from this we acquired a little boy named François. He was a beautiful child, a few months younger than Adelaide, and we offered him a month’s vacation. But long before that time was up, Lion and I adored him, and so did all who came in contact with him, big blue eyes and brown curls, and an ever present smile.

He was a chubby lad. At no time did his father pay us anything in the line of cash. The father, François D’Arles, visited him every weekend at first. He did some handy work around the place and was good about the garden.

This might seem a bit of a weird way to find a friend for your child, and indeed, the whole situation ended up even weirder. François D’Arles ended up becoming a lodger at Borley Rectory, staying in an adjacent cottage. As well as being a handyman and doing stuff in the garden, Marrianne and François ended up going into business together and opened a flower shop in Wimbledon, which is quite a distance from Borley.

D’Arles also experienced the hauntings at Borley, seeing a strange black shadow in his room on several occasions. Here’s how Lionel Foyster tells it in his manuscript for “Fifteen Months in a Haunted House”:

But on another night a third chance presented itself. This time, it seems, he was out of bed quicker than before. Good, he had got it. But- what a surprise.

His hands went right through the apparition and he encountered nothing except the wall. Yet this was not all; he touched nothing it is true, but something touched him. A terrific smack in the face is what he got for his pains. A loud cry rang through the silent house and disturbed the quiet of the night.

Next morning (he) appeared at the breakfast table with a black eye.

If you think there is something a tad fishy about this whole setup, you’d be right. François D’Arles and Marrianne started an affair not long after he moved in that lasted for the best part of three years. Whether Lionel Foyster was aware of this or not remains up for debate, but if he was, he turned a blind eye.

He was in very poor health at this point, and while his relationship with Marrianne lasted until his death (more or less, but we’ll touch on that in a minute), they were more friends than lovers. He had also been very affected by the pronouncement of that jobsworth of an officiant who declared their marriage “void in the church’s eyes”, so maybe he felt it was ok to give his young wife a pass.

Anyway, the more salient point of this part of the story is that D’Arles and Marrianne’s relationship was not a particularly harmonious one. Marrianne said later: “After it started, I realized that I had made a mistake - because I didn’t really - we fought like cats and dogs; that’s quite true.”

If they were trying to cover for how D’Arles got a black eye or how Marrianne fell out of bed, blaming it on a poltergeist when there had been known poltergeist activity seems like a reasonable solution to keep Lionel in the dark but maybe also to spare his feelings a bit as he probably worked out what was going on after a while. This gives a whole new meaning to “things that go bump in the night”.

Now might be a good time to add that François D’Arles wasn’t actually a suave French flower man as you may have been led to believe. He was actually a Cockney conman called Frank Peerless. While Lionel did seem to know his real identity, Marrianne always referred to him as “François D’Arles” in later interviews.

At one point, she moved out of Borley Rectory to live with Peerless, as we’ll now call him, and his son, whose real name wasn’t François Jr but Douglas, in their flower shop in Wimbledon. As you might have guessed, Frank Peerless wasn’t really some master botanist, and they didn’t grow much of anything at the rectory, and he didn’t do any work at the shop, so this whole thing ended in disaster. Marrianne and Peerless broke up in 1934, and he had to be turfed out of the rectory cottage by Lionel’s cousin, who was an attorney.

It has been hinted that Peerless was an accomplice to some of the poltergeist activity, especially when Harry Price appeared for the first time. Price hadn’t been impressed with anything he saw and accused Marrianne of doing everything, but then a bell was heard ringing by itself. Peerless wasn’t with the others, so we can theorise that he was trying to help his landlords out, although Price wasn’t really fooled by this either, reporting at the end of the visit that “the supernatural had played no part”.

Marrianne also thought Peerless might have been responsible for the wall writing, adding one more earthly name to the list above the fake dead nun.

The Foysters eventually moved out of Borley Rectory in 1935. Lionel never got his work published, and at one point, he allegedly happily posed as Marrianne’s father so she could get married to someone else. This would have been a bigamous marriage, and, in fact, Marrianne had also been married before she met Lionel. There were also rumblings of Marrianne running some sort of baby farm scheme while at the rectory, but that’s not relevant to the supernatural stuff, so we’ll leave that well alone.

The Foysters’ time at Borley seems to have been a weird mix of sometimes seemingly believing in the ghosts, exaggerating the ghostly activity with an eye on financial gain and using the ghosts as a handy excuse to cover up an affair. Was Lionel being cuckolded in his own house with Peerless and Marrianne laughing up their sleeves every time they blamed a strange noise or sound on a poltergeist? Was Lionel really writing a fictional diary from the start, or is that just what Marrianne is telling us many years later to make him look less of a hapless dunce and therefore make herself look a bit better too? When you know more about what was going on behind the scenes and the other people present at the rectory, the one thing we can say for sure is that it makes the possibility of a genuine poltergeist less and less likely.

Harry Price wrote at least two books based on supernatural goings-on at Borley, but remember, it was all coming from Lionel’s diary and manuscript that Harry Price had ahem procured, probably did some minimal editing to it and then had it published. There wasn’t a third-party observer to most of the stuff in the books, Price himself only stopped by a couple of times, so we only have Lionel Foyster’s shaky account that any of it happened at all.

Harry Price

Speaking of Price, after the Foysters left, he was the next person to spend time in Borley Rectory with his gang of volunteer researchers. He had lots of seances carried out, one of which brought out the information about the nun, Marie Lairre, who had been murdered and apparently buried in a well. The participants wrote a question on some paper, and the medium’s hands on a planchette were guided by the spirit to spell out responses in what’s called “automatic writing”.

Other conversations involved unnamed spirits asking for priests. The seances weren’t conducted in the rectory, though, but at the medium’s house in London; so while I don’t put a whole lot of stock in things like this anyway, to carry it out somewhere not even close to the site of the alleged body and ghost seems even less convincing.

Price didn’t live at the rectory for the year, he just rented it and popped in from time to time but while his cast of rotating researchers noted pages upon pages of notes, it was all just the usual odd noises, cold spots etc. that can be explained by the house’s set-up, mice in the walls and all that stuff. There was once “a dark figure” that was seen, but it turned out to be Mr. Arbon, the caretaker who lived in a nearby cottage.

Arbon was working there when the Foysters were living there, and while being interviewed, Marrianne said the Arbons: “told Price a bunch of tall tales. They decided to cash in on the act independently”.

The writings on the wall from the Foysters’ time were still there, however, and Price and his team would write beneath the wall scribbles, and a reply would sometimes appear, albeit not always legibly. But guess what? These wall writings only appeared when Price happened to be visiting the rectory and wasn’t being observed by anyone. According to the-order-of-the-jackalope.com:

A BBC radio crew visited the rectory during his tenancy to do a story on the Rectory, and noticed new writing only appeared when Price was lagging behind the rest of their party and could not be seen. When they made an effort to keep him in the middle of the pack where he would be under constant scrutiny, well, the ghosts got writer’s block.

So it seems like Price was just up to his old tricks. He’s such a strange character; he appears to desperately want the supernatural to be real, but spends his life debunking others and creating his own tricks. Another seance predicted that the rectory would burn down that very night on the 27th March 1938. And it did burn down!

Exactly 11 months later, on 27th February 1939. The owner then was Captain W.H. Gregson, and the fire was supposedly an accident while he was moving in, but according to the New Horizons Foundation report:

It was subsequently discovered that Captain Gregson had an unfortunate history where fires were concerned. Many of his properties had been destroyed in this way, and he collected handsomely on the insurance!

So, rather an ignominious end for the famous haunted house.

Harry Price Again

The last part of our story involved Harry Price returning to the remains of Borley Rectory in 1943 and unearthing some bones from the cellar, presumably to confirm the information he had got from the seances that a murder victim’s bones would be buried there and to close the loop on his sensational story. Unfortunately, he seems to have got into a bit of a technical plumbing muddle. The automatic writing has been interpreted as either “the well tank bothers me” or “the well tank bottom me”, which I hope means that the body is to be found at the bottom of the well tank and not anything dodgy.

Anyway, Price went digging about in the cellars as that’s a logical place for something called a “well tank” to be, however, the Smiths had had a plumbing overhaul during their stay, and the new well tank was now located in the attic. So how anything can be buried under that, centuries after the murder occurred and the house had since burned down is anyone’s guess. Apparently, Price mistook a shallow trough in the cellar for the well tank and was then surprised when he found nothing under it, concluding that the “well tank” had vanished.

In “The End of Borley Rectory”, he states of his failure to find the well tank:

It was inexplicable to me, and was just another Borley mystery. I was so certain as to the exact position of the well that I could have found my way there in the dark.

It’s also worth saying that the rectory had burned down in 1939, and a lot of the materials had been taken for use in the war effort. The cellar had been extensively excavated years before Price turned up again, so it’s not surprising that he couldn’t find what he was looking for. Here is a list of people who were there when Price dug up some bones: Reverend Henning, who was the current vicar of Borley, his wife and his gardener, known only as “Jackson”.

Captain Gregson, who’d burned the place down a few years earlier. Dr. Eric Bailey, a pathologist, and his brother.

Someone called Flying Officer Creamer. A somewhat odd crew, handily containing a pathologist and the former owner, who was probably desperate to make back a few pounds after messing up his insurance scam. The cellar was full of rubble, so only two or three people could fit into the area at a time to do any digging about, and thanks to there being no well tank there, Price basically picked a spot at random.

Guess who found the bones in the rubble? Yes, of course, it was Harry Price. Chances are, he either banked on there being some sort of bones under there, or he just planted them himself.

An article called “The Well Tank Bothers Me” by Andrew Clarke on foxearth.org.uk states:

Jackson, a former farm labourer, immediately identified (it) as the jawbone of a pig,(…). However, when it was handed to Mr Bailey, the pathologist, he pronounced it to be human. More digging produced part of a cranium.

I don’t think it’s beyond the realms of possibility that “Dr. Eric Bailey” was either a) not actually a pathologist or b) a pathologist who was happy to misidentify a couple of bones for a harmless jape and probably get paid for his troubles. Subsequent excavations of the rectory found no more human bones.

The supposed nun bones were not buried at Borley as word had got around that they were pig bones and people got quite het up about it, but they were reburied at the nearby parish of Liston.

Borley Rectory was a hot topic in newspapers for years, so Price was getting a lot of publicity out of it during his years of visits. He died in 1948, but the debate about Borley carried on long after his death, with the Society for Psychical Research doing an investigation into his work and finding out that he’d basically made everything up. Off the back of the SPR’s investigation, the amazingly named “Chapman Pincher” published an article in the Daily Express in December 1954 titled “Was the tale of the roving nun untrue? Ghost-Hunter Price ‘Not to be Trusted’.”

There was a rebuttal of Pincher’s article published in the Psychic News a few years later in 1957, rather hilariously titled:

Borley Not Haunted! NONSENSE! says the Brigadier

Well, if the Brigadier’s saying it’s haunted, it must be haunted. This is Brigadier C.A.L Brownlow of Sudbury, no less, who had spoken to precisely two people anecdotally about seeing a couple of strange things and, after the SPR’s exhaustive debunking of Price’s tales, asks the reporter: “What is the evidence of the science reporter’s statement?” Some people just don’t want to hear what you’re telling them.

The story of Borley Rectory, then, is really the tale manufactured by Harry Price and his frequent self-insertions and meddlings into the timeline of the building’s occupancy. There are no spooky photos of faces at the windows; all former occupants have confirmed that they didn’t think anything supernatural was happening at the time or if they did, it was things that can be easily explained. The whole backstory of the murdered nun was created in the late 1930s by Harry Price and swung the focus of the tale to this made up “Marie Lairre” instead of the nun who had been bricked up in the walls because—surprise—there had never been a monastery on the grounds where Borley rectory stood.

The Rectory was totally demolished in the 1940s and was built over in the 1970s. As far as I know, there have been no more occurrences of wall writing, phantom lights, strange noises or people getting hit with pebbles. But maybe that’s because the fake bones of the fake Marie Lairre were indeed found and finally put to rest.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Borley Rectory?

Borley Rectory was a large, sprawling house built in 1862 for the clergyman in charge of a parish, known as a rector, and his family. It was noted for its size and the number of rooms it contained.

Why is Borley Rectory considered one of the most haunted houses in England?

Borley Rectory gained a reputation for being haunted due to various supernatural sightings and activities reported by its occupants and visitors, including ghostly nuns, a phantom coach, and unexplained noises.

What was the significance of the Nun’s Walk?

The Nun’s Walk was a route in the grounds of Borley Rectory where a ghostly nun was frequently seen. This sighting contributed to the rectory’s reputation as a haunted place.

Who was Harry Price and what was his role in the Borley Rectory story?

Harry Price was a ghost hunter and psychic researcher who investigated Borley Rectory. He wrote books about the rectory’s hauntings and conducted seances, but his methods and credibility have been questioned.

What happened to Borley Rectory in 1939?

Borley Rectory burned down in 1939 due to the carelessness of the new owner, Captain W.H. Gregson. A neighbor reportedly saw a ghostly nun in the window as the flames took hold.

What was the significance of the skull found by Mabel Smith?

Mabel Smith, the wife of Reverend Guy Eric Smith, found a human skull in a cupboard at Borley Rectory. This discovery coincided with an increase in paranormal activity, but the skull’s origin and authenticity remain unclear.

What were the mysterious messages written on the walls of Borley Rectory?

During the Foysters’ tenure, mysterious messages started appearing on the walls, often addressed to Marrianne Foyster. These messages were scribbled and hard to decipher, adding to the rectory’s haunted reputation.

What was the outcome of Harry Price’s seances at Borley Rectory?

Harry Price conducted seances at Borley Rectory, claiming to contact spirits such as Marie Lairre, a murdered nun. However, the authenticity of these seances and the information obtained has been called into question.

What was the role of the Foysters in the Borley Rectory story?

The Foysters, Reverend Lionel Foyster and his wife Marrianne, lived at Borley Rectory from 1930 to 1935. They experienced and documented numerous paranormal events, but their accounts have been disputed, with suggestions of exaggeration and fabrication.

What happened to the bones found by Harry Price in the ruins of Borley Rectory?

Harry Price found bones in the ruins of Borley Rectory, which he claimed belonged to a murdered nun. However, these bones were later identified as pig bones and were reburied in the nearby parish of Liston.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: England’s Most Haunted Mansion?
• Hero image source by Tawhid Sadman / openverse, cc0.