What fascinates me about the Borley Rectory affair is that
the participants were given historical permanence by accident. They achieved
fame by sheer chance. There are many other famous historical events to which the
same applies, like the Ripper Murders or the Great Tay Bridge disaster. Those
who were caught up in the events were artificially preserved, like a fly in
amber. In this case, more than ten books and countless articles and papers. In
understanding them, their lives and their motivations, we understand something
of the period in which they lived and the place they inhabited: It is this that
long outlasts the fascination of the events themselves.
What makes the Borley Rectory Affair unusual is the way
that the characters leap out of the books as if larger than life. Marianne
Foyster, an extraordinarily modern woman; sensual, intelligent and feisty; Harry
Price, with his mesmeric manner and his compelling journalistic style; Lionel
Foyster, the loveable, dignified, but ineffectual, English Gent; Harry Bull, the
engaging but eccentric ‘Hedge Parson’, and Frank Peerless, the sinister sexual
predator, Ethel Bull weaving a fantastic web of fable around the Rectory and its
incumbents. The further one explores, the more figures burst out of the pages,
so real that one can imagine being amongst them. Perhaps these are the real
ghosts of Borley.
One must call it the Borley Rectory Affair, rather than
the Borley Rectory Haunting, because the latter title prejudges the explanation.
One must say at the outset that odd things happened at Borley Rectory in the
inter-war period, odd events that need to be understood properly without
prejudice. It is a story set in a time when the Great War had destroyed
confidence in international commerce, the great depression had set in, and money
was tight. It was a hard time to live in.
It all started in a quiet country Rectory near Sudbury, in
Suffolk. The Bull family had been hereditary rectors in the small north-Essex
country parishes for generations. They were a property-owning, fairly
prosperous, ‘county’ family, who intermarried with similar East-Anglian families
over the centuries to produce a minor sqirearchy that stocked the professions,
the army and the church. In those days, the country parson was responsible for
the welfare and education of his flock, as well as their spiritual needs, and so
occupied a prominent and vital role in the community. Henry Bull had taken on
the tiny parish of Borley whilst his older brother occupied their fathers’ and
Grandfather’s position at the next parish, Pentlow. He went on to live a
blameless life of hunting, shooting, fishing, and ministry, spawning a huge
family of thirteen children. Only the three boys went away to college, for
despite appearances, the Bulls could not afford private school fees for all
their children. The girls were educated at home within the claustrophobic and
isolated community, forming two or three cohesive tribal cliques within the
large rectory. They grew up as intelligent, bored, youngsters who rarely
travelled further than London, but led an active social life in the Sudbury
area. From what we can gather, they lived a life that was typical of a family of
their age, location and class, their life punctuated by the occasional
excitement of dances, tennis parties and rare foreign holidays. At some point,
amongst their many other interests, a group of them experimented with
‘chair-walking’ and, one suspects, séances. Some of them read ghost stories and
a few of them began to crystallize tales gleaned from what they read, and heard,
into stories of ghostly nuns and coaches. Whereas the younger boys dismissed
this as girlish nonsense, the oldest son, Harry, was smitten by these ghost
stories and seemed to believe them. There is no direct evidence that father
Henry even heard these tales. Only three members of the large family ever seem
to have claimed to have actually seen a ghost, and none of the servants, as far
as we know, but the stories about ghosts were firmly established in the family
before the end of the century. Two of the girls gradually built up a legend that
there had been a monastery on the site from which there has been an elopement of
a monk with a nun from a nearby nunnery. They were, so the legend went, caught
and the nun was subsequently walled-up as a punishment.
When Henry died, the oldest son Harry took over the
parish. He was an athletic, engaging chump, a long-term bachelor who had the
slightly alarming hobby of inviting boys, who he was supposed to be tutoring for
Latin, to all-night ghost-watching sessions in a summerhouse in the garden. His
unmarried sisters managed the house, taking on more responsibility as his mother
aged. After she died, the unmarried sisters ran the household, and did a great
deal of parish work. Late in life, Harry destroyed the harmony of this cosy
ménage by marrying a much younger catholic divorcee with a daughter. This event
pitched the family into a long-running quarrel over inheritance. Harry then set
up his new family in a house across the road, but when the remaining unmarried
sisters were obliged finally to move out to more congenial accommodation at
Chilton, near Sudbury, he was able to move back to the Rectory with his young
wife and lived there for ten years until his death. Amongst
his other wide-ranging interests, Harry evidently continued to believe in the
haunting though neither his wife nor stepdaughter noticed anything unusual about
the house. His last years were less cheerful than before: his income from local
farms declined greatly, and the Rectory proved difficult for the couple to run.
The next vicar, Rev Smith, was an Anglo-Indian with a
rather frail wife. Her condition was not helped when Ethel Bull, the sister of
the previous incumbent, bombarded her with stories of the haunting. Much of this
was obvious fantasy. By the time that the couple moved to the rectory, it was
damp, dark, poorly repaired and without modern amenities. The house was
originally built at a time of rural affluence, when domestic help was plentiful.
Now, in the post-war world, domestic help was difficult to find.
This was Eric Smith’s first incumbency in Britain. He had
accepted the living ‘sight-unseen’ whilst still in India. They were used to a
congenial colonial life in India. The house had suffered years of neglect. The
parish was initially unsettled by Eric Smith, after so many years of the Bulls
as rectors. Eric Smith quickly applied to the Bishop for a new living. This was
refused. Mabel Smith began to be more and more unnerved by visits from the Bull
sisters with their tails of the supernatural and ‘her nerves began to suffer’.
It got to the stage where Mabel managed to persuade her more
placid and sceptical husband into attempting to contact the
Society for Psychic Research (SPR). By itself, this was not a foolish action.
However, the naive couple precipitated the entire Borley Rectory affair and its
consequences by asking the Daily Mirror for the address of the SPR, and to do it
at the height of the ‘Silly Season’ when real news was in short supply. The
newspaper scented a story and sent down a reporter who found tales of haunting,
but not much else. The Mirror, undiscouraged, then contacted a journalist called
Harry Price and commissioned him to ‘assist’ the reporter. We would recognise
Price as being an ‘investigative journalist’. He specialized in stories of
Psychic matters, Mediums, Spiritualism and Ghosts. For
reasons of vanity, he liked to portray himself as a scientific researcher into
such matters, though in fact he had no training or qualifications to do so. In
real life, he was a travelling salesman for a manufacturer of greaseproof paper
to butchers shops. The Mirror wanted a story and, as soon as
Price, who was an expert conjuror, arrived on the scene, all sorts of
sensational ‘manifestations’ occurred. For the reporter and the readers of the
paper, it was all most satisfactory. They even held a séance at the request of
the Bull sisters. The spirit of the late Rev Harry Bull was obligingly summoned
and the spirit was able to confirm that the will should have been made in favour
of his sisters, and not his wife. A journalist who
accompanied Harry Price was certain that he witnessed Harry Bull faking
poltergeist phenomena. The Smith’s maid also spotted Harry Price up to tricks
and joined in, much to Mabel’s irritation. Nobody seemed to take events
particularly seriously.
As soon as Price returned to London, the various
‘phenomena’ ceased. The story featured all week in the newspaper. The tale of
the haunting captured the popular imagination, and all that summer, the country
lanes were filled with the charabancs and cars of tourists wanting to see the
Haunted Rectory.
The Smiths soon moved out of the rectory due
to its lack of amenities, and soon left the parish altogether. The Smiths kept a
cordial but cautious correspondence with Harry Price for a while, but Harry
Price unsurprisingly lost interest in the affair for some six years. He gave
just one lantern slide lecture that was delivered ‘tongue-in-cheek’. After Rev
Smith’s death, some ten years later, Mrs. Smith declared herself convinced that
there was no haunting at all, and all could be explained by Mr. Price’s
conjuring skills. Some other investigators who visited subsequently with Price
shared her suspicions
After an interregnum, a cousin of Harry Bull called Lionel
Foyster agreed to take over the living at Borley. Lionel Foyster and his much
younger wife Marianne were a devoted couple who had been married for several
years. It was a curious relationship, though. Lionel Foyster was what we would
once have called a ‘confirmed bachelor’, rather a cold fish, who had suddenly
proposed to Marianne by letter without having seen her for years. When he
arrived at the rectory, he was already unwell, and went into a physical decline
during his stay at the rectory. Whereas he had once been a most sociable, lively
and engaging chap, he gradually subsided into isolation and quiescence.
Marianne, by contrast, was in her prime, feminine, pretty, extravert and lively.
They had moved from Canada, and found themselves isolated in a strange country,
in a remote parish with no friends. Something had to give, and the fault lines
were soon to cause emotional earthquakes. Their stay at the rectory has become
famous because Lionel wrote three versions of haunting at the rectory. We do not
know for certain whether they were intended to be fictional, as Marianne
subsequently maintained, or whether they were a faithful record of what Lionel
experienced or was told about by others. To many people, they remain some of the
strongest evidence for the supernatural ever published, so they need to taken
seriously.
Poor Lionel: What comes through strongly from his accounts
is that he faithfully and truthfully recorded what he experienced, and tried to
explain what happened by fitting it into an increasingly nutty theory about
ghosts. Doggedly, too, he also recorded the investigations into the events,
which unanimously concluded that the supernatural had played no part in them,
and that his wife was responsibly for them, consciously or unconsciously.
This was not entirely fair. At first, the events were
happenstance. Any odd thing that occurred, whatever its cause, was attributed by
Lionel to ghosts. His short-term memory was going: the first signs of his
subsequent intellectual decline. Things started moving inexplicably, simply
because he’d forgotten that he’s done so. Lionel shared the Bulls’ fascination
with the supernatural, If anything inexplicable happened to Marianne, He would
be gratified, excited and would give her much attention. Marianne loved her
‘Lion’ deeply, and responded by offering more haunting incidents. Lionel seemed
to arrive at the rectory engrossed in the ghostly tales of his cousins, the
Bulls, and the fascination started to consume his other interests. The more
incidents that Marianne came up with, the happier he was. If things had
continued like this, then all would have been well. They didn’t and it wasn’t.
One hesitates to delve further into the private life of
the Foysters, but it is absolutely essential if one is to disentangle the
complexities of what happened next. Suddenly, there were two others in the
relationship. Edwin Whitehouse, the nephew of the Churchwarden became deeply
interested in what was supposedly happening at the rectory, and began to spend a
long time there. He was a vulnerable, disturbed young man who had suffered a
nervous breakdown and had, like his aunt, become deeply engrossed in
spiritualism. He was wrestling with the decision of whether to become a monk.
Both the Foysters seemed to become emotionally involved with him to a degree,
though this eventually turned to revulsion. Foyster tellingly recorded him as a
young lady in his second, fictionalised, version of events. Lady Whitehouse
eventually banned him from going to the rectory due to the deleterious effect it
was having on his mental health. These emotional dynamics led to the ‘hauntings’
moving up a gear, and we begin to find violent ‘poltergeist’ events and
wall-writing. When this triangular relationship fell apart,
Marianne rebounded into a loveless physical sexual relationship with a lodger,
Frank Peerless. She was becoming increasingly distressed. Lionel was suffering
worsening health problems and began acting more and more oddly. He lost his
engaging humour and sense of fun, and became increasingly frail. Unfortunately,
Lionel had lost most of his inherited capital and had a pathetic income from his
ministry. Marianne also must have gained a considerable insight into Lionel’s
past from the ‘Edwin’ incident. At this stage, it was obvious to all that the
many incidents of haunting, if they occurred, were caused by Marianne. In fact,
she must have had a confederate, and Frank Peerless was almost certainly
responsible for some of the ‘poltergeist’ phenomena. The most likely explanation
for this is that they were covering up their affair from Lionel. Such was the
residual interest from the original Tabloid reports of the haunting that there
were several investigations, including one by Harry Price, but they all
concluded that the phenomena were ‘caused naturally’. The phenomena ceased
suddenly after the intervention of the ‘Marks Tey Spiritualist Circle’, the
confinement of Lionel to a wheelchair, and Marianne’s weekly cohabitation with
Frank Peerless in London, running a florists shop.
Lionel Foyster hoped, desperately, but unrealistically,
that his account of the haunting would bring him an income. In fact, the
haunting coincided with the crash of the stock market, and the further collapse
of farm incomes in East Anglia. There was very little cash around, and
considerable hardship. Mrs Smith, the wife of the previous incumbent, had also
felt the pinch, and had also written a fictional book inspired by some of
the more lurid stories of the Bull sisters, called ‘Murder at the Parsonage’.
She had nurtured the forlorn hope of getting Harry Price to help her get this
thriller published. The Bull sisters too were worrying about money, as the Bull
capital had gone to the three brothers. Harry Price was desperately trying to
raise funds by selling his library, and even attempted to sell it to the Nazis
at one stage. If there was a common thread to the narrative, this was it.
Once Marianne had managed to disentangle herself from an
increasingly unpleasant and sadistic Frank Peerless, she returned to live full
time with Lionel at the Rectory. The relationship slipped into one of a daughter
devotedly nursing an increasingly frail father, and they stayed a further three
years in increasing poverty until his health forced his retirement. They saw no
more ghosts, and experienced no more poltergeists. The country had tired of the
story, and as another war seemed certain, the nation forgot its brief
fascination in the events at the remote Essex rectory.
At this point, all would have been forgotten, and we would
have heard of none of the participants in the saga. Then, everything changed.
There had been a sporadic correspondence between the various parties in the
saga. The Bull sisters kept Harry Price informed of events, and the Smiths still
corresponded with him too. At some point, Harry Price got hold of Foyster’s
first draft of the account of the haunting. Poor Lionel thought that, when Harry
Price’s eyes lit up, they signalled a publishing coup for him. Not so, for Harry
Price realized that, by including Foyster’s work in his own book, it would prove
to be a publishing sensation for Harry Price rather than Lionel Foyster. He laid
the groundwork carefully. To cover up his own previous lack of interest in the
events, and goaded on by Ethel Bull, he rented the empty rectory, and installed
independent observers, and persuaded one of them, Sidney Glanville, to do much
of the necessary research and footwork. This ‘tenancy’ was curious. Harry Price
stayed firmly away and selected a group of volunteers whose only common
characteristic was that they knew nothing about psychic research. Anyone who
proved to have experience in such things was rejected. The tenancy provided
almost nothing of value besides Sidney Glanville’s meticulous survey of the
house. It was, for the students, a ‘bit of a lark’.
Harry Price’s book, when it came out, was a publishing
phenomenon, with his bold assertion ‘The Most Haunted House in England’. This
was followed by a second, ‘The End of Borley Rectory’, in which any remaining
trace of his scepticism disappeared.
Why ‘The End?’ By now, a subsequent owner of the rectory,
in what looks like an attempt to defraud his insurance company, had burned down
the rectory. Curiously, the legend of the Borley Rectory haunting refused to
die. Harry Price was too good a writer to have left anything to chance. The
setting was perfect, with the huge, dark awful, rectory building, the isolated
country parish full of suspicious inhabitants, the spicy legends of monasteries,
monks and nuns, haunted coaches, and the excavations of human bones.
The local people had, by this time, changed their amused
tolerance of the stories to rank hostility. People were wandering around the
church and churchyard at night, and there were a constant stream of tourists,
many of whom had outlandish Spiritualist beliefs offensive to the tough rural
Protestantism of North Essex. The BBC did a radio program, and their sneering
and patronising ways were remembered in the parish for decades afterwards. The
locals eventually had to remove every signpost to the parish, and this lasted
for over twenty years. Any travellers who asked for directions to Borley were
gleefully misdirected into the wilds of Suffolk.
Behind the scenes, there had been rumblings of discontent
between the Society of Psychical Research and Harry Price. The SPR was the
agency that Rev Smith had tried to contact in an effort to calm his wife’s fears
about the place. Instead he had got a Tabloid Journalist and Harry Price. The
SPR maintained an interest, and tried to warn Lionel Foyster about Harry Price.
They did their own investigation, it seems, but it concluded that there was
‘nothing in it’. After the publication of Harry Price’s book, they appointed
their own investigative team to check what had been written. One of the team
Trevor Hall, was a newcomer to Psychical Research but had known Harry Price as a
fellow member of the Magic Circle, the London club for conjurors. One of the
researchers was one of Harry Price’s most prominent supporters, Mollie Goldney.
She had actually taken part in Harry Price’s visit during the Foyster
incumbency, so knew a great deal of the background. The third of the trio was
Dingwall, whose daytime job was as curator of the obscene books in the British
Museum, which earned him the rather unfair nickname ‘Dirty Ding’.
Their report, when it emerged, was devastating. Although
Trevor Hall was credited with the hardest-hitting chapters, in fact all three of
them were capable of very straight talking and much of the initial hostility to
their findings was directed at Dingwall. Although one or two details in the
report had to be subsequently modified in the light of further research by
Hawkins, it still holds as a reasonably fair account of what actually happened.
More was to follow: Marianne Foyster had drifted out of
the picture, but was finally located in the United States of America where she
had built a new life. She was persuaded to make two statements to a private
investigator, who unfortunately got rather carried away with the
cross-examination and intruded too far into irrelevant details of her private
life. However, she was clear on the main point, that her husband’s so-called
diaries were a fictional account and most of the now-famous incidents simply did
not occur. She claimed that her only odd experiences at the Rectory was the
sighting of an old man who she thought may have been Harry Bull. She later met
with more sympathetic researchers, but stuck to her story. Although odd things
had certainly happened, much of what was reported in Harry Price’s book was, she
insisted, pure fiction. She was deeply critical of Harry Price who, she felt,
had deceived her unfortunate husband, Lionel, and had stolen the manuscript of
his book.
Of course, the truth is much more complex. Some phenomena,
such as the lavender scent had an obvious explanation (a nearby lavender
factory). The mysterious footsteps were most likely due to parishioners slipping
in to use the toilet. Pranks were most certainly played by some locals, and rats
in the attic caused some of the random bell ringing. However, there is a core of
incidents that cannot be explained that way. Some odd things definitely happened
during the Foyster incumbency. Marianne’s effort to dismiss Lionel’s accounts as
being fictional just will not wash. We can be certain that very odd things were
occurring for the first eighteen months of the Foyster incumbency, for we have
other witnesses besides the Foysters. The most telling was the written account
of a medium who had been invited in by a local Spiritualist group, and
corroborated by other members of the group, who visited at the height of the
phenomena. The picture of a highly neurotic, and very worried, lady emerges
strongly from this testimony, and there are hints that even this group of
spiritualists suspected that what they experienced had more to do with this
world than the next.
We shall never be sure who caused these strange incidents,
Lionel Foyster, Marianne, Frank Peerless, Edwin Whitehouse, practical jokers
from the village, or Marianne’s firstborn son, who stayed with them at the
rectory for a while. We know that the bells had been rigged, in order to make
them ring in the passageway when a chord was pulled in the yard outside. We can
be fairly sure that objects such as bottles were thrown up the stairwells from
the cellar, which wwas accessible directly from the yard. The mysterious wall
writings were all in Marianne’s own handwriting. However, one doubts if it would
ever be possible to untangle the strange tale completely.
A strange thing happens when one examines the evidence.
The closer one gets to the primary evidence, the eye-witness accounts, the
flimsier it all gets. The spine-chilling account of a headless man wandering in
the garden turns out to be a rather routine account of a trespasser who was
glimpsed beyond the orchard trees; only the legs being visible. The famous
sighting of the nun turns out to have happened an hour after sunset. The famous
incident of the soap being hurled from the wash-basin happened when nobody was
in the room. It was a schoolboy trick with wet soap on the underneath of a
table. The materialisation of a bottle in mid-air was subsequently denied by
both purported witnesses. When one reads the Foyster diaries, one is struck by
the fact that nothing ever seems to occur in his presence
barring bell-ringing and a collar-tweaking incident. Many of the star witnesses
subsequently deny having seen anything.
Without a doubt, both Mabel Smith and Marianne Foyster
were in a very agitated state of mind during part of their residence at the
Rectory. This may also have been true of Rev Smith too. Their
subsequent denials of this simply add to the confusion, as it is simply too well
documented. One suspects that they looked back on their emotional state
retrospectively with some shame. They both moved to the Rectory at a vulnerable
time in their lives and both came under the spell of the unmarried Bull sisters,
who visited frequently, bearing spine-chilling stories of the haunting. The
house was, at that time, a creepy, dark, outsized, lonely place, the perfect
receptacle for ghost stories, and the chemistry was right for hatching
supernatural tales which, viewed in the cold light of day, were simply absurd.
There is simply no need to reach for a ghostly explanation
for the events at Borley Rectory. If there was a common theme to the events, it
was that of people living in a style well beyond their income, keeping up
appearances and pouring all their hope of being rescued from financial melt-down
by producing a best-selling book. Mabel Smith, the Rev. Smith’s wife attempted
it and failed. The Rev. Foyster tried to do it as well and failed. Harry Price
then attempted it and was magnificently successful.