by Colin Wilson
The rector and others tried praying in the chapel, taking with them a relic of the Curé of Ars, and then went around the house making signs of the cross. Finally, they all spent the night in the Blue Room, where Henry Bull (and others) had died; they asked that the entity should stop troubling the inmates of the house; a black shadow began to form against the wall, then dissolved. But after this, temporary peace descended on Borley Rectory.
In 1935, the Foysters decided they had had enough, and moved. Price rented the rectory in 1937, and arranged for a team of investigators to go in. But the major phenomena were over. Even so, the chief investigator, Sidney Glanville, a retired engineer, became completely convinced of the reality of the haunting.
In March 1938, the team were experimenting with a planchette, which wrote the message that Borley would be destroyed by fire. This happened in February 1939, when the house mysteriously burned down. Yet the phenomena continued; a Cambridge team investigating the ruins heard footsteps, saw patches of light, and recorded sudden sharp drops in temperature.
In August 1943, Price decided to try digging in the cellars at Borley—which he had been advised to do by a planchette message which claimed to come from ‘Glanvil’—the same Glanvil who wrote the account of the Tedworth drummer. They found a cream jug, which had also been referred to by the planchette, and some fragments of a human skull. The jawbone showed signs of a deep-seated abscess—Peter Underwood speculates that this is why the phantom nun always looked miserable.
The SPR survey on Borley, which appeared eight years after Price’s death, had the effect of seriously undermining his credit. Trevor Hall’s Search for Harry Price (1978) completed the work of destroying his reputation. yet although this leaves no doubt that Price lied about his origins—perhaps romanced would be a better word—and hungered for fame, it produces no evidence that Price was not exactly what he always claimed to be: an enthusiastic scientific investigator of paranormal phenomena. To assume that, because Price wanted to be thought a ‘gentleman’, he was also dishonest as a paranormal researcher, is surely poor psychology. Price was one of those ambitious men who crave an outlet for their energies. He was 40 years old before he found the opportunity he was looking for—a long time for a man of Price’s impatient temperament. It came when Dingwall invited him to Munich to study the Schneider brothers. From then on, Price had discovered his vocation; at last, he had found the outlet he needed for his explosive energy and romanticism. And when a man as energetic and romantic as Harry Price finally finds what he is looking for, he does not risk spoiling everything with a little cheap skulduggery. It only takes one scandal to destroy a scientist’s reputation. But to put it this way is to imply that Price disciplined his natural dishonesty solely to maintain his reputation, and this is to miss the real point: that once a man has found his vocation, he pours into it all that is best about himself. Bernard Shaw has left an interesting description of the socialist Edward Aveling, who was Eleanor Marx’s common-law husband; he was an inveterate seducer, and a borrower who never paid his debts, yet where socialism was concerned, he was fiercely sincere. Everything we know about Price reveals that, where psychical research was concerned, he was totally dedicated—although not above grabbing publicity wherever he could find it.
In short, it would be of no advantage to him to pretend the Borley phenomena were genuine when they were not. His reputation was based on his scepticism as much as on his support of the reality of psychic phenomena. Possibly—like most of us—he was capable of stretching a fact when it appealed to his romanticism. But in the case of Borley, there was no need to stretch facts. The haunting of Borley does not rest on Price’s evidence alone; there are dozens of other witnesses, such as Guy L’Estrange—or Dom Richard Whitehouse, cited by Underwood, who witnessed just as many incredible occurrences: flying objects, ringing of bells, writing on walls, outbreaks of fire, materialisation of bottles.
And is there evidence that Price did stretch the facts? The SPR survey cites as an example of his dishonesty the episode of the pair of legs that Harry Bull saw walking through the postern gate. Price says, admittedly, that when the man energed from behind the fruit trees, he was headless. But the report then goes on to cite Price’s original notes, which read: ‘Rev. Harry Bull saw coach, Juvenal, retriever, terrified and growled. Saw man’s legs rest hid by fruit trees, thought poacher, followed with Juvenal, gate shut, but saw legs disappear through gate.’ Clearly, what Bull saw disappearing through the gate was not a complete man, or Price would not refer only to the legs. It sounds as if the upper half of his body was missing—in which case, headless is a fair description.
What seems clear from all accounts of the case is that the ‘ground’ itself is haunted, and continues to be so. Borley is a ‘place of power’, the kind of place that would be chosen for a monastery, and that probably held some pagan site of worship long before that (See Chapter 15). In the Rectory’s early days, Harry Bull himself—son of the Reverend Henry Bull—was probably the unconscious focus or medium; Paul Tabori says that he was probably psychic. This is borne out by the fact that young Bull saw so many of the ‘ghosts’, including the coach and the nun. It is important to realise that not all people can see ghosts. The ‘ghost hunter’ Andrew Green describes, in Our Haunted Kingdom, a visit that he and other members of the Ealing Psychical Research Society paid to Borley in 1951:
‘One of the Society members grabbed my arm and, although obviously terrified, proceeded to describe a phantom that he could see some thirty feet in front of him, standing at the end of the ‘Nun’s Walk’. It was of a Woman in a long white gown, and moved slowly towards the end of the neglected garden . . . the witness was perspiring profusely with fear and, later with annoyance that I had failed to see the ghost.’
Green had only heard the rustle of trees and bushes, as if something was walking through the undergrowth. We may assume, then, that if Green had been a tenant of Borley before its destruction, he would probably have seen no ghosts. Bull was, it seems, enough of a ‘medium’ to see the ghosts. And Marianne Foyster was a far more powerful medium who changed the character of the haunting into poltergeist activity. (Most of the messages scrawled on walls were addressed to her.) The reason that the subsequent investigation of Borley (during Price’s tenancy) was so unsuccessful was that there was no medium present to provide the energy.
Asked about the ‘ley system’ of the Borley area, the ley expert Stephen Jenkins replied as follows: ‘Norfolk and Suffolk are a spider-web of alignments, many of which are linked to curious manifestations. Borley church stands at a node where four lines cross, one going from Asher church to Sproughton church . . .’ After giving further details of the ley system, he goes on:
‘My wife photographed me as I was standing with my back to the south wall of Borley churchyard, at ten o’clock on the morning of Saturday the 1st of September, 1979. Recently, this was borrowed for a magazine article, and the editor kindly sent me an enlargement. No less than three people, not one of them known to the others, have on separate occasions noted in the enlargement some odd—and not very prepossessing—faces among the trees close to the church. The same identifications have been made without possibility of collusion.
‘More dramatic than unexpected faces in a photograph, which can always be explained away as ‘simulacra’, or something wrong with the emulsion, is an incident of Sunday the 28th of August, 1977, on the road north of Belchamp Walter Hall. The time was precisely 12.52 pm, and we were driving south west along the minor road which marks the north end of the Hall grounds, when on the road in front, in the act of turning left into the hedge (I mean our left, across the path of the car), instantaneously appeared four men in black—I thought them hooded and cloaked—carrying a black, old-fashioned coffin, ornately trimmed with silver. The impression made on both of us was one of absolute physical presence, of complete material reality. Thelma and I at once agreed to make separate notes without comparing impressions. We did so, and the descriptions tallied e
xactly, except that she noted the near left bearer turn his face towards her. I did not see this as I was abruptly braking at the time.
‘What I had seen as a hood, she described as a soft tall hat, with a kind of scarf falling to the left shoulder, thrown across the cloaked body to the right. The face was that of a skull . . .
‘The next day we returned to the precise spot at exactly the same time and took a picture. It is a Kodak colour slide. In the hedge near the gap where the ‘funeral party’ vanished (there is a path there leading to Belchamp Walter churchyard) is a short figure, apparently cloaked, its face lowered with a skull-like dome to the head. A year later I returned searching the area where it had apparently stood. There was nothing, no post or stump that might have provided such an image, nor was there the slightest sign of the ground having been disturbed by the removal of anything that might have been rooted in it. The image is simply there on the film—we saw nothing wrong with the eye.
‘That minor road alongside the north edge of the Belchamp Walter Estate precisely coincides with a line passing through the node in the water west of Heaven Wood. That node itself linked with the node at Borley.’
He adds a postscript: ‘I hazard a guess that the dress of the coffin-bearer is that of the late 14th century. There seems to be no local legend of a phantom funeral.’
If Price invented the ghosts of Borley, he must have been in collusion with a remarkable number of people.
‘I did not like [Harry Price] because he was a difficult man to like. He was intensely selfish, jealous, and intent on his own glory at all costs, but these weaknesses of his character do not detract from his investigation as an honest investigator and ruthless exposer of frauds. This was the shining feature of his life.’
These words were written by another man who deserves to be remembered as one of the prominent ghost-hunters of the 20th century. Unlike Price, Nandor Fodor seems to have had no great compulsion to achieve personal glory; the result is that, since his death in 1964, his name has been largely forgotten, and most of his books are out of print. Yet at least one of his books—his account of the Thornton Heath poltergeist case—deserves the status of a classic.
Fodor was born in Hungary in 1895, studied law, then became a journalist, and visited America. In 1926, he interviewed two remarkable men: Hereward Carrington, the psychical researcher, and Sandor Ferenczi, one of Freud’s most prominent disciples. Fodor became simultaneously fascinated by psychoanalysis and psychical research and, in due course, became himself a psychoanalyst. Predictably, therefore, his analysis of poltergeist cases is dominated by the conviction that they have a sexual origin. But since—as we have seen—there is a large element of truth in this view, Fodor’s psychoanalytical beliefs distorted his outlook rather less than is often the case with Freudians.
Fodor attended his first seance at the house of a well-known American medium, Arthur Ford, in October 1927, and what he heard there left him in no doubt that the dead can communicate. In the semi-darkness, a trumpet sailed up into the air, then a voice began to speak. Various relatives of people who were present then came and (apparently) talked through the medium. Fodor then asked if the ‘control’ could bring someone who spoke Hungarian. It was, perhaps, an unreasonable request, but an excellent test for the medium. And after a few moments, a voice spoke from the air saying: ‘Fodor, journalist’, using the German pronunciation of the word—just as Fodor’s father did. Then the entity proceeded to speak to Fodor in Hungarian. The voice identified itself as Fodor’s father, and mentioned various relatives; it named his oldest brother by his pet name. The ‘spirit’ was having great difficulty communicating—because, explained the control, it was the first time he had tried to speak. The control helped out by telling Fodor that his father died on January 16. The ‘spirit’ ended by saying ‘Isten áldjon meg. édes fiam’—‘God bless you, my dear son’. After this, another Hungarian came through—the deceased brother of Fodor’s wife, who was present. It mentioned that ‘poor Uncle Vilmos’ was ill and would go blind. And, in due course, this is exactly what happened to Uncle Vilmos.
It emerged later that the medium—a man called Cartheuser—could speak Hungarian. Yet this scarcely helps to explain his knowledge of Fodor’s father, and the prophecy about Uncle Vilmos. Cartheuser also had a speech impediment, due to a hare-lip; the voices had no such impediment.
Fodor came to England to work for Lord Northcliffe—owner of the Daily Mail—and, in his spare time, compiled an Encyclopedia of Psychic Science, which is still one of the best available (a new edition combines it with a similar work by Lewis Spence). After publishing the book, in 1934, Fodor had first-hand experience of the ambiguous nature of ‘psychic phenomena’. He heard of a remarkable Hungarian medium called Lajos Pap, a carpenter, whose speciality was causing ‘apports’ of live birds, animals and beetles to appear at seances. In June 1933, Fodor attended such a seance in Budapest. Pap was undressed and searched, then dressed again in a robe of luminous cloth, so that his movements in the dark could be clearly seen. Two men held Pap’s wrists during the seance, although he could move his hands with their hands on him. In an hour-long seance, Pap groped into the air and produced thirty live beetles, many of them an inch long. He also produced a cactus plant with soil on the roots and a rose bush. On other occasions, Pap had produced birds, caterpillars, dragonflies, snakes and a live goldfish. His ‘control’, the Rabbi Isaac (who claimed to have lived six hundred years earlier in Galicia) had a sense of humour. At one seance, a toy pistol arrived, and a number of explosive caps were fired; the Rabbi claimed to have shot dead twenty-one crickets and, after the seance, dead crickets were found in the room.
On another occasion, nine lumps of dirty snow arrived during the seance, and proved to be mixed with horse manure and straw. The temperature in the room was 72 degrees Fahrenheit, so it would have been difficult to keep the snow unmelted for long if it had been concealed under the medium’s robe.
Fodor arranged for Lajos Pap to be brought to London. At a seance there a dead snake, more than two feet long, appeared. Fodor was impressed; but he nevertheless insisted that Pap should have an X-ray examination to find out whether he could have anything secreted in his body. To Fodor’s surprise and dismay, Pap proved to be wearing a belt of linen and whalebone under his robe. He said it was a kind of rupture truss, because he had a dropped kidney; but Fodor decided regretfully that this was where the dead snake had been hidden, and that it had been worked out through the neck of the robe. Accordingly, in his subsequent report, ‘The Lajos Pap Experiments’, Fodor concluded that Pap’s psychic powers should be regarded as ‘not proven’. Yet he adds:
‘Nor would I be willing to declare him a fraud and nothing but a fraud. Too long has psychical research been the victim of the fatal delusion that a medium is either genuine or fraudulent. It is a minimal assumption that mediumship means a dissociation of personality. There was plenty of evidence that Lajos Pap was suffering from such a dissociation.’
In fact, Pap is still regarded as a non-fraudulent medium, and accounts of his seances at which live birds and insects appeared seem to indicate that his powers were remarkable.
Fodor had been appointed Research Officer of the International Institute for Psychical Research. In November 1936, he was asked to investigate a case of poltergeist haunting at Aldborough Manor in Yorkshire. The bells for summoning servants had rung almost non-stop for five days, doors had opened and closed of their own accord, and two maids had seen a ghost above an ancient cradle. Lady Lawson-Tancred, who lived in the house, was afraid she would have to move out if the haunting continued. But when Fodor arrived, it was already over. One of the two maids had had a nervous breakdown and left. The bells had rung during the night she left and the following morning, then stopped. To Fodor, therefore, it was clear that the maid was the ‘focus’ of the disturbance. Her nervous breakdown was probably caused by the ‘drain’ upon her energies caused by the poltergeist. The other maid, a very pretty girl, also had a str
ange power over animals; birds would settle on her shoulders, and mice run into her hands. Lady Lawson-Tancred thought that she might also be connected with the disturbances, and dismissed her. (Fodor seems to have explained to her the difference between a poltergeist and a real ‘haunting’, where the house itself seems to concentrate the negative forces, as at Borley.) After this, Aldborough Manor became peaceful.
The same solution was found in the case of a Chelsea poltergeist that disturbed a house with its knockings. Fodor went to the house, in Elm Park Gardens, and heard the rappings himself—he said they were like hammer blows. Fodor looked around for the focus, and soon found it: a 17-year-old servant girl named Florrie. He engaged her in conversation, and she told him that this was not her first experience of mysterious knockings—the same thing had happened at home four years before, when she was 13. The children were all sent away, and when they returned, the knocking had stopped. Clearly, Florrie was quite unaware that she had been the ‘cause’ of the knockings.
Fodor told the house’s owner, Dr Aidan Redmond, that Florrie was probably the unconscious medium. That night, the raps were like machine-gun fire. Dr Redmond regretfully sacked Florrie. And silence descended on the house.
In July 1936, Fodor investigated a case in which the distinction between ghost and poltergeist becomes blurred; this was at Ash Manor, in Sussex, and he disguises the family under the name of Keel. It is among the most remarkable ghost stories ever recorded.
The house was bought by the family in June 1934; when they said they could not pay the price demanded, the owner dropped his demand so surprisingly that the Keels decided there must be something wrong with the place, probably the sanitation. But the wife soon began to get extremely unpleasant feelings in a bedroom that had been used for servants. (The previous owner said they had run away.)