Enigma of Borley Rectory

by Harry Ludlum

  The strange footsteps common in the Bull years were also heard by the Smiths, chiefly in locked and disused upstairs rooms, of which there were plenty, for apart from Mary Pearson and a part-time maid who left after only two days, they had no regular servants. Consequently they had little option but to limit themselves to a few essential rooms that Mabel Smith could manage to keep in order. According to some accounts, it was the footsteps that caused Guy Smith to think that there was somebody prowling about in the house uninvited and it is often told that he fetched a hockey stick, stationed himself in one of the upper corridors where he thought the sounds were coming from, and lay in wait. The footsteps came in to earshot and when the Rector judged them to be level with where he was hiding, he sprang out with his hockey stick, doubtless hoping to whack the would-be intruder, but only to find that he was hitting out at thin air!

  Turning now to the maids, it was reportedly Mary Pearson, the Smiths' only regular servant, who came scuttling indoors one morning saying that she had seen an old-fashioned coach tearing silently across the lawn, only to vanish almost in front of her.

  Later questioning by Harry Price elicited the information that she had seen the vehicle twice, travelling first down the lawn, and on the second occasion up the lawn. It remained visible just long enough for Mary to notice the colour of the horses, which were brown, though sometimes stories about the coach quote bay as the colour.

  It was, it seems, the same vehicle seen speeding across the Rectory corner late one night by Edward Cooper during the First World War, but whereas Cooper noticed one, possibly two, tall figures waring hats, seated upon the driver's box, Mary saw no men at all. The vehicle was apparently under no visible control when she saw it. It is also thought to have been Mary who saw a headless figure, standing beneath the trees, which she chased until it disappeared.

  Out in the Rectory garden, Mabel Smith saw a greyish figure leaning rather wistfully on one of the gates, only to vanish when she approached it. At a time when the Smiths had been in the garden, and with nobody else in the Rectory, they returned to find a china vase lying at the foot of the main stairs, smashed to pieces. The Smiths also quite often experienced the servant bell phenomenon; most odd considering that on some of the bells the wiring had been ripped out or cut. A further curious incident was that of a light seen in an empty room. When first seen by Mrs Smith, she was alone, but on the second occasion members of the choir were with her. On unlocking the empty room it was in total darkness.

  The Rectory's weird reputation had been a talking point locally for many years, but by this time its reputation had become such that few people wanted to come near the place unless they had to, and Guy Smith, finding that many of his parishioners would not even come to parish meetings there, and tired of the way in which the Rectory and its atmosphere were disturbing the general order of things, sent an appeal to the press for someone to come and sort out the cause of the mysteries.

  The place was quite depressing enough with no gas or electricity and the drainage and water system in a poor state. The disturbances and their effect on the house were something that Smith was not prepared for and both he and his wife found them very puzzling. His appeal reached the editor of the Daily Mirror and a reporter, Mr V. C. Wall, was despatched to Borley to investigate.

  Poor Guy Smith! One wonders whether he would so readily have told the popular press about the strange events at the Rectory had he had any idea as to the extent of national interest that would follow. At one stage, after the story was printed in the Mirror, groups were even running coach trips from places such as Colchester, 'to see the ghost'. However, it is the visit of Mr Wall that concerns us now.

  After a night spent in the grounds of the Rectory, during which time a light was again seen at the window of an unused upstairs room, Wall wrote a sensationalised article in the Mirror, which suddenly and irreversibly catapulted the Rectory and its phenomena into the public eye. It didn't really need Harry Price to achieve that.

  Any prominent psychic researcher or a body such as the Society for Psychical Research (of which, in fact, Price was a member) could have been offered the challenge of Borley, but as we now know so well the editor of the Daily Mirror telephoned Harry Price, who accepted the suggestion that he should investigate Borley.

  Price and his secretary, Lucy Kaye, later Mrs Meeker, together with Wall, motored down to Borley Rectory on Jun 12 1929 and arrived in time to take lunch with the Rector and his wife, to learn some of the legends about the Rectory, its past history and its current mysteries. For Harry, it was the start of what could well be described as the strangest and most controversial case that he was to undertake in the whole of his career.

  With the onset of the evening of that first day at Borley Rectory, Price and Wall were in the garden when Wall, spotting a moving shadow looking like a figure, close to the far side of the garden, called out 'There she is!', thinking that he had sighted the nun. Price turned to look just too late and was never certain that he had spotted the figure. That was the beginning of an extraordinary first experience of the Rectory's phenomena for Price. As the two men went to re-enter the house by the verandah entrance, something dropped through the glass roof with a crash and landed close by, showering the pair with slivers of broken glass. The object was found to be a piece of brick.

  Having previously sealed all those rooms that could not readily be watched, the two men hurried into the house and checked, in particular, the upper floor to see whether someone had thrown the brick down from there, but all of Price's seals were untouched and still in place. In one room that they unsealed and re-entered, a pair of red glass candlesticks stood on the mantle piece, and both were still in place when the couple left, locked the room and resealed it. As they descended the stairs, however, one of these candlesticks hurtled over their heads down the stairwell, struck the stove in the hall below and smashed.

  Standing with the Rector, surveying the sad remains, the party was then showered with an assortment of pebbles, bits of slate, mothballs and other sundry junk. This prompted another extensive search of the Rectory, with no tangible result to provide an answer to the hail of debris.

  The next curious phenomenon was for the library and drawing-room locks to eject their keys on to the floor for no visible reason, though some folk have since tried to suggest air pressure as the cause, ideas that certainly do not sound at all convincing.

  Much later that night all assembled in the Blue Room where, under Price's supervision, a séance was conducted. The chief contact reported to have been made during this session was, we are told, with the late Rev. Harry Bull about whom various bits of information came to light, mostly never published as some of the people involved, such as the Bull sisters, were still alive.

  Consequently, the recorded details of the results of this séance had, of necessity, to be, at least partly, held in confidence. Because of an obvious responsibility to those still living, there was little, if anything, that Price could do about this at the time and though the details of the séance would probably be harmless now, various papers have been lost over the years and, regrettably, some of the details pertinent to Borley have been lost for good. However, one incident that was recorded during the séance is still on record.

  Some feet away from where the party was sitting was a wash-stand with a water jug beneath. During the proceedings, there came a loud 'clunk' from the direction of the wash-stand and upon investigation it was found that a cake of soap had leapt from it and struck the top of the water jug with such force that the soap was deeply dented. Also heard during the séance was a persistent knocking sound which was found to be coming from the back of an old wooden framed mirror.

  The séance was wound up at about 4 am, after which, as Price tells us, he retired to bed in the Blue Room, in which nothing further untoward was to occur that night.

  Harry Price was to make numerous visits to Borley Rectory over the next few years, but in the meantime the atmosphere and the lack of home comforts w
ere telling on Guy Smith and his wife who had been quite ill for a time. By the summer of 1929, not very long after Price started his own investigation, they had had enough and, although continuing to carry out his duties as Rector, Guy Smith with his wife moved into lodgings in Long Melford.

  During this period, with the Rectory once again unoccupied, things continued to occur that were odd to say the least. Local villagers continued to report seeing the light in the locked upstairs room, and on return visits to the Rectory a previously closed and locked window was found wide open.

  On paying a further return visit to the Rectory in February 1930, the Smiths were surprised to find that some of their furniture, which they left in store there as a temporary measure, had been hurled about the room; also part of a stone fireplace had been dumped on one of the staircases. Writing to Price later, the Smiths recounted that on approaching the house on or about March 18 1930 they heard 'the most horrible sounds coming from the house'. In April 1930, the Smiths finally left the area altogether, moving to Sheringham.

  The building was once again without a tenant and, for a while, it looked as though Borley would have difficulty in finding a new Rector, but finally the surviving members of the Bull family managed to persuade a cousin to return from Canada to take up the post as Rector, and on October 16, 1930, Borley Rectory saw the arrival of the Rev. Lionel Algernon Foyster MA, together with his much younger wife Marianne, and a little adopted baby daughter, Adelaide.

  Their arrival signified the start of five of the most stormy years in the whole of the Rectory's history, over which controversy has continued ever since. In the face of the recorded happenings that follow, there have been varying accounts by many people of what did or did not happen between 1930 and 1935, when the Foysters finally packed and left. Marianne's side of the story, as she recounted it in more recent years, far from resolving the controversy, just added to it, providing yet another slant on the efforts of Harry Price and others such as Trevor Hall to prove or disprove the whole episode.

  One of the most fascinating aspects of the Foysters' tenancy at Borley was a diary kept by the Rector, telling of some of the most extraordinary phenomena in the house. There have been suggestions made that the diary, though inspired by things that happened in the Rectory, was compiled with a view to it being published and was, as a consequence, somewhat embroidered.

  This idea cannot be entirely discounted of course, but one wonders whether such ideas were entirely in keeping with the diary writer's position as a man of the cloth. It is now generally believed, however, that it was the intention of Lionel Foyster to circularise the diary among members of his family, of which there were several, dotted about in various places.

  Like their relations, the Bulls, the Foysters were quite a clan, Lionel's side of the family having provided successive rectors for the parish church of All Saints' in Hastings, Sussex, where Lionel himself was born. There were, in all, four versions of this diary, including a hand-written one and a typed manuscript in which Foyster concealed the location of the house, calling it 'Cromley Hall'. He also altered the names of the people involved, though it still ran pretty true to what other people witnessed at the Rectory during those five years, the diary itself dealing with about 18 months of that period.

  Regarding the criticisms about the diary, there have been statements to the effect that items that went missing in the Rectory, apparently without any logical explanation, were in fact mislaid by the Rector due to supposed absent-mindedness on his part. Though that is possible, it is an answer to the phenomena that seems to me to be too convenient, and in many instances it is a solution that is not good enough. The characters of Lionel Foyster and his rather curious young wife will be looked at in greater detail in a chapter set aside for their tenure as residents of the Rectory. For the present, though, we are concerned here with the phenomena that are said to have occurred while they were at the Rectory, and so to continue ...

  We are told that on their first full day in the house, Marianne was alone in the building at one point and heard curious 'disembodied' voices calling out her name. Referring to the Rector's diary, we learn the following:

  The Rector, his wife, Adelaide and a helper heard footsteps. Marianne reported seeing the figure of Harry Bull more than once; clad in a dressing gown that local folk recalled him having worn often when he was alive. In addition to the appearance of Harry Bull, other, more annoying, things happened. Assorted utensils, such as jugs and other crockery would go missing and then reappear elsewhere in the house. On one occasion, the Foysters noticed a strange smell like cologne and lavender mixed, the smell being most pronounced in the Blue Room, which they used as their bedroom.

  The familiar bell-ringing incidents continued to take place, sometimes for long periods at a time. One day, Marianne, having taken off her wristwatch to wash her hands, turned to put it back on, only to find that the bracelet strap had vanished. It was never recovered. There then followed the appearance of a lavender bag, not seen before, first on the mantelpiece in the sewing room, then in the Rector's coat pocket a day or so later. In the typed 'concealed location' version of the diary there appears a remark that Marianne supposedly made about the lavender bag, 'Don't throw it away. If you don't want it, I'll put it in with the washing.'

  Then there occurred the strange incident of some old books found in the toilet upstairs, next to the chapel. A book was found on the windowsill. When removed, it was found later to have been replaced with another and so on until, on the last occasion, a book was found lying on the floor with its cover torn off. This last episode is reported as having occurred during February 1931.

  On the 25th of that month, a number of missing items of crockery, lost some time before, were found piled in the kitchen. At Lionel's suggestion, Marianne asked whoever or whatever was responsible for these capers to return a missing teapot. The teapot reappeared. The lost watchstrap was also asked for, but sadly with no success. Upon waking the following morning, February 26, they found some old books thrown under their bed. Later the same day, a stack of Durham Mission hymn books was found on a shelf over the kitchen range. A popular version of this incident has it that the church was rather short of hymn books at that time.

  On the evening of the same day is said to have occurred the nastiest of all incidents during the Foysters' tenancy. Marianne was outside the Blue Room, carrying a candle in her hand, with nobody else near, when she was struck in the face with sufficient force to cause a cut beneath her eye and to blacken the eye itself. The following evening, February 27, 1931, shortly after retiring to bed, the couple were 'buzzed' by a cotton reel and then by a hammerhead on a snapped-off handle, both of which skimmed across their bed, the hammerhead landing on the floor with a clatter and the cotton reel striking the wall before dropping to the floor. When the Rector lit a lamp, the strange antics stopped.

  A day later, when Foyster had been in his study writing, and had left the room for a few minutes, he returned to find pins sticking point-upwards in two of the chairs. Following this incident, the Rector tripped over an old oil lamp and a saucepan lying on the floor outside his room, and later he came across a floor polisher handle in one of the passageways. The lamp and saucepan he did not even recognise as belonging to the household.

  On the night of March 5, Foyster was hit on the head by his own hairbrush and later Marianne had a doorknob thrown at her from behind while traversing the passage from the bathroom. On the two days following, more things were thrown and articles were dumped on the floor. In one case, pictures from the wall on the stairs were found lying on the floor, books on a shelf in the sewing room were hurled on to the floor, and stones were thrown.

  On March 9, workmen arrived at the Rectory to thaw out frozen pipes, which had been installed earlier. While the men were working there, stones were heard and seen tumbling down the back stairs. Foyster was apparently satisfied that when Marianne entered the building, having been outside, she was not responsible for the incident. Later, in walk
ing from the kitchen to the sewing room, Marianne was pursued by a large chunk of iron, which came scudding along the corridor after her and landed inside the sewing room as she tried to shut the door against it. Then Marianne was in the process of making up the fire in the kitchen range, when a stone flew over the room and struck the door just as the Rector passed behind it. On March 10, in the morning, Marianne woke to find small stones behind her pillow.

  Following this came further disturbances including the breaking of the window on the stairs by something thrown through it from inside, while all the occupants of the house were downstairs near the hall stove. Not long after this, various odds and ends were found in the house, such as a tin travelling trunk, not seen before, a powder box and, most odd, a wedding ring which had disappeared by the following morning.

  An odd sequel to the ring was that a few years later, on the last day of Harry Price's own tenancy of the Rectory, when he and a colleague Mr Geoffrey Motion were checking, prior to locking up for the last time, they found a gold ring, possibly the same ring, on the floor in one of the rooms.

  Returning to the Foysters' experiences, the next dubious treat in store was for Marianne to trip over a brick lying by the bathroom door. The following day saw the arrival of two priests who, accompanied by the Rector and Marianne, covered the whole house, reciting prayers and using incense and holy water in an attempt to put an end to the disturbances. Though nothing further happened for a while, their efforts proved ineffective, like all such attempts to clear the Rectory of its phenomena. Later, a small boy passing by outside had a stone thrown at him and when the Rector returned from having been out during the latter part of that day, he had another stone thrown at him. Shortly after, another stone fell near the hall stove, narrowly missing the Rector's head.