by Neil Spring
And at that point, I had known that John Wesley was right: I had to find her, not just to learn about my father and myself but to show her what I had done with my life. To explain that what ever torment she had endured by giving me up, I had been all right. Had done well. Become a respected academic. She needed to know that she could be proud of me.
My mouth was dry with the unconscious fear of rejection, and as my car rolled to a halt I caught the movement of a curtain at the closest window. I reached for the glove compartment and clicked it open. Inside were the photographs I had brought to show Sarah Grey: my beautiful girls and my wife, posing together in the earlier summer outside the Colosseum in Rome.
I waited, my chest tightening around a thundering heart, mentally rehearsing everything I would ask the woman who had brought me into the world. I was about to meet someone who had only ever been a name to me. What would she be like? I pictured a frail, elegant woman in a wool cardigan. Any time we had left would be painfully limited. There would be smiles. There would be tears. And I would embrace her in a hug that lasted fifty years.
My eyes roamed as I climbed out of the car. Beyond the farm house, out to sea, which was wild and black and forever, lightning shredded the sky. And somewhere, beyond the curtain of rain, in another place, I imagined Harry Price was watching.
THE END
Author’s Note
The haunting of Borley Rectory and Harry Price’s investigation are legendary. Rumours and stories abound and have fuelled many books on what might – or might not – be lurking in that bleak and isolated hamlet perched on the Essex–Suffolk border. But what is the truth?
During my first visit to Borley in 2010, I was unable to find anyone willing to admit to any unusual experiences on or near the site of the old Rectory. The few residents I did meet were keen to emphasise that any stories of ghosts were fictitious and that the legend of the Rectory was nothing but an elaborate hoax. I even wrote a letter to every resident in the village, requesting that they share any personal experiences of haunting. None did.
But then came a curious and unsettling development.
An old friend who accompanied me to Borley on a later date revealed in confidence that he had heard strange noises as we approached the churchyard. In his words, ‘the sound of a coach and horses pounding the road’.
The odd thing was, we hadn’t seen any coach or horses.
When I mentioned this to an elderly woman living close to the site of the old Rectory, she became serious and said quietly, ‘Yes, people do keep reporting that … But if strange things do still happen here, I’m hardly likely to tell you. Don’t expect anyone else here to discuss it, either.’
Whatever the truth about that mysterious, out-of-the-way place, it is the legend of Borley rather than its historical detail that I have sought to re-imagine. This novel is certainly not a faithful retelling of Harry Price’s association with the house, but a fictional representation of what might have happened. I owe a debt of gratitude to the source material in Harry Price’s original books, The Most Haunted House of England and The End of Borley Rectory.
The following elements in the story are true:
The Harry Price Magical Library was looked after for forty-two years by the late Alan Wesencraft, who died on 3 December 2007. For many years, the collection was stored in a room on the eighth floor of University of London’s Senate House Library, which is itself reputedly haunted. Yes, there really are rumours about the eighth floor, and the collection is one of the largest and most important of its kind anywhere in the world. More information is available at www.neilspring.com
The National Laboratory for Psychical Research was based on the top floor of 16 Queensberry Place, the headquarters of the London Spiritualist Alliance. Whereas the setting remains consistent for my story, in reality Price’s lease with the LSA expired in 1930. The following year, the Laboratory was relocated to 13 Roland Gardens in South Kensington. It was dissolved in 1934.
In 1927, at Church Hall in Westminster, Harry Price staged a sensational public opening of Joanna Southcott’s ‘locked box’.
The Bull sisters observed the apparition of a nun in the Rectory garden on 28 July 1900. From that day, 28 July became known in Borley as ‘the nun’s day’.
The Borley case came to Harry Price’s attention in 1929 via Alexander Campbell, the editor of the Daily Mirror, after Mrs Smith wrote a letter to the newspaper asking to be put in touch with the Society for Psychical Research. Vernon Wall did not lock horns with Harry Price. He resigned from the Mirror in 1932 and became a freelance reporter.
According to Harry Price, the title of his book – The Most Haunted House in England – came from a labourer whom he stopped and asked for directions on his way to Borley Rectory.
Price’s arrival at the Rectory on 12 June 1929 coincided with a range of unusual happenings; stones and mothballs were thrown, bells rang, a candlestick came hurtling down the stairs and a brick crashed through the verandah roof. Vernon Wall also reported that he had seen a dark shape moving in the garden and caught his foot in a rotten well cover in the Rectory cellars. The order of these events has been altered significantly in my story.
The Blue Room seance on the night of 12–13 June 1929 lasted three hours and was attended by the Bull sisters, Mr and Mrs Smith, Vernon Wall, Harry Price and his real secretary at the time, Lucy Kay. During this seance, a cake of soap was indeed thrown at the wall and raps were heard on the back of a mirror, spelling out names and messages by an entity purporting to be the spirit of the late rector, Harry Bull, who claimed he had been murdered.
Many people working at the Bull Inn, near Borley, claim to have experienced paranormal phenomena. Interviews with some of these witnesses are available at www.neilspring.com
Harry Price sat with the Austrian medium Rudi Schneider many times, and in May 1932 obtained an incriminating photograph which he later claimed was his revenge for Rudi associating with the Society for Psychical Research. During another seance in his Laboratory, Harry communicated with a medium who appeared to be speaking with the voice of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. These seances were entirely separate events, and on neither occasion did events transpire as the Rudi seance is presented in my story.
Although the scenes involving Harry Price and Sarah Grey with the Reverend Lionel Foyster and Marianne are imagined, it is true that Price returned to Borley Rectory in October 1931 with a group of interested colleagues. It is also true that he was persuaded to return to Borley by Ethel Bull; that Lionel Foyster sent Price a copy of his Diary of Occurrences, which Price did not return; and that Price signed an agreement of confidentiality with the rector. He left the house with the impression that the phenomena in the house were caused by Marianne, but paradoxically later wrote up the case as an apparently genuine incident of poltergeist phenomena.
Marianne Foyster was born in 1899 and died in 1992. It is true that she married a man by the name of Greenwood at just fifteen and that when she married Foyster in 1922 there was no evidence of any divorce. According to evidence from Trevor Hall and Robert Wood, author of The Widow Of Borley, the Foysters’ lives were extremely dysfunctional, with Marianne pursuing a sexual relationship with Frank Peerless, the lodger at Borley Rectory.
During the fire which destroyed Borley Rectory on 27 February 1939, a police constable and locals watched what they thought were ghostly figures walking in the flames. Captain W. H. Gregson’s son, Alan William Gregson, later claimed that the fire started while his father was shelving books in the library when an oil lamp accidentally tipped over; but another son, Anthony, claimed that the house was torched for insurance purposes.
My character Sarah’s interpretation of the wall writings ‘well tank bottom me’ is based on an elaborate theory devised by Canon W. J. Phythian-Adams, who wrote to Harry Price in January 1941 urging him to dig in order to substantiate the theory. Although the writings appear to have been written in Marianne’s hand, some witnesses claimed that the wall writing appeared in front
of their eyes.
In July 1943, human remains – the jawbone of a woman and the left side of a skull – were discovered at the site of the Rectory. The jawbone was analysed by a dental surgeon, Leslie J. Godden, who found it was severely infected and was likely to have caused great pain during life. Harry Price theorised that this was the reason the phantom nun of Borley was always seen looking pale and haggard and unhappy.
Harry Price died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in Pulborough on 29 March 1948. The St Ignatius Borley medallion was found on his body, after his former secretary, Lucy Kay, sent it to him at his request. Until recently, the location of the Borley medallion was unknown; but shortly before the completion of this novel, its whereabouts were privately disclosed to me.
In January 1956, Eric J. Dingwall, Kathleen M. Goldney and Trevor H. Hall published their ‘Borley Report’ in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. The results of their five-year investigation destroyed Price’s reputation as a reliable psychical researcher, accusing him of fraud in practically all aspects of the Borley case. Professor Anthony Flew, who reviewed the report in the Spectator on 27 January 1956, referred to the Borley case as ‘a house of cards which Harry Price built out of little more than a pack of lies’. By then Charles Suttton, a journalist, had gone public with the news that he had witnessed Price throwing stones at the Rectory.
In March 2004, the fourteenth-century tithe barn, which was positioned just next to where the Rectory had stood, was converted into a handsome private house. During the course of the work human skeletal remains were unearthed in its foundations: fragments of skull, ribs and leg bones. Analysis of the remains confirmed they were female.
Reports of unusual sounds and occurrences at the site of Borley Rectory continue to this day.
As for Harry, his character – brilliant and ambitious, impatient, selfish and unreliable, charming and riddled with contradictions – is based on the true Harry Price, who was born to a working-class family and certainly embellished his upbringing and his credentials. I have exaggerated and imagined aspects of his character. The real Harry Price was not, for example, a good public speaker and showed much greater initial enthusiasm for the Borley investigation than is implied in my story. He never employed an assistant named Radley and he never kept his paper bag business a secret. Nor is it necessarily true that he sympathised with the Nazi regime, although he did possess a great many photographs of German architecture, and in July 1939 he drafted a letter to Hitler, requesting ‘facilities for attending – in comfort – the Nuremberg Rally in August’.1
Harry’s foil, Sarah Grey, is my creation. I found some small inspiration for her character in Harry’s former secretary, Lucy Kay (born Violet Lucy Kaltenbach). Lucy, whose father was a commercial clerk named Maximilian, was a young actress of German descent who trained at RADA, and was first introduced to Harry at the opening of his Laboratory. Their meeting wasn’t at all hostile or dramatic in the way Sarah’s encounter is presented. Nor did she move to Wales and live out her days with Vernon Wall. In fact she died from cirrhosis of the liver in Hammersmith on 7 May 1955, and although she was only involved in the initial investigation of Borley Rectory – having left Price’s employ in the early 1930s – unlike Sarah, she was a willing believer in the phenomena encountered there, as well as a staunch defender of Harry Price. ‘It is my considered conviction that Harry Price never, at any time, faked phenomena,’ she wrote. ‘I am convinced he was a man of unimpeachable integrity.’2
There are indications that Lucy Kay led rather an unpredictable, irresponsible life. According to her son David, she frequently moved between addresses in the Paddington area of London, enjoyed betting on horses and was not sensible with financial affairs. In fact, she even borrowed money from Harry Price, whom she found ‘hypnotic’. The pair formed a close friendship which lasted until Price’s death, after which Lucy had replicas of the Borley medallion made, and sold them for profit.
Despite suspicions, there is no conclusive evidence that Harry and Lucy’s closeness ever developed into a romance. In my novel, Sarah’s Grey’s child by Harry, Dr Caxton, is entirely fictional. His character brings us to the heart of the book through layered narrative – a well-worn technique in the ghost-story genre.
When people ask me what makes a good ghost story, I invariably tell them that the reader must be made to care about the ghost. We have to know something of their life on earth if we are to care about them in death. So it might seem odd that in this novel we learn very little about the phantom nun, but we do learn a great deal about Harry, Sarah and the residents of Borley Rectory. This is deliberate, because ultimately they are the true ghosts of the piece.
I like to think that Sarah and Harry are still out there somewhere, chasing ghosts and solving mysteries, a conception I hope will be realised one day through dramatic adaptations. Harry Price, ever the showman, might approve of this idea.
I hope so.
Neil Spring
London, 2013
* * *
Notes
1 Letter from Harry Price to Eric Dingwall, 28 July 1939.
2 Lucie Meeker, quoted in Borley Postscript, p. 143.
Bibliography
Adams, Paul, Eddie Brazil and Peter Underwood. The Borley Rectory Companion. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2009.
Banks, Ivan. The Enigma of Borley Rectory. London: Foulsham, 1996.
Clarke, A. “The Bones of Borley.” The Foxearth and District Local History Society, 2005.
Dingwall, Eric John, Kathleen M. Goldney and Trevor Henry Hall. The Haunting of Borley Rectory. London: Duckworth, 1956.
Aickman, R.F. “Postscript to Harry Price.” Mystery. An Anthology of the Mysterious in Fact and Fiction. Ed. Negley Farson, et al. London: Hulton Press, 1952.
Foyster, Reverend Lionel Algernon. Summary of Experiences at Borley Rectory. University of London: Senate House Library [HPC/3G/2], 1938.
Foyster, Reverend Lionel Algernon. Untitled Letters. University of London: Senate House Library [HPC/4B/74], 1931.
Glanville, Sidney H. The Haunting of Borley Rectory. Private and Confidential Report. University of London: Senate House Library [HPC/3G/5]
Hall, Trevor Henry. The Search for Harry Price. London: Duckworth, 1978.
Henning, Reverend A.C. Haunted Borley. Colchester: Shenval Press, 1949.
Mayerling, Louis. We Faked the Ghosts of Borley. London: Pen
Press, 2000.
Meeker, Lucie. The Ghost that Kept Harry Price Awake.
Morris, Richard. Harry Price the Psychic Detective. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2006.
Price, Harry. Confessions of a Ghost Hunter. London: Putnam, 1936.
Price, Harry. Leaves from a Psychist’s Casebook. London:
Gollancz, 1933.
Price, Harry. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (1929).
Price, Harry. The Most Haunted House in England. London: Longman, Greene & Co Ltd., 1940.
Price, Harry. Poltergeist Over England. London: Country Life, 1945.
Price, Harry. Search for Truth: My Life for Psychical Research. London: Collin, 1942.
Price, Harry. The End of Borley Rectory. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1946.
Tabori, Paul. Harry Price: The Biography of a Ghost Hunter.
London: Athenaeum Press, 1950.
Underwood, Peter. Borley Postscript. Haslemere: White House Publications, 2001.
Wood, Robert. The Widow of Borley. London: Duckworth, 1992.
Other
Dingwall, Eric John, Kathleen M. Goldney and Trevor Henry Hall. The Haunted Rectory [BBC script]. London: British Broadcasting Company, 1956. Republished at http://www.foxearth.org.uk.
‘An Authentic Interview with Conan Doyle from Beyond.’ NewYork: Cosmopolitan, January 1931.
“Instruction booklets for Observers at Borley Rectory.” University of London: Senate House Library [HPC/7/6], 1937.
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Websites
http://www.harrypricewebsite.co.uk
To learn more about Borley Rectory, other mysteries and future novels, visit:
www.neilspring.com
Acknowledgements
My sincerest thanks to Guy Chambers, dear friend to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for fishing the opening pages out of the sea (yes, it’s true – that doesn’t just happen in movies); the fabulous Sharon Kendrick, an early encourager; my excellent literary agent, Cathryn Summerhayes at William Morris Endeavour; everyone at Quercus – my copyeditor, Margaret Histed, the publicists and especially my fantastic editor, Jo Dickinson, who saw the potential and the heart of the story and made it so much better; Tom Winchester and Jo Wright at Bentley Productions, for acquiring television option rights; Portia Rosenberg for her atmospheric illustrations; Alex Harris and Andrew Hiles for a website that does the book proud; all the helpful librarians at the Senate House Library for their permission to reproduce extracts from the Harry Price Library; the employees at the Bull Inn, near Borley and the residents of that quiet hamlet; friends with feedback, including Jurij Senyshyn and Jon Harrison for reading and commenting on early drafts and help with historical accuracies; Owen Meredith, for his patience; my family, for their unfailing support and love; and my brother, James, whose feedback on the text was extremely helpful.
Large portions of this novel were written under the Umbrian sun at Giardinello. Thanks to Guy Black and Mark Boland for your endlessly flowing hospitality.
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