Return to Borley Rectory

'Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.'

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House, 1959.

The Most Haunted Blog In England

Borley. An evocative name.

I once visited Borley Rectory, or what’s left of it. Back in my Essex days, I took a daytrip up to the Suffolk border, en route, ultimately for Rendlesham Forest. I had UFOs on my mind at the time, as you can probably guess. But on the way, I passed through more witchy, ghost-haunted and folky horror-y terrain. Coffee in Matthew Hopkins’ Mistly village, a drive through the Stour Valley, stopping off at the haunted Bull Inn at Long Melford, the spooky Elizabethan splendour of Melford Hall, and a pitstop at Nethergate Brewing to pick up some fine ales. It was a grand day altogether.

The Gates of Melford Hall. A ghostly countess jumps from a window here into the moat, apparently.



Nethergate Brewery, where I picked up some folk horror-themed beers!



The Bull, Long Melford, which I think is everyone's idea of what a haunted inn should look like.

There isn’t much left of the house today. The redbrick cottage, adjacent to where the Rectory stood, is all that remains. The owners, by all accounts, don’t appreciate rubberneckers or photographers. The church, which features in the tale, is the most accessible and recognisable element still in place.

Borley Church. I lost my pics from this day, so yes these are from Google Earth!

I recorded a podcast episode about Borley Rectory during the Covid years. My sources at the time included Ivan Banks’ The Enigma Of Borley Rectory (which I found at the Corringham library), and of course, the old chestnut, Usborne Haunted Houses, Ghosts and Spectres by Eric Maple and Lynn Myring – the book that had me convinced as a kid that if I lifted my eyes from the page, the terrifying phantom nun would be right outside on my lawn (in broad daylight!).

I recall, on that episode, my reluctance to address the character of Marianne Foyster, wife of the fourth rector (counting both father and son Bull) to report supernatural phenomena in the house, and generally considered to be one of the most central figures of the Borley saga. This stemmed from my distaste for the patronising way she was treated in older books on the topic, such as Banks'. I very much gave her the benefit of the doubt, not wanting to repeat the musty, judgemental attitude of those authors. However, on recently revisiting the case via Sean O’Connor’s Borley Rectory: The Story Of A Ghost Story, I am now convinced that Marianne’s character probably provoked the ghosts of Borley into being more than almost anybody else other than the great ghost-buster Harry Price himself. To quote the actor Reece Sheersmith (who played reporter VC Wall in the 2017 Carrion films version of the Borley tale) upon reading the book, ‘I thought I knew all there was to know about this legendary haunting. It turns out I have been sitting in the dark.’ Indeed. But we shall return to Marianne presently.

I read O’Connor’s excellent book over the occasional pint of Smithwick’s around Kilkenny, sometimes in Bollard’s or Syd Harkins. The story of Borley having been so influential on me as a youngster, this is one of those books that felt as if it had been written just for me, adding more detail and colour to the story than I thought possible.

Raging Bulls

I recall saying on the podcast that Borley was somehow the ‘definitive’ haunted house, the ‘ur’ haunted house, the pattern for all others to follow. I’ve always believed this; yet I was surprised just how far O’Connor’s book bore this out. He points out just how directly all the most famous haunted houses of both fact and fiction took Borley as their template. Even the concept of a ‘Mount Everest of haunted houses’ (to quote Richard Matheson’s brilliant Hell House) comes from Borley Rectory – or at least, Harry Price’s promotion of it. Jackson’s Hill House, Matheson’s Hell House, Amityville, Enfield, etc. The English haunted house archetype is, of course, much older than Borley Rectory, with a fine Victorian tradition in particular behind it. Indeed, Harry Price nabbed the title ‘most haunted house in England’ from the earlier ‘most haunted house in Scotland,’ Ballechin House, a cause celebre of the 1890s. But it was Price who updated and codified the tropes for a new age when he popularised the tale of Borley Rectory in the 30s and 40s.

In particular, O’Connor notes that the nature of the Borley phenomena changed upon the advent of Price. The Bulls, who built the house and lived in it in the middle of the 19th century, reported a traditional, very Victorian assortment of hauntings: quiet, mournful shades, and of course the famous nun gliding through the garden along her Nun’s Walk, staring wistfully at the family through the dining room window. With Price’s arrival, the haunting turned active, violent, and noisy – and with a tabloid-friendly poltergeist.

O'Connor extrapolates on the first part of this observation: the Bulls were a family fascinated by ghost stories. Visitors observed that the Bulls read and made up ghost stories as a way to amuse one another regularly. Indeed, they lived in a world that was quite haunted, and they were not at all naive innocents to be visited by spirits of which they knew or expected nothing. It should come as no surprise that England's most haunted house should get its start from such a family.

This little garden house at Mount Congreve, Kilkenny, reminded me of the structure Harry Bull built at Borley so he could sit, smoke, and watch for the phantom nun.

The Widow Of Borley

But though the Bull family gifted the Borley Rectory tale its Victorian trappings and its most famous spectral resident, the Nun, it is to the house's residents during the 1930s, the Reverend Lionel Foster and Marianne Foyster, that the starring roles belong. Marianne, in particular: she was was young, fashionable, modern. O'Connor brings a fact to our attention which surprised me: Marianne was Irish - sort of. She grew up, for a decent chunk of her childhood and adolescence, in Belfast, and seems to have kept the accent over the rest of her varied and tumultuous life. O'Connor maintains that her Irishness (at least as it would have been perceived by the couple's neighbours in Essex) was one of several things marking her out as being different, alien, in stuffy, small-town East Anglia. From her time in Ireland she also retained an open-mindedness about Roman Catholicism and Irish nationalism; both opinions would have been highly, highly suspicious in Borley in the 1930s.

O'Connor does a convincing job of showing that Marianne's boredom at life in the Rectory, and her intelligent, mischievous nature was the perfect mix that gave the Borley ghosts an upgrade and turned the story into a legend. Harry Price, of course, the inveterate showman, was the catalyst.

Another element I mentioned on the podcast, on which my thoughts have evolved since reading the book, is the influence of the so-called 'Amherst Mystery.' On the episode, I mentioned that Marianne had lived in Canada before coming to Essex, and postulated that she may have heard about this very famous earlier ghost tale. As she lived in New Brunswick, and the Amherst Mystery had occurred in Nova Scotia, it seemed just about possible. However, I hadn't copped that they had first lived in Salmonhurst Nova Scotia, much closer to Amherst. The similarities between the two cases include general poltergeist activity, upset furniture, violent ghostly slaps, and perhaps most strikingly, the spirits in both cases communicated by writing on walls, addressing the focus of the case by name: in Borley's case, the infamous Marianne Please Help Get.

In Borley Rectory: The Story Of A Ghost Story, Sean O'Connor has placed the famous haunting in some much-needed context. The interwar gloom, the resurgence of interest in spiritualism following the horrors of the Great War, the place of the English Ghost Story in turn-of-the-century culture, even the elements of Catholicism poking out from the rural Protestant veneer: this book brings Borley, Marianne, and Price to life in a way that no affectionado of the case should miss. Recommended.