A Ghost At the Rectory

Hoaxer's confession lays the famed ghosts of Borley

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Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. As the clergy and his family move into their new home, they find out that something is very much amiss.

Kindle Edition , 11 pages. In addition, Smith's wife believed she saw a horse-drawn carriage at night. On 10 June the newspaper sent a reporter, who promptly wrote the first in a series of articles detailing the mysteries of Borley. The paper also arranged for Harry Price , a paranormal researcher, to make his first visit to the house. He arrived on 12 June [15] and immediately phenomena of a new kind appeared, such as the throwing of stones, a vase and other objects.

A Ghost At the Rectory

As soon as Price left, these ceased. Smith's wife later maintained that she already suspected Price, an expert conjurer, of falsifying the phenomena. The Smiths left Borley on 14 July and the parish had some difficulty in finding a replacement. These included bell-ringing, windows shattering, throwing of stones and bottles, wall-writing and the locking of their daughter in a room with no key.

Marianne Foyster reported to her husband a whole range of poltergeist phenomena that included her being thrown from her bed.

Ghosts of History: The Borley Rectory

Because of the publicity in the Daily Mirror , these incidents attracted the attention of several psychic researchers , who after investigation were unanimous in suspecting that they were caused, consciously or unconsciously, by Marianne Foyster. She later said that she felt that some of the incidents were caused by her husband in concert with one of the psychic researchers, but other events appeared to her to be genuine paranormal phenomena. She later admitted that she was having a sexual relationship with the lodger, Frank Pearless, [20] [a] and that she used paranormal explanations to cover up her liaisons.

Borley remained vacant for some time after the Foysters' departure. In May , Price took out a year-long rental agreement with Queen Anne's Bounty , the owners of the property. Through an advertisement in The Times on 25 May [24] and subsequent personal interviews, Price recruited a corps of 48 "official observers", mostly students, who spent periods, mainly during weekends, at the rectory with instructions to report any phenomena that occurred. In March Helen Glanville the daughter of S.

She was said to have been murdered in an older building on the site of the rectory, and her body either buried in the cellar or thrown into a disused well.

The second spirit to be contacted identified himself as Sunex Amures, [28] and claimed that he would set fire to the rectory at nine o'clock that night, 27 March On 27 February the new owner of the rectory, Captain W. Gregson, was unpacking boxes and accidentally knocked over an oil lamp in the hallway.

After investigating the cause of the blaze the insurance company concluded that the fire had been started deliberately. A Miss Williams from nearby Borley Lodge said she saw the figure of the ghostly nun in the upstairs window and, according to Harry Price, demanded a fee of one guinea for her story. Sutton claimed that whilst visiting the rectory with Price in he was hit on the head by a large pebble.

Sutton stated that he seized Price and found his coat pockets filled with different sized stones. In , Eric Dingwall , K. We can start with the basics, defining rectory for instance, which is the residence of a clergyman. And, if you're anything like me, your interest may be peaked by the fact that a clergyman, a man of the cloth, a man of God, would be so spooked by a ghost.

It just doesn't seem to add up but in fact there were several clergymen who were scared off by the notorious ghost of the Borley Rectory! And as I understand the diverging tales of the house, this is either going to be a ghost story about forbidden love or ghost story about spousal abuse.

And we'll start with the legend that the Borley Rectory was built where a monastery used to be and in the 13th Century, a monk and a nun tried to elope together but they were caught and he was hanged and she, worthy of an Edgar Allen Poe tale, was bricked up within the convent where she died. And the Borley Rectory was built on this place in for the Reverend Henry Bull who actually somewhat enjoyed the haunting and built a summer house so he could watch where the nun was supposed to walk while he was smoking his cigars.

And while the Bull family didn't mind the nun's ghost so much, others were really frightened by her. Her face would sometimes appear in windows and she got so bold as to walk across the lawn in broad daylight and when Henry's son Harry took over at the rectory, the haunting increased and she was seen more frequently and there were more strange noises and haunting-like things of this sort. The Bulls weren't particularly popular either.

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There were rumors about the older Bull that he used a whip on parishioners when they were misunderstanding. That he possibly was involved with a dalliance in a maid where she ended up pregnant and also that he was abusive. And he and his son both died in the blue room of the Borley Rectory which then became known as one of the most haunted places within the house.

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So, it seems like the ghosts are multiplying in fact and in , the Reverend Eric Smith took ownership of the house. And he'd heard that there were strange things that happened there so he consulted the paranormal investigator, the aforementioned Harry Price, to determine whether the hunting's were real or not. And we're going to talk about Price at greater length later but I wanted to just set up this character for you because he is such a character.

He was known for being a prankster and showing off with his parlor tricks and he would perform magic tricks just to show people how they were done and call the bluff of someone who was trying to bluff him. So, in a time when people were capitalizing off of wartime tragedy to make money by claiming they could put people in touch with their dead relatives, he set out to call out who the frauds were and in June , he was elected to the Society for Psychical Research. He wanted to make the business more honest; he wanted to clear up all the fraud and he exposed a lot of phonies, most notably, the spirit photographer, William Hope.

And Hope had taken hundreds, if not thousands, of spirit photographs and Price was able to show people that this stuff was really fake. Back then, you had to mix all manner of chemicals and use all manner different types of light and strategies to create a photograph so it's quite simple to add a strange shadowy figure in the background of a plight. And another way to do it would be by having a photographer's assistant appear in the background of a picture because it took a full minute of sitting still with the shutter open for someone to be captured on film.

So, it would be easy for someone to sneak in and dart out and create an apparition on film.

So, Price's personality was such that he loved this sort of stuff of cal ling people out and of making up stories. He was a bit of a sensationalist journalist and he thought poltergeists were, as he said, mischievous entities, he dabbled with it, he had great fun with it and he would spend 16 years, and the space of two books, documenting Borley Rectory.

And he came at the request of the Smith's who'd gone to a London newspaper and said, you know, there's some crazy stuff going on at the rectory, please come help us, including the wife of Reverend Smith found a woman's skull in a cabinet. They had a bunch of bells ringing when all the strings had been cut.

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There were lights and windows. There was a carriage and my favorite part is when a ghost whispered to Reverend Smith, "Don't Carlos, don't," as he was walking into the chapel. They also saw a stranger in a top hat. And when Harry Price came in June of , he called the day 16 hours of thrills as a direct quote.

Keys started shooting out of locks, there were bells, there were rocks everywhere, there were a bunch of wrappings, things markedly increased when Price came on the scene.

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