Borley Rectory (site) and Borley Church

OVERVIEW

Borley is a hamlet above the Stour opposite Long Melford. The rectory built in 1862 for the Reverend Henry Bull stood beside the church until it burned in February 1939 and was cleared in 1944; houses stand on the site. Between 1929 and 1938 it was the most famous haunted house in the country, through the Daily Mirror and the psychic investigator Harry Price, whose two books on it sold widely.

HISTORY

The Bull daughters said they saw a nun in the garden on 28 July 1900; the legend of a monk and a nun walled up alive was later traced to no monastery at all. The Smiths, arriving in 1928, reported bells and footsteps and called the Mirror; Price came on 12 June 1929 and stone-throwing began while he was in the house and stopped when he left. Under the Foysters (1930–35) came wall-writings addressed to Marianne Foyster and objects thrown; investigators at the time suspected her, and she later admitted as much. Price rented the house in 1937–38 for a year of observers; a 1938 planchette named a murdered nun, Marie Lairre, and predicted the fire. In 1956 three SPR members, two of them Price's former colleagues, published The Haunting of Borley Rectory, concluding that he had faked phenomena himself and that the rest were fraud, rats and the house's acoustics.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The nun on the 'Nun's Walk', the coach with headless horsemen, the bells, the writings and the fire are the story; the record shows how much of it was made. Reports at the church — footsteps, organ music in an empty building — continued after the rectory was gone and were the subject of a 1975 BBC investigation. The entry keeps the case for what it is: the founding text of English ghost-hunting, and the clearest lesson in it.

VISITING

The rectory site is private houses — do not approach them. Holy Trinity church and churchyard are open; the parish asks for quiet.