Ghosts of History: The Borley Rectory

Legends surround the history of the Borley Rectory, which is known as the most haunted house in England. Tune in to learn more about the ghosts reputed to haunt the Rectory in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Keene. You're joined by fellow editor Katie Lambert.
Hello Candice, Hi Katie, I see you have a piece
of correspondence in your hand I do. It's from Vince

(00:23):
in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and he had a suggestion for us,
which actually he titled a burning question and it says, Hi, there,
Candice and Jane. I am a fervent listener of your podcast,
and I have noticed Candice's pensiant for the macab I
thought of a cool topic for your podcast, the Boardly
Rectory in England. I remember reading about it in a
book when I was in grade school and being utterly terrified.

(00:45):
I severely enjoy your well researched and thoughtfully recorded podcasts,
so I know you will enjoy this topic. And we
like that you severely enjoy this How could we say no?
And again a perfect addition to our Ghost of History
multipart series. We were delighted to cover the Boorily Rectory
and um before we get into the history of the

(01:08):
place that the most haunted house in England, 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 interests may be piqued by the fact that a clergyman,
a man of the cloth, the man of God, would
be so spooked by a ghost. It just doesn't seem

(01:28):
to add up, But in fact there were several clergymen
who were scared off by the notorious ghost of the
Boily 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 will start with the legend that the Boiley Rectory

(01:50):
was built where a monastery used to be, and in
the thirteenth 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 po tail was
bricked up within the convent where she died, and the
Boardly Rectory was built on this place in eighteen sixty
three for the Reverend Henry Bowl, who actually somewhat enjoyed

(02:13):
the hauntings 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

(02:37):
at the rectory, the hauntings increased and she was seeing
more frequently, and there were more strange noises and and
haunting like things of this sort. The Bulls weren't particularly
popular either. There were rumors about the older bowl that
um he used a whip on his parishioners, and um
that he possibly was involved with a Dahlia in a

(03:00):
maid when she ended up pregnant, and also that he
was abusive. And he and his son both died in
the Blue room of the Boily Rectory, which then became
known as one of the most haunted places within the house.
So it seems like the ghosts are multiplying in fact,
And in nineteen twenty seven, the Reverend Eric Smith took
ownership of the house, and he'd heard that there were

(03:22):
strange things that happened there, so he consulted the paranormal investigator,
the afore mentioned Harry Price, to determine whether the hauntings
were real or not. And we're going to talk about
Price at greater length later, but I wanted just to
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

(03:45):
magic tricks just to show people how they were done
and called the bluff of someone who was trying to
bluff him. So, in a time when people were capitalizing
off wartime tragedy to make money by climbing they could
put people in touch with their dead relatives, he set
out to call out who the frauds were, and in
June nineteen twenty he was elected to Society for Psychical Research.

(04:07):
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 it 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

(04:29):
of light and strategies to create a photograph. So it's
quite simple to add a strange shadowy figure in the
background of of a plate. And another way to do
it would be by um 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

(04:50):
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 calling people
out and of making up stories. He was a bit
of a sensationalist journalist, and he thought poultergeists or as
he said, mischievous entities. He dabbled with it. He had

(05:12):
great fun with it, and he would spend sixteen years
in the space of two books documenting Borley Rectory. And
he came at the request of the Smiths, who had
gone to a London newspaper and said, you know there's
some crazy stuff going out of 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

(05:34):
bells ringing when all the strings have been cut. 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 the top hat. And when Harry
Price came in June of nine nine, he called the
day sixteen hours of thrills. That was a direct quote.

(05:59):
Key started shooting out of locks. There were bells, there
were rocks everywhere. There are a bunch of wrappings. Things
markedly increased when Price came on the scene. He stirred
up the polter geists for sure. And he arrived on
the scene with his uh now patented ghost hunter's kit,
a tape measure, a camera, a fingerprinting kit, portable phones.

(06:19):
He was there to call the bluffs and he was
convinced that these things weren't being faked. The Smith's actually
moved out, they'd had enough of all this ghost business
in their rectory, and Reverend Lionel Foister and his wife
Mary Anne and their daughter Adelaide moved in. And for me,
this is where the story gets a little bit creepy
because of the violence inflicted on poor Marianne. These events

(06:43):
went on between nineteen thirty and nineteen thirty five, and
it seemed that a polter geist had definitely taken over
the rectory. The foisters had water poured on them while
they slept. Lionel was whacked in the head with a
hair brush. There were mysterious fires, there were bottles that shattered,
Marianne was actually throw own from her bed at one
point and almost suffocated by a mattress, and strange riding

(07:05):
began appearing on the walls, things that said Marianne, please
get help, Marianne, please lighten mass prayers. It seemed pretty
obvious that someone was trying to communicate with her, and
her attempts to reciprocate the communication didn't work. But it's
odd to me that someone who the spirits deemed sympathetic

(07:26):
to their plight would be targeted by such violence. And
later the violence was even inflicted on the voyster's child.
So the vosters had the house exercised, and for a
while it worked, but eventually it seemed like that just
transferred the phenomena to new places and new things. They
started hearing strange music coming from the chapel, they saw communion,

(07:50):
wine turned to ink. My favorite part is in Harry
Price's notes when he said that they were odors found
pleasant and unpleasant. Well, that's never good. I mean, you
can get suffocated with the matters, but when stuff starts
smelling bad, it's time together smelling good. So, whether it
was that being tossed from one's bed or the awful

(08:11):
smells permitting the air, the Foister's had enough and the
house went unoccupied until nine when Harry Price moved in
and he advertised in the local newspaper for help conducting
the study that he wished to undertake. And I have
a copy of the advertisement and I actually have to
read it to you because it just it tickled me

(08:33):
and Katie to death. Really, here we go, Haunted House colon.
Responsible persons of leisure and intelligence, intrepid, critical and unbiased
are invited to join Rota of Observers and the Year's
Night and Day Investigation of alleged Haunted House and home Counties.

(08:53):
Printed instructions supplied, scientific training or ability to operate simple instruments,
an advantage house situated and lonely hamlet so own car
is essential, right box h period nine eight nine, The
Times Easy four And we checked Craigslist for something similarly

(09:15):
enticing today and could not find anything that was quite
good enough. But we found one in Atlanta. But there's
no compensation. If I'm going to live with the ghosties,
I want to be paid. One my favorite part was
said demon demonic hauntings, etcetera, etcetera. It doesn't get better
than that. But we digress back to Harry Price. So
he moved in NY seven and he got so many

(09:38):
responses to his advertisement he couldn't take them all, and
he thought a lot of them were phonies or unsuitable
was his word. But he ended up choosing about forty
eight people to come live with him. And my favorite
part is where they all get out their version of
a Wuiji board called a planchette and try to channel
the spirits, at which point a nun named Marie Layer

(10:00):
speaks to them and says that she left the convent
to marry a man named Henry Waldgrave, and her husband
strangled her and buried her remains in the cellar. The
spousal abuse re alluded to earlier. He was from a
very wealthy family and the house was on the site
where the Boily Rectory now stood. A later seance actually

(10:20):
had the woman not as Marie Lair, but as Arabella
Walda Grave, a Stewart spy and the wife of Henry
Walda Grave. But perhaps the biggest cue, if one could
call it, that was the seance that revealed the house
would burn to the ground and evidence of the nun's
existence would be revealed. And so, needless to say, everyone

(10:42):
was waiting for the big fire to get started, but
that didn't happen until eleven months later, and that was
when Captain W. H. Gregson had assumed ownership of the house.
He was unpacking the books for his library. An oil
lamp turned over and the fire started and burned the house.
And right before that one of my other favorite stories

(11:03):
as a man named W. J. Fithian, a different reverend
who had also communicated with the spirits, and he told
Harry Price where to dig in the cellar to find
the bones of Arabella Waldgrave or Murray Lair. And they
did go to the cellar and dug up part of
a skull and a jaw bone, along with some holy
medals of Catherine Laboret and Saint Ignatius, And this was

(11:23):
after the house had burned in Ninetree and Price thought
he could put the spirits to rest by giving them
what he called a proper Christian burial. Didn't work, supposedly,
not supposedly. Even today, there is still supernatural phenomena observed
in the churchyard near where the Boily Rectory used to stand.

(11:44):
And even when the house was being demolished, Life photographers
from Life magazine were there to capture what was happening.
And there's a strange photograph that exists with a spectral brick,
and people wonder if it's one of the spirits from
the Boily Rectory raising the brick and the background to

(12:05):
signify we're still here, or if it was a prank
pulled by a worker who threw it just as the
camera flash was going off to give the illusion of
their being a ghost, or simply just to play it
nown at the rubble. And that's the question still about
whether these things were real or faked. People are pretty
sure that the notes that Marianne Foyster found are made up.

(12:27):
They took it to a graphologist and he said basically
that they were definitely Marianne's hand, but some of the
other parts of it can't be explained, and while the
Society for Psychical Research does say that most of it
is probably exaggerated by our dear illusionist um Harry Price,

(12:48):
some of it is still up in the air. And
if you don't believe in the ghost story aspect of
the history of the Boily Rectory, you can at least
recognize that this is definitely a point at it's paranormal
investigators started to gain some clout and people start to
take what they say, if not seriously, at least give
some credent to it. And as a matter of fact,

(13:10):
Harry Price broadcasted on radio one of the first paranormal investigations.
And just think today about all the different TV networks
and movies there are about paranormal investigators. You know, it
is a part of our media today. It's a part
of popular culture and some people buy into it and
some don't. So thanks to Harry Price. Thanks Harry Price.

(13:31):
And if you want to learn more about different parts
of England and other historical ghosts and spoops, you can
read about it on our website at how stuff Works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
because it How stuff Works dot Com and be sure
to check out the stuff you missed in History Glass
blog on the How Stuff Works dot com to home
page