Guaranteed to attract its quota of ghost hunters on Monday - Halloween - is Borley Rectory in Suffolk, though the place was mysteriously burned down over 40 years ago, and there aren't even ruins left to explore. But five successive rectors who lived there testified that they saw, heard,and felt inexplicable happenings. Its fame came through Harry Price, an esteemed investigator of psychic phenomena who spent a decade studying the rectory, actually renting it for a year, and writing two bestsellers about it. After Price's death in 1948 he was exposed as a fraud; but a subsequent inquiry vindicated him, and the argument about Borley Rectory goes on to this day. As Alan Combes discovers.

The Chance of a Ghost

If I said I chanced upon Borley Rectory, then I'd be lying because I'd known about it for many years. Like thousands of people I'd read about The Most Haunted House in England - Harry Price's investigation of psychic phenomena at the rectory during 1929- 39. In fact, you can't open any self-respecting manual of the supernatural in this day and age which doesn't give the place a mention.
I happened to be staying in Sudbury for a few days so I drove out that way. First shock: assertaining just which village is Borley. No signposts point that way and the tiny village which corresponds with the dots on the map is unnamed. Taking bearings on an Ordnance Survey map, however, confirms this is The One. Second shock: absolutely nowhere to park in this rural retreat. The church car park is chained off and the grass verges are staked out.
On foot I approach the churchyard to be greeted by handwritten signs which warn me that due to damage and mistreatment the church will be open during daylight hours only. It's 9:30 a.m. and no sign of an opening. Now, according to Harry Price's plan, the rectory is across the road and directly opposite. But there is nothing.
I knock on the door of this house and a rather po-faced lady greets my inquiry about a churchwarden with "It's me." The church keys are in her hand and she is about to open up. I ask her about the rectory and she tells me it's gone. . . . "lock, stock and barrel. They used the last of the foundations as infill for some air strip in 1942."
This is Mrs. Dorey and she is decidedly frosty. The best person to talk to is her husband, Major Dorey, she tells me, but he must have gone out.
"The people of this village are absolutely fed up of the story. I mean, two weeks ago we were packed out with about 40 people in the churchyard at two in the morning because it was supposed to be the anniversary of the last sighting of the nun on her walk."
Harry Price wouldn't exactly be made a freeman of Sudbury if he were still around these days. Poor Mrs. Dorey bought her property five years ago with no idea about the fuss which went on. Villagers of long standing regard the entire business as a confidence trick and foremost among the villains is the BBC.
Seven years ago they set up infra-red cameras and a tape recorder inside Borley church to research the Borley legend. The end product was a few unconvincing scuffles and moans on a tape which was shamelessly featured on Nationwide. This year they included Borley on the Sunday afternoon Fax programme. In Mrs. Dorey's opinion their data on Borley was about as reliable as the spelling of the programme title. They had tried to film inside the churchyard without first obtaining permission and the police were called in.
"Then there was this chap, Simon Marshall. Took a photograph of the churchyard and claimed there was ectoplasm floating in the sky. As my husband said - the chap wants to clean his lens properly."
Since the rectory's disappearance, the so-called ghost story has transferred itself into the church. Now there is no good reason for this except perhaps the activities of Rector A.P. Henning (1936- 55). To attract outsiders, he implied strange goings-on in the church; visitors tend to give donations and during that time the church was desperately in need of money. But to be right, the bones which were supposedly found in the rectory's cellar in the 1930s are now buried in nearby Lyston churchyard.
At this point Mrs. Dorey went to her bookshelves and handed me a copy of the September 1979 edition of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. She indicated the article I was to read. Under the title, The Alleged Haunting of Borley, Iris Owen and Pauline Mitchell had tracked down Marianne, a key figure in the Borley story, still alive in the US.
When she dies Marianne will release her diary account of what happened at the rectory; in the meantime she denounces Harry Price as the villain of the piece. His "research" was just a front to create a best-selling book; along with her late husband, the Rev. Lionel Foyster, they attempted to create an Amityville Horror 50 years before its time. The only aspect merging unscathed is the early manifestations of poltergeist activity at Borley.
"In all the time we've lived here, the only disturbances have been human ones," Mrs. Dorey said. "People fooling around in the churchyard after midnight."
"Look," she said, on the point of exasperation, "the best person you can talk to about this is PC Lindsay Smith, our local bobby. He's been on this beat for 22 years."
PC Smith personified the kind of reassurance which was the earmark of policemen in everybody's youth. In those primitive supernatural thrillers of the 50s, there was frequently a no-nonsense village bobby who spurned the existence of things irrational. PC Smith was that man. "The worst kind are the serious ones who come to prove things. They go back and tell others there was a cold spot or a strange noise. . . ."
Halloween is a time when the Castle Headington police station can anticipate operation overkill at Borley. By midnight last year, over 40 people had gathered outside the churchyard. "I mean, if you were a ghost, would you make a guest appearance to order in front of 40 people?"
Some years ago, a tour operator organised a coach excursion to four haunted houses in the south- east and the trip's final call was Borley churchyard at midnight. PC Smith recalls bevies of credulous Americans stepping open mouthed off the coach, expecting a ghostly greeting at their convenience. That operator was eventually persuaded of the unwisdom of disrupting Borley's peace and quiet at such an hour.
"One of the funniest experiences was when I drove the car into Borley one night and there were four terrified lads running out of the village. Said they'd heard moaning and whining. I made them go back and show me where. It was a small barn opposite the church and inside it the farmer had half a dozen greyhound pups. He was breeding them, see? Imagine if I hadn't stopped them, how that would have added to the story."
On another occasion his patrol car frightened off six people holding a ouija session in the middle of Mrs. Dorey's lawn. The game and playingpieces were deserted and became police lost property. In the past year Major and Mrs. Dorey have had installed two switches which operate floodlights- one on the front of their house, one on the side of the church. The switch-on occurs if things get too rowdy, and the result is usually an instant exodus.
I drove away from Borley with no sense of foreboding for the churchand its frilled yews imparted an air of calm. What I did consider was the irony that one of England's most haunted houses didn't even exist. So what is it, then, that Borley visitors, most of them young, are actually searching for? Perhaps Harry Price knew the answer to that one. He certainly knew how to mine a rich vein.