Borley has been intertwined in my life for some time. Starting from when I first saw a picture of the 'Get Help...' writing in an old Readers Digest book of the paranormal when I was around 9 or 10 (Which I admit scared me silly just to look at it.) to conducting a deep investigation into the work of Harry Price et al during my college/university years 1992 to 1996/97.
Borley to me has represented the epitome of paranormal research, the stories, the mystery, the press, how to and how not to investigate such events etc. After my involvement in this 'case', my attention turned to several paranormal events in my home locality. Also Our final year project documentary, "Desperately Seeking Something," was about the paranormal world, interviewing prestigious people such as paranormal investigator/author husband and wife team John and Anne Spencer and Dr parapsychologist Richard Wiseman of Hertfordshire University.
After seeing your web site, I thought I would drop a line to one of the very few people who had contact with the very thing that has played such an important part of my life.
Although I had been vaguely interested in Borley for several years, it was not until 1992 that I really started to find out more about it. A colleague and I from college spent many hours pouring over books and articles about the phenomena. Several times we visited the site - not to intrude or cause nuisance, but just to see what we had read about and had discovered. We have our own stories of what occurred at the Church and what we discovered during our research, things that people had never come across before - especially using the then most advanced computer photographic technology we had access to at University to 'dissect' pictures; recordings we made and photographs we took. All in all our time on the 'Borley case' was extremely interesting, and as I can see from the more recent photographs on your Site, it will still be providing interesting phenomena, be it real or not, for years to come.
My colleague and I spent several years researching Borley and it's chequered history and came up with several interesting conclusions.
One of the major things we had access to that people such as Harry Price did not was computer technology. Using scanners and a program called Adobe Photoshop, I was able to enhance, resize and perform allsorts of technical wizardry on several images; including the infamous 'floating half-brick'. This story, according to yourself and others, can be simply explained as either the brick was placed on a wooden beam of some sort or thrown by a workman. Upon closer inspection and enhancement, I found that the wooden frame behind and to the right of the brick is intact and not obscured by, say, a support.
The other point was the fact there was no blurring of the brick - if the brick had been thrown, and therefore falling, it would have been travelling at 10 metres/sec/sec, a simple law of physics. We went on to speculate that could camera film of the late '40s have been able to capture a moving object without any blurring? In order to do that today, you would require ASA 400 film at the least; a standard we believe was not available in the late forties?
Other areas we looked at was a mathematical formula, using information from an astrophysics colleague, to determine the reason for Cold Spots during typical hauntings and enhancements of the 'Get Help Marianne' message that found there was a possible 'third line' of text on the left hand side of the message. Plus also a lot of speculation with regards to identity/nationality of the 'phantom nun'.
Also we visited the Church several times, even gaining access on the 31st July, let in by the current(?) owner of the Coachhouse. We gained some sound recordings - typically of a few raps here and there. The most interesting thing to occur at the church on a subsequent visit, although I would not have called it that at the time, was something that occurred in the Porch of the church.
My colleague was photographing the grave stone of Rev.Bull in the church yard whilst I was in the porch, setting up a tape recorder, with my back to the entrance. As I knelt there, I felt as if my colleague was approaching me, even to the extent that I 'felt' a shadow. As I turned to say Hello to my colleague, I found no-one there. Suddenly I felt a tremendous rush towards me - as if, the only way I can describe it, something had thrown shear fear at me. I almost screamed in terror, and with almost animal instincts, I grabbed my camera and ran out of the porch, one arm over my face as if running through trees into the sun shine. It was then that I found my colleague still at the grave stone. Out of breath and shaking I described to her what had happened. In some confusion, she then said 'So you didn't just walk around the church?' I answered No. She stated that a few minutes earlier, as she bent over the stones, she felt, rather than saw, 'me' walk around the church at the Altar end and head for the Porch. This must have occurred just before my 'episode.' This unnerved both of us sufficiently to finish up quickly, grab the tape recorder (Which incidentally recorded me and my reaction, but nothing else) and head for the car.