Borley lived up to the standard preconceptions of a haunted location -with mist covering the topiary bushes and bats flying just above our heads.
We had recording equipment and dangled a microphone through a missing piece of glass in the leaded lights around the back of the church. Then we all took turns listening intently to the sounds being recorded from inside the church through headphones. All we could hear was the blood whispering through the veins in our ears.
It grew increasingly cold and damp (and the only provision I had for bad weather was an extra t-shirt) so I decided, after hearing nothing of note, to leave the others in their sleeping bags and go inside the front porch of the church where I could lie on a large coir doormat.
I hadn't been there long when I heard a loud echoing knock which sounded as though it came from the other side of the doors which were above my head. Assuming that the sound was made by one of the others trying to frighten me, and feeling that it would negate any attempt to be 'scientific' (noting times and sounds, making recordings and keeping as quiet as possible) if practical jokes were being played, I didn't repond to it.
Moments later Sean and the others came round to the front porch and we confronted each other with "Was that you?"
Realising that the 'knock' wasn't made by any of us - we played back the sound on the tape. A group of locals drove up to the church through the dark to ask what we were doing and we played them the tape - and they agreed that it was certainly "someting" (altough not an accurate reproduction of the acoustics of the church).
We didn't hear anything else during the night, and when the verger opened the church in the morning we looked inside for anything that might have fallen over and caused the noise. We couldn't find anything, but discovered we could reproduce a similar sound to the one we heard by kocking on the closed door from inside the church.
Someone, I think it was Steve, thought that the local radio station in Brighton may be able to remove the 'tape hiss' and clean up the sound on the tape - but the radio station reported that they'd played the tape and that there was "nothing on it". I'm not sure if they ever returned the tape.
I'm not convinced that the sound was 'supernatural' , old buildings do creak (especially in cold, damp conditions) - and our desire to hear something 'unearthly' made us just interpret the sound in that way. Still I do feel that it was extraordinary that we only heard the one instance of the sound - not a series of creaks and noises during the night.